How PBL Aligns with Effective Teaching Frameworks, Part 3: Instruction

This is the third of four posts about project-based learning and the most commonly used frameworks for effective teaching. In my first post, I talked about how teachers can move from traditional teaching to project-based learning without totally reinventing their practice, because PBL aligns with the frameworks for effective teaching already used by many schools, districts, and other organizations.

That’s my basic message for these posts: teachers, if you’re effective, you are already doing most of the things you’d need to do to implement PBL successfully. You just need to apply them in the context of managing a project rather than in a series of lessons in a traditional unit.

In my second post I focused on planning, which is found in both the Danielson and Marzano frameworks. In this post I’ll discuss the domain of instruction. Just as I said about planning, all of the aspects of effective instruction in these two frameworks apply in a PBL context. Some aspects, though, are especially prominent in PBL, or have a particular nuance in a PBL context, as I’ll explain below.

Alignment with the Danielson Framework for Teaching

The Danielson Group lists these five components of “Instruction”:

3a. Communicating With Students 

• Expectations for learning  • Directions for activities  • Explanations of content  
• Use of oral and written language 

3b. Using Questioning and Discussion Techniques 

• Quality of questions/prompts  • Discussion techniques  • Student participation 

3c. Engaging Students in Learning 

• Activities and assignments  • Grouping of students   • Instructional materials and resources       • Structure and pacing 

3d. Using Assessment in Instruction 

• Assessment criteria   • Monitoring of student learning   • Feedback to students
  • Student self-assessment and monitoring of progress 

3e. Demonstrating Flexibility and Responsiveness 

• Lesson adjustment   • Response to students   • Persistence 

The first two components are seen in a well-managed PBL project, but let’s look more closely at the last three.

Engaging Students in Learning

When I read the Danielson Framework’s description of this component, it rings the PBL bell loud and clear. Take a look at this language: “Activities and assignments that promote learning require student thinking that emphasizes depth over breadth and encourage students to explain their thinking.”

Depth over breadth is a hallmark of PBL, in which students dig deeply into a topic or real-world problem. It’s not about memorizing facts and concepts for a test, it’s about applying them. And students explain their thinking in a project when they engage in reflection—one of the essential criteria for high-quality PBL. 

And look at these indicators for engaged students the Framework provides—again, they’re defining features of PBL:

• Student enthusiasm, interest, thinking, problem solving, etc. 
• Students highly motivated to work on all tasks and persistent even when the tasks are challenging 
• Students actively “working,” rather than watching while their teacher “works” 

Using Assessment in Instruction

The Danielson Framework lists four elements in this component, each of which aligns with PBL:

• Assessment criteria that are known to students, and that students “have a hand in articulating.” In PBL, rubrics are used throughout a project by students to guide the creation of high-quality products the use of 21^st century success skills. Teachers often co-create rubrics with students.
• Monitoring of student learning takes place all during a project. The teacher checks on student understanding of how to apply knowledge and skills to the project, and checks regularly on student and team progress toward the project’s goals.
• Feedback to students occurs often in a well-managed project, based on formative assessment and frequent checkpoints. In addition to the teacher, feedback in PBL might come from outside experts or stakeholders in a project.
• Student self-assessment and monitoring of progress also happens regularly during a project. Students may check their work or that of their team by reviewing a rubric and reflecting on their learning and progress.

Demonstrating Flexibility and Responsiveness

This component really feels like a natural fit with PBL. Take a look at its three indicators:

• Incorporation of students’ interests and daily events into a lesson 
• The teacher adjusting instruction in response to evidence of student understanding (or lack of it) 
• The teacher seizing on a teachable moment 

As any PBL teacher will tell you, these things happen all the time in a project. They often have to adjust a project’s timeline to allow for more or different instruction if they see that students don’t understand something they need for the project. Projects are often designed to match students’ interests—or once students are engaged by a project, they become interested in all sorts of aspects of it and can take the project in unexpected directions. This creates many teachable moments! 

Alignment with Marzano’s Framework

The Marzano Center/Learning Sciences International, in its Teacher Evaluation Framework, calls the domain “Standards-Based Instruction” and lists 10 elements. For each of the elements below, I’ve added a note about its connection to PBL.

• Identifying Critical Content from the Standards

When teachers plan a project, they make sure it is targeted at content standards that are central to the academic discipline. A high-quality project should be rigorous; it is not just a “hands-on activity” that does not serve an important instructional purpose.

• Previewing New Content

Many projects begin with a “knowledge inventory.” Students identify what they already know about a problem or topic, then create a list of what they need to know, which guides their inquiry and the instruction that follows. 

• Helping Students Process New Content

One of the key roles a teacher plays in PBL is to help students understand concepts and apply their knowledge and skills to the project.

• Using Questions to Help Students Elaborate on Content

During a project, the teacher coaches student thinking by asking questions. Students add new questions to their “need to know” list as they gain knowledge and their understanding deepens.

• Reviewing Content

At regular moments during a project, the teacher asks students to review the growing list of what they know and reflect on what and how they are learning.

• Helping Students Practice Skills, Strategies, and Processes 
• Helping Students Examine Similarities and Differences 
• Helping Students Examine Their Reasoning 
• Helping Students Revise Knowledge 

I clustered these four together because they all have to do with the kind of teaching that goes on during a project: skill-building, promoting critical thinking, and coaching students whether to revise their thinking or their work, given the demands of the project.

• Helping Students Engage in Cognitively Complex Tasks

A high-quality PBL project is, by definition, a cognitively complex task. To begin with, it’s based on an open-ended driving question, challenge, or problem. Students must grapple with the fact that there is no single “right answer,” unlike what they might be used to in traditional instruction. They must engage in inquiry, develop and test their ideas, and create a product for a particular purpose, user or audience.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the next category of effective teaching: the classroom environment and conditions for learning.