A Student-Centered PBL Project Planner
In the real-world sales teams use a Sales Playbook, Designers use the Design Thinking Process, Entrepreneurs use a Business Model Canvas. Professionals are given roadmaps or guides to do their jobs. They are told what to do, but not always how to do it. Use this PBL project planner to plan your next student-driven project-based learning or inquiry project. This project planner is perfect for the teacher who believes that less is more. The PBL planning book simply asks you to break down your project into stages and tasks to help guide your students through their project start to finish without taking away their agency.
Following our mantra - less is more - the PBL project planning tools leaves most of the choice and voice up to the students. Leave room for a student’s individuality, ideas, and input. The overall purpose of implementing project-based learning after all is for students to flex their soft skills - creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, executive functioning etc.
Remember, PBL is not POSTERS. PBL is when students actively engage in real-world and personally meaningful projects. In that case, we need to plan a little less and scaffold key skills a little more.
In this Health & Wellness project below, the teacher needs to scaffold question formulating, deep exploration & brainstorms, various research and investigation methods, goal setting, time management, and design thinking strategies… to name a few.
Not sure how to start putting together the pieces and parts of your PBL project plan? Check out this repeatable project-based learning plan that can be customized for any PBL learning experience!
ROADMAP
Stage 1 - Launch
In this stage, you are going to figure out what you already know about this topic and what you wonder about. Your job is to look for a problem you wish to solve or an opportunity to make something better.
Explore the topic. Make a brainstorm, mind-map or list of everything you already know and wonder about this topic.
Explore your wonderings further. Share the resources you used (books, websites, experts etc.) and choose 1 wondering that you find the most interesting.
Create a driving question around your wondering. This question will help guide the rest of your project work.
Plan investigation.
Share one need or problem you are going to tackle in this project. Why is this topic important to you?
Stage 2 - Understand the Problem
Before you come up with solutions, you need to better understand the problem. Figure out who is problem impacts? How does it impact them?
Find people who experience the problem and create a group. Think about age, job, interests etc.
Choose how to investigate. Observe people as they engage in activities to do with the problem, Interview or Survey these people.
Build a question list and come up with a plan. Answer the questions who, what, when and where in your plan.
Conduct the investigation and share your findings. Show your findings in an infograph, picture, video or slide. Record feelings, behaviours, actions etc.
Stage 3 - Define the Problem
Determine the specifics of the problem. Determine who experiences the problem, why they are experiencing it, why it is a problem, and how many people are experiencing the problem. Also, determing what is currently being done to address this problem.
Identify with your end-users or audience. What are their jobs, pains, keeps and gains?
Complete an empathy map.
Break down your information. Collect everything you've learned about the problem and break it down into simple ideas. Eg. One idea per sticky note. Group together similar ideas and name each group. Do you see any patterns? Share your groupings.
Create a journey map. Write out a detailed timeline of your users experience with the problem, start to finish.
Define the problem. Who is affected by the need? Why does this need exist? Why is this need worth solving?
Stage 4 - Design a Solution
Exercise every creative bone you have! Here's where you bend, break, and blend ideas. Generate a lot of ideas and questions to ask to solve the problem or meet needs. Share solutions with others for feedback. Move forward with the most promising solution.
Ideate solutions. Create a list of 'how might we' questions addressing the need in your problem statement. Eg. How might we ___(verb) for ____(user). ____(need)_____ in order to _____ (reason) ____. Eg. How much we create a tutoring program for students who struggle with math because they aren't getting enough support.
Brainstorm a list of ideas to go with each 'how might we' question. Provide quick drawings.
Test your ideas. Run your solutions by peers and your end-user. Collect feedback and narrow down to your top idea.
Stage 5 - Action Plan
Now that you have defined a clear need or opportunity consider what is currently being done to address this. What could be done? Develop a plan of action. Think of the audience and experts who can support your plan. Carry out your action plan. Get feedback on implementation. Iterate: make adjustments and improvements.
Set a goal or purpose.
Determine objectives.
Plan a timeline of to do's.
Share your progress. Carry out your plan of action and share your work as you go.
Stage 6 - Present
Here's where you bring it all together. This is your chance to showcase what you've learned and what you've accomplished. How can you make your presentation relevant and engaging for your audience, while highlighting your progress?
