| Websites | Video |
| Research | On-Line Course |
| Books | Project Libraries |
| Management Software |
2Learn Project: This site, based in Canada, is a memorable resource for project ideas, PBL philosophy and history, and a fare smattering of research that supports the methodology.
SchoolsMovingUp.Net: This site is the creation of WestEd. It features a remarkable array of links and on-line resources, including a tool kit that allows schools to design, manage, and implement school reform in a variety of ways. The on-line library of articles and journal pieces is extraordinary.
Bob Pearlman.Org: Pearlman is one of the movers and shakers in high school reform, but his main focus is on PBL. His site offers a plethora of resources for researchers, teachers and administrators.
Buck Institute for Education: This non-profit group is recognized as one of the national leaders in PBL training. The site offers myriad resources, among them access to on-line planning tools, PBL literature, research links and downloadable PowerPoints. BIE sells a wonderful PBL manual for teachers than can be purchased on this site.
PBL Online: This is the Buck Institute's site in which all its training resources are presented in interactive format. Visitors can take an on-line PBL staff development course, visit a project library (in development), review video of the curriculum development implementation process, or review the BIE training modules, or collaboratively design projects.
George Lucas Educational Foundation: Lucas supports wide-ranging efforts in education.. This link takes you directly to the pages related to PBL. It includes information, news and legislative updates as well as video clips of exemplary PBL classrooms. Teachers can register to receive the GLEF newsletter, Edutopia.
New Technology Foundation and New Technology High School: This Napa, CA, high school was the model digital high school in California and serves as one of the national leaders in school reform. Every classroom in every curricular area uses PBL year-round. The school spawned a Foundation to promote this model and has become the center of a growing national network of PBL schools.
The Project Approach: This site focuses primarily on resources for the PBL crowd in K-12. It includes sample projects as well as a structured guide to project design and implementation.
Berkeley WISE: This site offers an on-line space for collaboration for both students completing a project or teachers creating projects. The focus is on science and the process is inquiry based. Registration is quick and free. The BIE is working with Berkeley WISE to refine this process and adapt it to the methodology and forms used in the BIE training.
PBLNet.Org: This site is managed in part by the folks at WestEd, an organization that has been at the center of curriculum reform on the West Coast. PBLNet.Org gives parents, teachers and administrators examples of best practices, including links to exemplary projects. The site includes two databases filled with project ideas and resources.
Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA). This site provides a diverse set of resources for teachers, parents, students and administrators. Information on PBL history, research and development abound. Teachers looking for project ideas can find a ton of material. IMSA also provides an entry way into the PBLNet, a bulletin board focused exclusively on project- and problem-based learning.
Small Schools Project: This site, funded in part by the Gates Foundation, is a remarkable compendium of resources for the small schools movement. If anything, there is too much information so the curriculum resources (as it relates to PBL) are buried about five links down. However, anyone interested in starting a small school or converting a large school into house or academies can find rich resources on scheduling, facilities, curriculum, advisory, staffing, administration, etc. This group also produces videos that highlight particular areas of development for small schools.
ThinkQuest: This is the site run by the Oracle Education Foundation and devoted to its international competition for student work. On the left-hand rail of the home page you will find a link to the ThinkQuest project library, a compendium of student projects. The work is divided into a score of curricular and career fields. The site can be used by teachers as a source of project ideas, examples of student work, or as a content resource.
ORC Pathways: This site, part of a statewide initiative in Ohio to advocate project-based learning for all vocational/career tech prep schools, includes an online project library. Ohio maintains 16 career pathways, three of which have been completed and posted. The state intends to roll out 3-4 additional pathways in the next 6 months. Every project in these career fields (information technology, construction, travel and hospitality, manufacturing, etc.) is run in conjunction with core academic areas such as math, science, social science and English.
Take this link to our short list of key research pieces (some available on line) that support, explain and explore PBL.
Project Design
Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe
Engaging Children's Minds: The Project Approach by Lilian Katz/Sylvia Chard
Horace's Hope by Theodore Sizer
Expanding Cooperative Learning Through Group Investigation by Yael & Shlomo Sharan
Project Assessment
Authentic Achievement by Fred Newmann
Assessing Student Performance by Grant Wigggins
Graduation by Exhibition by Joseph P. McDonald et al.
The Schools our Children Deserve by Alfie Kohn
School Culture
Horace's School by Theodore Sizer
The Power of Their Ideas by Deborah Meier
The Big Picture by Dennis Littky
Designing Groupwork by Elizabeth Cohen
One Kid at a Time by Elliot Levine
Schools that Work by George Wood
High Schools on a Human Scale by Thomas Toch
Tomorrow's Children by Riane Eisler
Cooperative Learning by Robert Slavin
An Ethic of Excellence by Ron Berger
Teaching and Learning
The Unschooled Mind by Howard Gardner
Standardized Minds by Peter Sacks
Leave No Child Behind by James Comer
How People Learn by the National Research Council
How People Learn: Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice by the National Research Council
The Case for Constructivist Classrooms by Jacqueline & Martin Brooks
Smart Schools by David Perkins
I Won't Learn from You by Herbert Kohl
How Children Fail by John Holt
How Children Learn by John Holt
The Teaching Gap by James Stigler & James Hiebert
The Unschooled Mind by Howard Gardner
21st Century Skills
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
Looking for An Argument and Talk, Talk Talk by Teachers College Press: These DVDs, shot at Urban Academy in New York, feature video of classroom practice melded with teacher, student and administrator interviews. It provides wonderful examples of what an inquiry-based classroom looks like in an urban setting and give key insights into how rigorous curriculum is designed and implemented.
