http://www.edutopia.org/stw-project-based-learning-best-practicesguide?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=post&utm_content=stw&utm_campa ign=stepbystep
Discover a project-based learning model that motivates students to pursue knowledge and drives academic achievement.
BY MARIKO NOBORI
One sophomore project at Manor New Tech High School was based on the best-selling
novel The Hunger Games. Examples of how they incorporated English and world history standards into the project are below.
Credit: Zachary Fink
Manor New Technology High School in Manor, Texas, is a 100 percent projectbased learning school. They are part of the New Tech Network of schools and their approach has yielded remarkable results , including a 98 percent graduation rate, with all of their graduates accepted to college.
The success of their PBL approach is largely attributable to the fact that their process is designed to stimulate student inquiry. Additionally, their process can be applied to any project in any subject, which means there is a consistent approach across grades and subjects at Manor.

We followed a sophomore world studies class through a three-week project called Controlling Factors, created by teaching partners Mary Mobley (English) and Michael Chambers (world history). They designed a project that capitalized on the wild popularity among their students of the best-selling novel The Hunger
Games . Built on specific English and world history state standards, the project covered concepts including the pre-World War II global economic crisis, the rise of totalitarianism, and the societal moral dilemmas that world leaders at that time faced, and then had students draw parallels to similar fictional themes in the book.
Here is a breakdown of key steps, with some examples from Mobley and
Chambers's project:
1. State standards: Every project at Manor starts with the state standards, and every project's final assessment requires that students demonstrate their mastery of them. State standards are laid out in the rubric, and students
• should be able to tell you which ones they're covering in any given project.
Example: For Mobley and Chambers's project, world history standards included understanding the causes of the global depression, the response of governments to it, the rise of totalitarianism, and key world leaders in WWII. English language arts standards included analyzing moral dilemmas across cultures in works of fiction, making complex inferences from literature, and writing personal response essays.
2. Critical Friends: Honest, two-way feedback and ongoing adjustments help
Manor’s projects to continually improve. Both students and teachers
• participate in a peer review protocol they call Critical Friends. Before teachers launch a project, they often have a session with colleagues for feedback, especially on the academic rigor of the project. Similarly, before their final presentations, students often run Critical Friends to give each other feedback in the form of "I like…" and "I wonder…" statements and suggest next steps for improvement.
Example: Mobley and Chambers had a Critical Friends session with their department colleagues in which they received feedback on how to better integrate the two subjects. In this session, they also came up with the idea for the second part of the project, in which the students were broken up into districts and a ruling capital to simulate both the fictional and historical scenarios they were studying.
3. Entry event: Teachers introduce each project with an entry event that serves several purposes: to hook the kids and get them engaged in the content, to provide an exemplar of what the teachers expect, and to introduce key vocabulary (such as people, events, and terminology) related to the

• targeted content to get the students thinking about what they'll need to know.
Example: For the Controlling Factors entry event, Mobley and Chambers created a newsreel that included terms like "Mussolini,"
"totalitarianism," "global depression," and "World War II" as breadcrumbs. A student might already know what totalitarianism and
World War II are, but may not know who Mussolini was and how those terms are all connected.
4. "Need-to-know" list: Keywords in the entry event should prompt students to identify new concepts they’ll need to learn and help them make connections to related content they already know. As a class, they agree on a shared list of need-to-knows, which they update individually throughout the project.
5. Rubric: The rubric is an essential tool for maintaining transparency for students at Manor. Teachers carefully design rubrics to define all the desired learning outcomes for a project, including which state standards students are expected to master and how performance will be measured for each outcome. The rubric sets the standard for each project and is presented at the start so that students have clear goals to work toward.
6. Group contract: Individual accountability is a critical component of successful
PBL, and Manor students use group contracts to document expectations for each team member. Each project team writes a contract that clearly defines everyone's roles, responsibilities, and contributions to the project, and students are held to it. Students can be fired if they do not fulfill their part of the contract and must complete the project on their own, although this rarely happens at Manor.
7. Research and collaboration: Once the project is launched, it is up to the students to work together to figure out what their final product is going to be and how they will acquire the knowledge they need to complete it.
Teachers provide workshops to go over concepts depending on students' needs, and they have students run workshops for each other to reinforce
• their learning and build collaboration.
Example: Workshops for The Hunger Games project included studentled discussions about real moral dilemmas from events in history or fictional examples based on events in the book. They also had workshops on different totalitarian leaders and other world leaders during WWII.
8. Assessment and adjustment: Throughout the process, teachers and students give and receive feedback and make adjustments accordingly. Teachers track student progress to make sure no student is falling behind.
Depending on what they find, they might go back and do more scaffolding, quiz more, or provide additional workshops. "If I have a student who is almost done with an entire project and is not doing very well," says Mobley,

