Understanding by Design emphasizes the importance of teaching to the big ideas on a subject. PBL teachers have to be the holders of these big ideas, and help students move from a set of disparate facts to a mental map of the subject.

You have to be more expert than your students, at least for the first few weeks. Then, you need to keep learning, as student questions demand new research. One big difference between doing projects in your class and being a project-based learning teacher is that you will be going on a journey with the students as well.

Take yourself to the public library and cruise the children's section for books about the project topic. Read the local section of the paper for references to the issues that you will be studying. Try answering the driving question yourself, making a thinking map of your ideas. Put yourself in the role of lead learner.

Create a space where the project will live and breathe. Students can access information about the project, including due dates, rubrics, notes, and models in this space.

Demonstrate your commitment to student voice by collecting and returning to their questions.

A Project Wall should include space to:

• collect and sort student questions
• keep and update project calendar, with checkpoints & deadlines
• post learning goals
• collect Tier 2 (high frequency) & Tier 3 (subject-specific) vocabulary
• collect and post realia
• share resources: rubrics, etc
• celebrate high quality student work, even in rough draft form

It is useful to have one place for students to write their reflections, tape in papers and information, and use as their primary resource for the particular project.

Before you launch your project, get specific about how and when students will use these journals. Plan how students will format the title page, table of contents, and glossary. Where will journals be stored?

While you can follow the exact structure and steps of the NextLesson Project, an authentic PBL classroom is responsive to student interests and local relevance. You should review the project in its entirety before starting in order to identify opportunities to adapt the project to be more locally relevant and developmentally interesting. This might include switching out standards, skills or resources.

NextLesson Projects each include a driving question. Good driving questions should speak to the age, interests, and environment of your students. You might therefore also consider adapting this question to have your students solve an interesting, novel or local problem.

As you practice project-based teaching more and more, you will give away more responsibility of learning and project management to the students as you go through the project. Parts of a project may change course as you progress through. However, you are always ultimately responsible for the content and quality of the students' learning.

You might want to consider contacting local experts for resources. Think about who uses the key knowledge you will be teaching. Many local companies and national agencies are keen to partner with schools. Park rangers, city planners, theater directors, florists: everyone went to school and may want to help you!

You might catch student attention with a real world example. Bring in a news article, a recent movie clip, or internet meme that captures one of the big ideas of the project.

You could roll out and unpack the driving question. Make sure that everyone understands the vocabulary of the driving question. Ask students which words "speak" to them, or seem the most important. Then, have students actively unpack the driving question using the Question Formulation Technique. Through this process, students download all of their questions about the driving question, and then share, sort, and prioritize them as a group.

If you have decided to use journals, you can get students into their journals during this project launch. Students can brainstorm their questions in their journal, write a short response to the introductory activity, or begin a thinking map about what they know about the topic.

When introducing the project, you may also want to introduce the learning goals. Make sure these targets are kid-friendly and usable. Educational research confirms that students benefit from seeing and unpacking content and literacy learning targets on a weekly or daily basis.

The Common Core stresses the need for students to think critically. Check to see if you are asking questions at all Depth of Knowledge levels, or hovering near recall most of the time. Critical thinking and inquiry go hand-in-hand, so be sure the keep the inquiry process moving in your classroom.

One of the necessary shifts to PBL is to let students come up with their own solutions to the driving question. In best practice, agency and creativity are related. If students perceive that they have some choices in process and format, they are more likely to put their own art and ideas into the final product.

Support collaboration by making it visible - think about how to equitably share the workload. You could use team participation contracts, task logs, and monitor student progress by having them check off each project step if they are logged in to NextLesson.

You might also confer with working groups daily or weekly, depending on the age level. Convene class circles to discuss what collaboration does and does not look like for students. From there, you can create a collaboration checklist that explains what good collaboration looks and feels like. An effective practice that seems scary at first is for groups to rate members once a week on their collaboration, using the aforementioned class-developed definition.

