There are two different questions I often hear from visitors to High Tech High that are both based on the same misconception about project-based learning.
The first is, “How much time should we be spending on PBL per week?” And the second is, “Is it still OK to give lectures?”
The answer to both of these questions lies in the understanding that a project isn’t a specific kind of lesson, but rather a specific kind of unit. So a traditional history teacher might say, “For the next 12 weeks, we’re doing a unit on the Protestant Reformation and will be reading chapters 11–13 of the textbook.” But a PBL teacher might say, “In 12 weeks we’re going to premiere short plays about European religious leaders at a theater festival downtown.” Over the course of those 12 weeks, students will write scripts and rehearse, but they’ll also read about the Reformation, learn specialist vocabulary, study how to write dialogue and describe scenes, and the teacher might even give a lecture or two.
So it doesn’t make sense to say, “The PBL lesson happens after lunch on Tuesday,” because a project isn’t a type of lesson—it’s an entire unit. And lectures still have a role to play in PBL, because teachers can use pretty much any technique that helps prepare students to showcase their work.