"I really step back and wonder, 'Where was I this whole time? Why wasn't I paying more attention to the student's progress?'"
9. Presentations: Public presentations are the common element to all projects at
•
Manor, with up to 80 percent of them in front of an external audience.
Verbal communication, public speaking, and other important nonacademic skills are honed in this process.
Example: Final presentations for Mobley and Chambers's project included a multimedia presentation with audience participation about a moral dilemma faced by Nazi concentration camp survivors and a skit dramatizing the moral decisions made by world leaders running up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
10. Final assessment: Because teachers take pains to observe student progress throughout the process, the final assessments tend to be relatively easy. The work up front on creating a clearly defined rubric that identifies multiple learning outcomes and criteria also helps considerably.
As Mobley explains, "By the time students turn in their final work, they should know what grade they're going to get."

http://www.edutopia.org/stw-project-based-learning-best-practices-resources-lessonplans#rubrics
Educators from Manor New Technology High School in Manor, Texas, part of the
New Tech Network of schools, have provided these resources and tools for project-based learning.
BY EDUTOPIA STAFF
English teacher Mary Mobley (left) shared the PBL resources and tools she and her teaching partner created for their sophomore world studies project (right) featuring
the novel The Hunger Games. Credit: Zachary Fink
11. Documents to Help You Get Started
12. Culture at Manor New Tech High School
13. Additional Resources on the Web
14. Suggested Reading on Project-Based Learning
Click on any link below to view or download that file.
Tips for downloading: PDF files can be viewed on a wide variety of platforms -- both as a browser plug-in or a stand-alone application -- with Adobe's free Acrobat
Reader program. Click here to download the latest version of Adobe Reader .

• The Hunger Games Project Documents
• Below are sample project-based learning documents from teachers Mary
Mobley (English) and Michael Chambers (world history) of Manor New
Technology High School in Manor, Texas. They team-teach a sophomore world studies class. These documents were used for their "Controlling
Factors" project, a three-week project in which students learned about the global economic crisis of the pre-World War II era, how it led to the rise of totalitarianism, and the societal moral dilemmas that arose out of those conditions, and then drew parallels to similar fictional themes in the novel
The Hunger Games.
(Read more about it in the Step-by-Step Guide to the
Best Projects .)
• Project Form When Manor New Tech teachers create a project they must first submit a project planning form. The form was created as a guide for teachers by the Buck Institute for Education. This doc is the completed project planning form for Mobley and Chambers's Controlling Factors project.
• Project Calendar This calendar shows the three-week schedule for the
Controlling Factors project from the entry event through the final project presentations.
• Entry Event The entry event is used to engage and motivate the students when the project is introduced. This video was created by Mobley and
Chambers as the entry event for the Controlling Factors project.
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• Rubric The rubric for the Controlling Factors project includes the following elements:
Driving questions
Overview of the project
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State standards
Assessment criteria on content literacy, critical thinking, and oral engagement
Rhetorical strategies •
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• Workshops Workshops are provided during the project process to help clarify concepts, answer questions, and share information. Workshops for each project differ depending on student needs, but can include lectures, creating graphic organizers, and group discussions. For the Controlling
Factors project, students had the option of writing about real moral dilemmas from events in history or creating fictional examples based on the book The Hunger Games . Then they had group discussions about

