As PBL teachers, we will sometimes need to teach students material that doesn’t fit neatly into projects. For example, a student should feel confident using a semicolon even if the editorial they’re submitting to the local newspaper, and the letters they’re writing to their local representatives, won’t benefit from semicolons.
So what’s a teacher to do? You don’t want a kid to make their writing worse by shoehorning in some irrelevant semicolons, but you want their learning to be authentically driven by the project.
By way of solution, consider how a basketball team works. Not all of basketball takes place on the court, after all. So while much of a team’s training will be focused on practicing dribbling, shooting, passing, and other basketball-specific skills, they will also devote considerable time to off-court work, such as going to the gym to lift weights and work out on machines. What players do in the gym isn’t explicitly connected to basketball, but it’s building up the muscles they will need in order to dribble, shoot, pass, and execute other moves they must master to win games.
Skills that don’t explicitly fit into your project are the academic equivalent of going to the gym. Doing a Romanian deadlift may not look much like playing basketball, but the player who puts in the time doing those deadlifts will make more rebounds. The same goes for the student who mastered the semicolon even though she wasn’t using it in her editorial.
