Clearing up misconceptions about project-based learning

Thirty years ago, when I started as a 6th-grade teacher, I discovered William Heard Kilpatrick and project-based learning from his seminal 1918 article, “The Project Method.” That discovery — along with the works and ideas of other progressive educators, like John Dewey, Carl Rogers, John Holt, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Nancie Atwell, and Frank Smith — transformed my life in education. These pioneering educators shared the common belief that students learn best by doing and making real things that are rooted in the real world. Their vision of good teaching and learning was not students sitting passively in their desks as their teacher lectures. Discovering them was vital to my practice as a teacher. From my first day, I had a project-based classroom (Wolk, 1998).

When I started teaching, resources on the how of project-based learning (PBL) were scarce. Dewey and Kilpatrick were all about theory but not much about actual practice. And their writing was based on life and schooling from almost a century earlier. I had to figure out how to make their ideas work in my classroom.

For the past decade, I have seen Kilpatrick’s and Dewey’s ideas brought back to life. Unlike when I was teaching, schools and teachers today are doing PBL with vigor. You can read a plethora of articles and books about PBL. You can type #PBL on Twitter and see examples of this exceptional work. You can follow organizations like PBL Works, Edutopia, EL Learning, and the High Tech High schools to gain wisdom on PBL and to see dynamic projects. Yet despite the availability of quality resources, common misunderstandings about PBL persist. So I think it’s important to step back and clarify what PBL is, and what it is not, and to share some nuts-and-bolts advice that I wish I had received 30 years ago.