•
• these moral dilemmas. Below are student examples:
Workshops -- Moral Dilemma 1
Workshops -- Moral Dilemma 2
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Workshops -- Farmers Story
• Additional PBL Documents from Manor New Tech High School
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• More Project Rubrics:
• "Bourne to be Wild" -- World Geography
• "When Opinion is Not Enough" -- International Culture and History
• "The Role of the President" -- Government
• "Re-creating a Planet" -- World Geography
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• Peer Collaboration Evaluations Students present their in-progress projects to each other for peer review and use these peer-to-peer critique sheets to give each other feedback.
• Group Contract Template Students write group contracts detailing each team member's role on a project. The contract must be signed by all members at the beginning of a project.
• Think Forward Website Overview of Manor New Tech's Think Forward Institute, which was designed to train educators in project-based learning and its
21st-century applications.
• Think Forward Brochure Brochure on Think Forward's four-day conference on project-based learning.
• Writing Rubrics Presentation Mary Mobley created this presentation on writing rubrics for the Think Forward Institute.
• Digital Dojo Digital Dojo is a website created by the Digital Media Literacy class at Manor New Tech High. It showcases music and video from their students.
• Digital Dojo Podcast Podcast created by the Digital Media Literacy class. This must be viewed or downloaded using iTunes.
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• Manor Visitors Summary Sheet An overview of Manor New Tech for visitors, including mission statement, learning outcomes, and the school's commitments to their students
• Learning Outcomes Manor New Tech's learning outcomes for all classes
• Manor Bell Schedule Daily bell schedule for Manor New Tech
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• Manor New Technology High School -- Manor New Tech's website
• New Tech Network -- Nonprofit that works with schools and districts nationwide providing services and support to help reform learning through PBL
• Buck Institute for Education -- Nonprofit dedicated to improving 21st-century teaching and learning through effective project-based learning
• Educate Texas -- Educate Texas connects legislators, funders, business groups, school administrators and teachers to create change for Texas students
• The System for Teacher and Student Advancement Program (TAP) -- A
National Institute for Excellence in Teaching Initiative was created in 1999 to develop and retain highly effective educators
• Texas Education Agency -- Texas state agency whose goal is to provide leadership, guidance, and resources to help schools meet the educational needs of all students
• Dinah Zike Academy -- Institute for training teachers in the use of graphic organizers
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• PBL Starter Kit . John Larmer (2009) The Buck Institute for Education
• PBL Handbook . Thom Markham, John Larmer and Jason Ravitz (2003) The
Buck Institute for Education
• Notebook Connections: Strategies for the Reader's Notebook . Aimee Buckner
(2009) Stenhouse Publishers
• Reviving the Essay: How to Teach Structure Without Formula . Gretchen
Bernabei (2005) Discover Writing Press
• Comprehension Connections: Bridges to Strategic Reading . Tanny McGregor
(2007) Heinemann Educational Books
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More Edutopia Resources on Project-Based Learning:
• Edutopia's Project-Based Learning Core Strategy page
• Article: Real-World Issues Motivate Students: An Overview of PBL
• Video: An Introduction to Project-Based Learning
• Article: Research Validates Project-Based Learning
• Schools That Work Package: Project Learning in Maine
• Resource Roundup: Project Learning: Model Schools with Solutions
• Article: The PBL Launch Pad: Worthwhile Projects for High School Students
• Article: How to Turn Project-Learning Setbacks to Your Advantage
• Article: 10 Takeaway Tips for Project-Based Learning
• Resource Roundup: A Reading List for Project-Based Learning
• Resource Roundup: Free Resources and Downloads for Project Learning
• Discussion Group: Project-Based Learning
See more project-based learning resources and downloads.