PBLWorks defines Project Based Learning as a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge. When developing your Projects, it is helpful to identify the Skills that you are targeting up front, and then design the Project, and its Steps, to align with those skills.

The structure of a project is fundamentally simple. Each project consists of individual steps, scaffolding a learner to the Project’s objective – and the Skills you are targeting. Although technically unlimited, we recommend capping projects at not more than eight Steps. If you envision a particularly complex Project, perhaps it would be best to break it into phases – separate projects – that may be easier for a learner to swallow.

Project creation happens up front, but it is important to understand that projects can continue to be edited or added to, even as learners are already working on an early step. It is also helpful to know that projects can be customized for individual learners if you feel that someone needs additional scaffolding to achieve the objective, or a learner needs to be more challenged to stay engaged. You may also wish to release your projects over time, not all at once.

One or more Evidence assignments can be added to a Step. These Evidence assignments are the heart of the LiFT learning experience. They can be tagged to the Skills you are trying to develop. You’ll work with learners to revise these assignments and they provide a way for learners to exhibit their learning. Ultimately, completed Evidence is evaluated and accumulated in a learner’s Skill Portfolios for assessment at the Skill level.

To keep the submission of assigned Evidence as easy as possible, if your school uses a Google Workspace, you can create templates in your Google drive that are automatically copied for each learner and shared back and forth without any need to set sharing attributes each time you send the files.

To each of the steps, you can attach resources that help guide a student through the learning process. You can also add Evidence assignment to give learners a way to exhibit their learning. By tagging evidence to skills, you provide learners with opportunities to demonstrate their growing mastery over a wide range of skills.