Project Based Learning and Social Emotional Learning Jobs

I love Project Based Learning. I believe giving students authentic, engaging, and difficult experiences are a gift. Why? Because I see how students learn and grow through the experience. It is amazing.

So when I got myself ready for another PBL opportunity, I reflected on how to increase 100% student engagement in the project. I am always looking for a way to build in accountability and opportunities for all students to equally engage in the work. In the past, I have given students jobs, but my concern was always about the value to students. PBL is not about busy work, it is about authentic learning that simultaneously builds soft skills. Was timekeeper meeting that goal? I wasn’t so sure.

So, with this in mind, I contacted our Instructional Guide, Meg Frideres, for a coaching conversation (simple plug for the power and value of dialogical coaching). We set down to talk about how I could promote social-emotional learning explicitly within the project. Through our conversation, I decided to make the PBL jobs directly tied to the SEL Competencies. What if instead of a person who keeps the papers, we had a student reflecting on the group’s ability to remain socially aware?

Now in order to make the jobs valuable, I knew I needed to have students reflect on the competencies often and intentionally. Here is a description of the jobs as introduced to students.

In order to facilitate the reflection, I created reflection books for each job. Students will be asked to complete the reflections at the end of each day students work in groups. Will this take time? Yes. Will it help students really think about their ability to meet the SEL competencies? Yes. To me, this meets the goals for PBL. Below, I included an example of what is in the guide.

To introduce the jobs, I showed this video. I wanted to honor kids and recognize that sometimes group work sucks, but it doesn’t have to.

Next, we had a little fun. Students were given their first challenge as collaborative teams.

Students were SO engaged. It was awesome! Were they working collaboratively, not completely, but that is what made the task so perfect. I wanted students to have an experience that they could reflect on. Cue the next step of the introduction…

I gave students time to reflect individually, collaboratively, and then identify a goal to share whole class. i was blown away by the honesty in the students’ reflection. They are definitely spending time analyzing the competencies and I am excited to see how this intentionality on my part will help them. If I want students to be world changers, I have to give them opportunities to develop the critical skills.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think!

Above is how I organized the group reflections. I chose to color code groups and keep the folders to ensure they are always in class and available. This also allows me to provide feedback on our SEL learning targets for the project.