Share the tools and techniques that you use yourself for managing projects. These might be to-do lists, Google Calendar events, Google Docs, and timers.

You will need to check in on students individually, and create smaller focus groups of students who are struggling with the project's workload. Be the lead manager in the room, and do not accept any student falling behind; intervene and include other supporters, including parents and coaches, to support a student.

Students should have some voice in the selection of their group mates, but teachers make the ultimate decision. Many PBL teachers recommend a group size of three or four students. Here are a few options that work well:

• Allow students to write to you about group member preferences: students reflect and tell you one or two peers they hope are in their group, and one who they do not wish to work with. This reflection can be connected to socio-emotional work around learning styles, personal strengths and challenges, or how groups need different types of thinking and energies to be both creative and productive. Be upfront and honest with them that you will be "balancing the boats", so that each group represents the diversity of the classroom.
• At younger grades, think about having a writer, an artist, a builder, and a manager in each group. There are many other categories you could select (scribe, time-keeper); just be clear on what roles the final product requires.
• Let the inquiry guide the group selection: group students by the types of questions that they are most interested in.
• Group students by their preferred product type for the final challenge. Who wants to stage a debate? Who is filming a movie?

Have students come to their group with research notes, brainstorms of solutions, or thinking maps already completed and turned in for grading. Their goal, then, is to blend the best of their knowledge, skills, and creativity to come up with a shared best-fit solution to the Driving Question. The next learning, then, is about sharing, listening, and blending ideas, not about basic knowledge and fact collection.

As you introduce and teach key learnings towards the big idea of the project, student questions will arise. You should address these questions and student interest by showing flexibility with the project structure.

In PBL classrooms, students return to their questions often. Have students work in their journals every week, preferably more than once.

Students might reflect on core content by discussing their thoughts on what they have learned or on their process. You could use the reflection resource provided at the end of the NextLesson Project or edit to create one of your own to focus on these aspects throughout the project, either on a weekly basis or after important milestones. You could alternatively run through a reflection in small group conferences.

Another way to keep the inquiry going is to return to students' initial questions on the Project Wall frequently. Which ones have been answered so far? Which ones seem unimportant now? What new questions have come up? Create a space for student voice and choice by letting students select a specific question from the Project Wall to be responsible for answering. This builds on student interest and demonstrates whether they are progressing in their research skills.

Engage students in being citizen scientists. Talk to your contact at the site of any visit and see if there are observations and data collection that would assist their mission, or service work to improve the site too. Prepare a set of questions that students will answer while on the visit.

You don't have to leave your schoolyard to do fieldwork. Many observations, especially for the younger grades, can be made on your playground, in the cafeteria, or by interviewing community members at your school.

Critique takes practice. Start as a whole class, looking at one anonymous, volunteered piece of draft student work. Have students note what they like. Encourage them to be specific. Then repeat the process by having them state how they might improve the work on a second draft. This time, demand both specificity and kindness, as you saw in the Austin's Butterfly example. Once you feel confident that the classes' tone and focus is there, try out a whole class Gallery Walk.

In addition to looking at student work, another strategy that many PBL teachers use is looking at exemplars, mentor texts, or real-life examples from the local community. What are the qualities of a high quality final product? Students observe an exemplar together, and those qualities become part of your project rubric.

NextLesson Projects include a Stepping Stone focused on revision. In a PBL classroom, this revision should be made a regular part of the project and the grading process. After each checkpoint or critique, set aside time for students to improve their work. Have them reflect on where they used feedback to make their work better. Then, accept the higher grade when work is revised before the grading period closes.

If you have students share their work at conferences with their family, have them include a first draft, rubric, and final draft, telling the story of how they improved their work using feedback from others.

What is most important in the end is that students can use the rubric to see how to improve their own work. Select one example of high-quality work, either commercially or student created. Have students use the rubric to rate that piece of work. Get specific about what made that a "3" in their mind. Let them know if you disagree, and update your rubric as necessary.

