What Can Teachers and Students Teach Us About Project Based Learning?

Seven Essentials for Project-Based Learning

• Need To Know. A need to know is basically being able to engage your students. When you assign a project, you want it to be something that is going to grab their attention and encourage them to want to learn more about the subject.
• A Driving Question. The driving question is important because it gives a project a sense of purpose. A project without a driving question could cause a lot of confusion and result in missing the main purpose of the project. A driving question should be complex, open-ended, and be related to the subject of the project.
• Student Voice/Choice. It's always a good idea to allow students to have choices in some of the elements of a project. It could be the way they choose to present a project or the tools they use to develop it. Giving students choices makes the projects more meaningful because they feel more ownership towards the project.
• 21st Century Skills. 21st Century Skills are skills like collaborating, critical thinking, and using technology. Creating podcast, working in teams, and encouraging problem-solving are good examples of these skills. It's important that students learn these skills because they could need them in their future workplace and also in life.
• Inquiry and Innovation. Inquiry is students finding answers to the question they created from the original driving question. Students could easily form questions from the answers of a previous question. Students follow a trail of information and draw their own conclusions.
• Feedback and Revision. Feedback and revision is important because it is very rare that the first draft of a project is perfect. Peer editing is a good ways for students to revise their work. Rubric are also very helpful.
• Publicly Presented Product. The result of a product can be presented to an audience of peers, parents, or even the community. If it is published on the web then the entire world could be your audience. Students also usually work a lot harder when they know that an audience will be seeing their work. 

Project Based Learning in PE

I really enjoy posts and articles about PBL in PE because I plan on being a PE teacher. I really like the idea of creating a fitness plan as a project.  I have a personal fitness plan for myself right now and I haven't even thought about how I could use it with my students. I think if I were to do this project I would expand it a little. I would ask that the student would also create a fitness plan for someone else or that they had someone else test their fitness plan and compare their results. Another PBL I've thought of was to create exercise videos.

What Motivates Students?

I think that it is very important to know how what motivates students. Students that are interested and video, some students were motivated by rewards and some were motivated by positive feedback. One boy said he was motivated because pleasing his parents meant that he wouldn't be grounded.
motivated are going to be more engaged and enthusiastic about their work. It's important to know that different things motivate different students. After watching the

Example of PBL

Two students from North Liberty High School were asked to create something that was relevant to them. Tyler Richards and Jonathan Thompson chose ketchup caps. They both enjoyed ketchup, but not the water that comes out while squirting it. They did a lot of research and found that this was a problem for a lot of people. They created a cap that they call the "mushroom" or "the shroom". It is shaped like an upside down mushroom and traps water son only ketchup will come out.