Building PBL Systems That Really Encourage Students to Lead

More than 10 years ago, when I was a student teacher, a mentor teacher said something I’ll never forget: “Students don’t always learn because of us—they learn in spite of us.”

At the time, I took it as advice to step back and let the students have some room. Now, however, I see it as something much more. Students don’t need room just to grow. They need room to lead. Sometimes the biggest thing in the way of their progress is me—and how often I swoop in with the answers that they can discover themselves. Enter project-based learning (PBL). 

PBL is often seen as a way for students to gain more independence, which we as teachers crave for them. The problem is that many of these projects rely on constant teacher support, whether that’s answering questions, providing redirection, or just being present to keep the project moving. The second that teacher support is removed, student progress can slow rapidly, mainly because the underlying system isn’t strong enough to carry the weight by itself.

I’ve had a crash course in this over the past few years with my 32-student high school yearbook class. Before taking on this publications course, I had never taught a class quite like it—one centered on real deadlines to produce a final product for the entire school community. What I did have was management experience from previous roles in retail and the food industry, where we used clear roles and systems to get the job done, even when the manager was gone.

That background helped me approach yearbook in a similar way. Initially, I was provided with one difficult-to-follow spreadsheet and a class that was already in the production process. No clear map. No set expectations for each role. Just a ton of moving pieces.

I did what anyone would probably do in this scenario. I stepped in and tried to take control of the wheel. I reorganized the spreadsheet, but I ended up repeatedly answering the same questions with the sense that there was still a lack of clarity about what we were all trying to do. The system was working better. Pages were coming in. Other tasks were getting done. But if I wasn’t in the room or at the school event, the system would break down.

Creating Systems for Project-Based Learning

I realized that the fault wasn’t in the ability or motivation of my students, who were amazing. The fault was in the system. I had made some improvements but was still at the center, trying to hold it all together. And if I was the system, my students were being robbed of the opportunity to grow as leaders and take ownership of it themselves. So we stopped trying to fix each page as it came in, and we started trying to redesign the system itself.

The first step was to clarify roles and responsibilities. Students’ titles needed to be more than that. They needed to include expectations and visible deliverables that were both trackable and measurable. Here, the real game changer came from using Google’s Looker Studio to better organize our spreadsheet. After that, instead of scrolling through a messy spreadsheet, students were able to click their name in a data dashboard to find their tasks and due dates.

Increasing ownership

The shift in ownership was immediate. Instead of asking me what needed to be done or explaining why another date was missed, students checked their assignments on the dashboard first. More transparency. Easier-to-find information. More forward momentum. And this clarity created the space for ownership.

But visible roles and deadlines weren’t enough. There still seemed to be a lot of manual work bogging down the system. For example, trying to track the timeliness of student tasks was arduous work for me and the editors. So we adapted by automating as much of the spreadsheet as possible with data dashboards to help track and navigate important information.

Again, the change in the class was immediate. Instead of asking where a resource was, why their grade was what it was, or what they needed to do, students were able to navigate these automated and self-updating resources first, leaving only the most specific questions for me.

Other applications

This is when I realized that these improvements weren’t just applicable to a publication course. I realized I would need to design stronger PBL systems for all the areas I’m involved in. The more ownership my students can take over their learning, the better. And that comes from using systems designed to carry more weight, allowing the teacher to become less central to the process.

To do this, start by creating roles with defined responsibilities. Make important information easy to find and as automated as possible. Limit the number of places students need to look to find the answers they need. Create a culture in which they turn to each other for support first and the teacher second. When the system is able to carry the weight of common tasks and easily answered questions, students can stop waiting for permission and be empowered to make decisions.

One of my students said that the change made them realize that improving the parts of the project they thought they didn’t care about (the logistics) created more time for the parts they did care about (the creative work). “Being exposed to and constantly using these systems in yearbook definitely made us more reliant on each other than on you,” the student said. “I think you being transparent with how the system works and doesn’t work, asking us for ideas on ways to fix it, and explaining the rationale behind why you designed things the way you do helped me learn how I can set up similar systems outside of yearbook.”

That’s the goal. As I look back on my own mentor’s advice, it was never about stepping away from my students. For me, the focus has become building systems that can be sustained without my presence, so students have the space to learn, and to lead.