Create a storyboard and outline your goals. Visualize how your audience will see your slides, video or prototype start to finish. What are your goals? Do you want to persuade, inform, inspire or hook your audience? How do you plan on meeting these goals?
Create bullet points. Make sure you touch on the main points and arrange information to meet your objective.
Put it all together. Get feedback and make revisions. How is your messaging coming accross?
Stage 7 - Reflect & Extend
Reflect on your project by looking back on the experience. Deepen your reflection by looking forward: what more could be done to continue your work? How could it be extended and built upon?
Summarize your experience. You can use a journal, collage, photobook, blog or vlog to reflect. Consider what worked well and what could be changed. How did this experience impact you personally?
Add to your work. Brainstorm what else could be done to continue your work? Who else could benefit from your work? How can you apply your work to a different area?
Share your extended work.
things to think about when you are planning…
use metacognition, not micromanagement
It’s been proven by expert PBL teachers in this study that improved metacognition, not micromanagement, is the key to improving student agency. If we focus less on the the teacher-driven tasks (lessons, worksheets, suggested readings) and more on the metacognitive, student-driven tasks (research, brainstorming, questioning, goal-setting, creating) we are equipping young students with the necessary executive functioning skills to learn how to learn. Isn’t that the point of PBL projects after all???
Our PBL Project Planner takes a metacognitive approach to managing and organizing student work. The most modern classrooms establish this method because they see a substantial improvement in the self-sufficiency and organization of their students. Check out how this expert PBL teachers has used metacognitive tasks in this “Teen Challenges” health education project to pull her students through. Another great example of metacognitive tasks can be found in this ELA “Storytelling Project”.
design a roadmap, not a lesson.
The PBL project planner below may seem a little more hands-off than other project-based learning planning materials. It’s student-driven, not teacher-driven. The purpose of PBL is to ensure that students have voice and choice in what, when, where and how they learn. The PBL project outline is designed to support continual check points of feedback, reflection and iteration that’s required of real-world projects. Instead of building a plan for just yourself as the teacher, why not build a clear plan for students at the same time that enables them to direct their own learning: reflecting and questioning their work at every step to improve and inform next steps. Break down your project into stages (milestones, phases) and action steps so students know where to start and where to go next. Ensure they don’t race ahead or miss any important steps along the way. Encourage students to share their learning process, not just their final work for every task.
train students to manage the messy middle.
A project plan is in place to manage the messy middle. But who shoulders most of the management? The teacher? The student? Our PBL project planner below guides students through transferrable skills like researching, ideating, sourcing information, doing an analysis etc. rather than push students through teacher-curated content/ lessons and quizes. Instead of teacher-driven plan: what are teachers doing at every stage, we have come up with a student-driven plan: what are students doing at every stage. After all, PBL is student-centric — the students are learning how to be agents. Active managers.
We absolutely love how this teacher designed a roadmap to introduce her students to a PBL experience using this project: “Learn a New Skill: Beginner Student-Led PBL”. The purpose of the project-based learning project plan is for beginner PBL students to learn how to design and lead their own project-based learning experiences. This project can be used at any grade level, covering any topic to get students used to a healthy new balance of freedom and self-direction required of a PBL experience.
If students need support with higher-level tasks like planning, goal-setting, creating a driving question, solution finding etc. access Spinndle’s task library for templates that scaffold students through more complex actions.
There are plenty of resources to give students to help them manage on their own. Get them to explore 100 Final Project Ideas or support them with driving question or project proposal workbooks.
don’t plan alone
Spinndle has created project roadmaps to support your student-centric plans for any type of project. Poke around Spinndle’s shared library to see how other teachers are planning their projects.
Free PBL Project Planner
Used by over 5000+ teachers, this Google Slide template is completely customizable. Use the project-based learning book to plan any project. It is a repeatable project design process. This project design template will help you break down your project into manageable stages or milestones for your students to work through. From there, empathize with your students’ needs and ideate what kind of scaffolds or lessons you will need to provide to support each stage of the project.
What’s included?
High-level planning page: project name, final product, audience, community participation, project overview
Milestones & Tasks planning page: stage, stage overview, deliverables and student NTK’s, resources and scaffolds
Skill Assessment Map: Summative assessment, core competencies/ skills covered and formative assessment pieces
Example Project: Example of how to fill out the PBL project planner
Spinndle is used by some of the most modern classrooms in the world.
““Spinndle helps students move meaningfully though phases of a project””