Partner With ARIEIn brief
Project-based learning is an instructional approach in which students build knowledge and skills by investigating a meaningful question, problem, or challenge over time and creating work for an authentic purpose or audience. High-quality PBL combines academic rigor, inquiry, collaboration, student agency, feedback, revision, and public demonstration of learning.
Connected practice areas
Clear answers
Project-based learning, or PBL, is an instructional approach in which students learn by investigating a meaningful question, problem, or challenge and producing work for an authentic purpose or audience.
A traditional project often follows instruction. In PBL, the project drives the learning as students acquire and apply knowledge throughout sustained inquiry, feedback, revision, and creation.
No. Strong PBL begins with required standards and uses the project as a meaningful context for learning, applying, and demonstrating that knowledge.
Yes. Well-designed projects explicitly teach and assess reading, writing, speaking, mathematical reasoning, data use, and problem-solving within meaningful applications.
ARIE's approach was developed by practitioners who designed, taught in, and led schools built around PBL. Participants experience, design, critique, practice, implement, and improve usable work.
Rigorous projects align to important standards, require substantive knowledge and reasoning, include explicit instruction and individual accountability, and use clear criteria, feedback, and revision.
Authentic assessment asks students to apply knowledge and skills through meaningful products, performances, explanations, or solutions while also providing evidence of individual learning.
Students collaborate productively when teachers establish shared norms, clear roles, individual accountability, respectful critique, equitable participation, and routines for resolving problems.
Written and reviewed by Steven Zipkes, President and Founder of Advanced Reasoning in Education. His perspective is grounded in more than three decades of school leadership, the design and leadership of two PBL-centered schools, international educator development, and sustained implementation work.
Review Steven Zipkes's experience