Why is PJL the 21st century go-to in K-12 education?

Project Based Learning is becoming the preferred method for K-12 instruction, and rightly so. PJL has shifted the focus to real world, hands on, learning experiences that engage the students more fully than memorizing a list of facts or answering multiple choice or true/false questions ever can.

PJL requires students to work in groups, which sets them up for success later in life where the ability to work well with others is necessary for career success. This also teaches students that others have valuable insights and ideas too.

Blog Post: *Essential Question: Why is PBL widely used in some disciplines and not others?

*Essential Question: Why is PBL widely used in some disciplines and not others?

in medical, science and business graduate education

but not in teacher education

I teach a college level freshman seminar class. In this class, students look at community and civic engagement, and how that relates to their educational and professional goals. In the context of this class, PBL would be an excellent learning strategy, yet most students are very resistant to it because they don’t want “someone else” to taint their grade on a project. As SOL and other performance based testing is used to evaluate teachers, it becomes desirable for teachers to do better than their peers, and therefore seem less inclined to collaborate. This is my observation based on working with preservice teachers. This also seems to be a trend in the fine arts. Even though the success of a theater production requires many people and roles, the individual performers seem to want to be remembered as individuals, not part of the whole.

On the other hand, in other fields advances are made because of collaboration. When a surgeon goes into the operating room, he/she has a team working to ensure the success of the operation, all of whom are needed for a positive outcome. In the business field, especially in marketing, the final product is usually a collaborative effort. In the sciences, engineering, and computer programming, it is never one single person working on a project or research. This filters down into graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 education, especially in these fields.