Narrator: Research demonstrates that students who participate in high-quality project-based learning, or PBL, do just as well on standardized tests and do better on assessment of skills that are crucial in a modern workforce. But the idea of project-based learning can be overwhelming, particularly if you don’t have the support of your district or even your school. Here are five ways to begin the shift toward authentic PBL in your classroom.

In many classrooms, teachers teach a unit, give a quiz or a test, and afterward, students get to do a little project to showcase what they’ve learned. In order to shift to PBL, the project must be the core academic work, so that it becomes how students learn the material, not something extra they get to do at the end. Start by evaluating the units you already teach. Could you deliver that content through a project?

If a project doesn’t address the standards you need to cover in a given subject area, be it literacy, math, science, or history, you’ll struggle to find space for it. The best projects develop understanding of key concepts and skills. But you certainly don’t have to start from scratch. You can find teacher-tested projects online from sources like High Tech High and PBL Works.

Good PBL takes time and involves lots of different parts. Over the course of a project, you may teach direct lessons, invite experts to share insights, and assign field research. Students might do a report, produce a video, build a model, or create a proposal. Try offering lots of different ways for students to develop skills and show what they know. You may be able to reach more students by tapping into what works for them.

When a classroom is engaged in PBL, it should, if it’s running well, feel like an architecture firm, or a science lab, or a news office, rather than a quiet place where students listen to someone talk at them. Make your classroom a workshop where kids are meeting in small teams, producing things, critiquing work, testing out hypotheses, and solving problems together.

Learning happens all along the way in PBL. Track individual progress throughout all aspects of the project—from research students did to activities they participated in and drafts they created. To start with, determine what you want students to know, then develop tasks that require students to demonstrate that knowledge and those skills. Identifying what good performance looks like on each task will help you develop a rubric that will set expectations and guide assessment. And again, don’t be afraid to turn to the experts online.

Getting started in project-based learning can feel intimidating, but tapping into the world of existing PBL resources can make the transition a little easier.