Project-based learning provides an excellent answer to a question that students ask a lot: “Why are we learning this?”
In a conventional classroom, the answer is, “Because it’s a thing that people should know.”
But that’s kind of vague, so the back-up answer is, “And it will be on the test.”
In a project-based classroom, however, when a student asks, “Why are we learning this?” The answer is, “Because we’re making [a thing] for [an audience].”
Here’s an example. A student asks, “Why are we learning about sentence structures?”
The PBL answer is: “Because we’re writing proposals for how to clean the local creek that we’re presenting to the town council in three weeks.”
Will this work for all of the things you teach in your class? Of course not. Learning is messy. But if you’re doing PBL, it will work most of the time, and it will fundamentally transform how both the teacher and the students think about the work they’re doing.