You can start with a pre-made rubric, and you and your students can add developmentally appropriate noticings and language to the rubric as you go. During discussions, make notes on your original rubric. You can keep an ever-growing and more specific copy of the rubric on your Project Wall, or build a more specific version online.

Once your class is using kind, specific, and helpful language to critique, you can also use rubrics during Gallery Walks or other critique protocols. Be explicit with students that the goal is not to "grade" this work, but to identify its high quality elements and specifically how it could be improved.

You can use the same copy of your rubric several times with students or groups of students. Mark in different colors so that the students can see their areas of growth and challenge. Remember that final student grading should be done for individual students and not for groups.

Many teachers host Author's Teas for parents to sit by their students and hear them read their writing. Your first sharing of final products should feel that easy. Invite your administrative team, your book buddy classroom, and the grade below you. Have it last 30 minutes. Keep it small. But do remember to invite any community experts that you met along the way!

Student engagement and accountability for high standards will be raised where there is an authentic audience for their final product. NextLesson Projects suggest an audience outside of the classroom, but think further about your own local community. Have students suggest ideas of who they would present their final product to in the real world. Think about whether they could actually send off letters, run a local campaign, present to specific community members. The more authentic, the better.

Students should present both their solution and the process that they used to get there. When you design the setup of the final presentation, think of it like a science lab. What was the question? How did you research the problem? What did you learn? What is your idea for solving the problem?

Every student should play a part in the presentation of their final product. Plan out which section of the product each student will present. For younger grades this may look like simply taking turns. If you have a student that will not be able to present due to language issues, give them a non-speaking role. The better you know your students, the easier it is to build in a role that fits each one.

Build presentation practice into the project calendar. Name the skills that they will need to use and consider adapting the NextLesson rubric specifically for this portion of the project. Start small, with groups practicing with each other during class time. Then consider inviting other grade level classrooms to come over as practice visitors. Debrief before and after practice: what was hard? What was easy? What do you need to practice?

The PBL experience means shifting away from perfectly polished adult-managed products to real glimpses into the work and solutions of students themselves. Don't require perfection from your students.

You may choose not to grade students during the public sharing of work. You could instead grade individual work and level of understanding during the course of the project. This does not preclude giving qualitative feedback to every group or individual on their final sharing. You could also give feedback during the practice process.

Let the students know that you want their feedback on the project, so that you can revise it before you use it with another group of students. You can use the questions provided in the reflection resource with students filling these in on paper or discussing in groups or as a class. Take a class period to reflect on the project as a whole and for each student to celebrate a job well done.

Reflections should be on the key learnings of the project as well as students' processes and how they used 21^st century skills. You may want to change the reflection resource to direct questions toward other learnings, skills or processes that became pertinent over the course of the project. These may be similar to the changes you made to the rubric.

• Deeper Learning: what is deeper learning?
• Main Course, Not Dessert - via bie.org
• Project-based Learning: A Short History, by Suzie Boss - via bie.org
• Resources List: Collaboration in PBL - via bie.org

• Elementary - Farm Animal Playground & Butterfly Habitat
• Middle School - Gender Roles or Soil Superheroes
• High School - The Hunger Games: History + ELA or or The Wing Project: Physics + Engineering

• Chalk talk protocol - via National School Reform Faculty, nsrf.org
• Video example of Chalk Talk in action: Making War Relevant (7th grade) - via edutopia.org, to min 1:40
• Parts, Purposes, Complexities thinking routine: see Educator Resources, and scroll down - via agencybydesign.org

• The Who, What, and Why of Learning Targets - via elschools.org
• Students Discuss the Power of Learning Targets (7th & 8th grade) - via Expeditionary Learning, on vimeo
• Using a Learning Targets Throughout a Lesson (K) - via Expeditionary Learning, on vimeo