CES Essential Visions: Classroom Practice: This is one DVD in a three-part series on the practices of Coalition of Essential Schools. It includes footage of classroom practice melded with teacher and student interviews. It provides wonderful examples of what an inquiry-based classroom looks like in a variety of settings and give key insights into how curriculum is designed and implemented. There is one chapter devoted to a math classroom, providing a crucial view of how inquiry looks in that discipline.
PBL-Online.Org: This website, run by the Buck Institute for Education in partnership with Boise State University's Educational Technology Department, offers free on-line video of classroom footage (K-12) of inquiry-based classrooms. To get full access to the PBL tools and library visitors must complete a non-intrusive registration form.
Moving Images: This three-DVD set offers footage of classroom practice melded with teacher and student interviews. It provides wonderful examples of what an inquiry-based classroom looks like in a variety of settings and give key insights into how curriculum is designed and implemented. These DVDS were produced by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, which offers on its Edutopia website many free video clips. Just recently GLEF has compiled all their PBL-related video clips into a new videotape called Project-Based Learning.
Buck Institute for Education: The Buck Institute for Education, in partnership with the George Lucas Educational Foundation, will soon be offering a DVD showing best PBL practices. The DVD, which includes chapters that mimic the format of its highly regarded PBL handbook, follows the design and implementation of a wing-design project at Aviation HS near Seattle.
A Private Universe: This video (and now DVD), created by Harvard and the Smithsonian Institute more than a decade ago, details the importance of teaching for understanding. Interviews with Harvard graduates from science programs as well as teaching staff there demonstrate how high-achieving students can move through the school system with little or no understanding of basic scientific knowledge. The DVD comes with a teaching guide.
Problem-Based Learning: 3 Classrooms in Action: This is the best of three DVDs produced by the folks at Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. There is a great deal of talk and not enough video of students and teachers in action, but this is the only DVD in this field that focuses on math and science so it has some value as an instructional tool.
EdTech 581, Boise State University: This course, taught by Dr. Kerry Rice, blends the features of an educational technology approach with the standards-based curriculum design advocated by Novel Approach and others, including the Buck Institute for Education. This graduate level course, taught on-line by Dr. Rice, is in session each fall.
High Tech High: This site has been recently been opened to the public. It contains dozens of projects in dozens of curricular areas and can be sorted in a variety of ways. Many projects offer downloads of Word documents that facilitated implementation and assessment of the projects.
Novel Approach: This is our project library, which now as about 35 projects in a variety of curricular areas. The material is not stored in a database and is not searchable, but it is packaged under large curricular headings (science, math, etc.).
BIE Co-Laboratory: This project library launched in April of 2007. BIE has a goal of a minimum of 40 projects by June 2007. The projects are stored in a searchable database. The BIE Co-Laboratory is housed on a site that also includes an on-line version of the BIE project planning forms, which allows individual teachers or groups of teachers to design and store projects on-line.
Project Exchange: This project library, created in a partnership between Envisions Schools and WestEd, launched this spring. It features projects in a handful of curricular areas, including Visual and Performing Arts, Digital Media and World Languages as well as the usual: Science, Math, Language Arts and Social Sciences. Project entries are supported with examples of student work as well as short video clips in which the project authors (teachers) explain finer points of the process.
Ohio Resource Center: This exemplary website is focused on project-based learning in Career/Technical Education. The ORC Pathways website includes 16 outstanding projects in a variety of career pathways and will be expanded over the next two years to include scores of projects in 16 different career fields.
Berkeley WISE: This site was created for students who could use its tools to collaboratively design and manage projects on-line. While that goal is still in place, increasingly teachers (often teachers at different sites) form curriculum-writing groups and collaboratively design projects. Teachers have the the option assessing their students' work if it is stored on this site.
PBL Net.Org: Small library of exemplary projects, hosted by West Ed. Features projects in all curricular areas, ranging from elementary grades through high school.
ThinkQuest: This if the project library of student work gathered over a decade of Oracle's management of the ThinkQuest project competition. Although everything on the site is student generated, it can offer both teachers and students a wealth of ideas and examples.
Virtual Schoolhouse: This wonderful collection offers successful projects that have been implemented in urban, suburban and rural schools in grades ranging from elementary to high school. All curricular areas are represented.
PBL Clearinghouse: This site includes a score of projects in a variety of curricular areas, including the hard sciences and math. Maintained by the University of Delaware.
Project Foundry: This company offers a suite of on-line tools that allows students and or teachers to design projects, collaborate, communicate, store data and content and to assess work. This is a web-based platform hosted by Project Foundry, which means schools pay a start-up fee in the first year and then a per-student maintenance fee from them on. Project Foundry offers on-site and web-based training.
Northwestern U. Co-Laboratory: This site, run by Bonnie Thurber out of Northwestern offers a free suite of tools (you must register as a school organization and create accounts for teachers, who then create accounts for students) that rivals anything that is on the market and charges a fee. Uses will find tools for collaboration, design, scoring student work, communication and more.