• Using Google Docs to track group work (5th grade): Blended Learning My Way: PBL, the standards, technology and reflection - via p21.org
• Introducing student group choice and team contracts during the project launch (9th & 10th grade): The Wing Project: Physics + Engineering - via youtube.com

• Using Webb's Depth of Knowledge to Increase Rigor - via edutopia.org
• Inquiry-based learning: Developing Student-Driven Questions - via edutopia.org

• Parts, People, Interactions - via Agency By Design

• Models of Excellence: the center for high quality student work - a partnership between Harvard and EL Schools
• The Who, What and Why of Models, Critique and Descriptive Feedback - via elschools.org
• Using Gallery Walks for Revision and Reflection - via bie.org

• Kindergarten Project Presentation Video: "Stray, Stray, Go Away!"
• Presentation Rubric (6th-8th grade) via the Buck Institute at bie.org
• Stand and Deliver: The Role of Presentations in Project-Based Learning - via p21.org

You should answer the following questions to generate your focus:

• What kind of questions did your students ask during the task that might link to a project?
• Did anything strike you about what you observed when students were completing the task?
• Does the actual premise of the task naturally lend itself to an authentic task?
• Do one of the Finales lead into a project that you could extend or adapt?

Make sure that the focus you are planning to use is an appropriate PBL scenario. You might think about the following questions here:

• What real world scenarios would the work connect to? What adult world or real world applications would this have?
• Is there a purpose to what the students would produce?
• How might they use the skills or final product outside of school?
• Would the final product be something useful?

1. It should be a question that people ask in the real world.
2. It should challenge and stretch students' thinking.
3. It should inspire students' imagination and creativity.

Simple, clear questions make the best driving questions. Driving questions often change or transform as the project idea emerges and you design your projects. This is normal and it's important to be flexible.

You could look at some example driving questions from tasks or use a driving question generator.

Some examples from NextLesson Performance Tasks are:

Speak to your students about PBL and how it differs from a typical project or lesson.

Speak to parents or send home a letter to let them know what they can expect. Be sure to communicate information about the project, the exhibition and how they can get involved.

Tell other teachers about what you are doing. They may help you come up with ideas and resources or may want to collaborate.

Think about changing around the layout of your classroom and/or the structure of your routine to fit the needs of your project.

Decide how you will exhibit or make the final pieces of work public. Pick a day and share with people in advance what they can expect from this exhibition of student work.

PBL is very different from regular classroom instruction. You need to be prepared to be a facilitator rather than a leader in the process.

Here are some steps you could follow to get yourself set up:

• Decide what you want your students to learn, and plan backwards from there.
• Do the project yourself first and share your prototype with your students.
• Make a connection with someone outside the school to work with you to include a real world connection.
• Create a plan for implementing the project and think about how you will differentiate the project based on the needs of your students.
• Consider the resources you have and those your students will need.
• Decide on a date for the exhibition and then work backwards to create a timeline with project checkpoints to support student learning.
• Build in time for student revision and reflection to cement student learning.
• Think about assessment and what you want students to be able to demonstrate or do.
• Design the project and consider using the NextLesson platform. See the section below titled "How can I structure my project clearly?" for tips on how to use the NextLesson platform.
• Read through our PBL teaching strategies to use as you progress through the project.
• After the project, take time to reflect on what went well and what you would do differently next time.

Look through the Key Components that we use to design our own NextLesson Projects. You can check each of these elements off to make sure you have included appropriate PBL elements.

Relevant parts of the Performance Task you are using to inspire your PBL could be attached as resources along the way, for example the math activities, the reading or other ELA activities, or sample data/texts. Think about using parts of the math and ELA matching Performance Tasks.

You could think about including an interactive Rank & Reason activity in your PBL to link to the driving question. You could build this out as the project evolves.

Some ranking questions based on these example driving questions could be: