3 Places to Look for PBL Unit Ideas
As elementary PBL facilitators, we often need help coming up with ideas for PBL units. Here are 3 roads that I often take to find inspiration for PBL units.
1. Students
Because students are the driving force behind any quality PBL unit, why not start with their interests, ideas, and topics of conversation as inspiration for your PBL units? If a PBL unit is inspired by the students in your class, they will be more engaged in the learning that occurs through that topic. Here are a few ideas for drawing PBL topics out of your students.
Use a student survey to discover topics that interest your students. Once you have a few topics, you as an educator can use those topics to help develop a PBL unit. Have a lot of students interested in cats and dogs? Try a PBL unit with the local humane society as your community partner. Looks like your kiddos are interested in dinosaurs? Contact a paleontologist to ask students for help spreading the word about a new find.
Try a whole class brainstorming session. By sitting with students and discussing issues that they see in their school, community, and the world, you will quickly find that they are more observant than you might think. Topics and problems will begin to flow from them that you might not have known.
Use an “I Wonder” board all year long to gather ideas and topics that interest your students even when you are not engaged in a PBL unit.
2. Curriculum/Standards
Teachers new to PBL, often feel that their curriculum and PBL are like oil and water, but often the curriculum you have in your classroom can be a source of PBL inspiration. Be wary to initiate student buy-in with this strategy, otherwise, your PBL unit might become a “project.”
Check out the units at the front of your basal. Each unit often has a theme or the main topic. Does anything look like it might interest your students? Do any of the topics match those written on your “I Wonder” board? Great! Now, you don’t have to hunt for resources that teach your standards.
Look for multiple standard topics within your strands. For example, do you have five standards over space? Why not try to persuade your students to do a space-based PBL unit? Have standard strands about potential and kinetic energy? Maybe the local cub scouts need help with their boxcar derby.
3. The World
Everywhere around us there are places to seek inspiration for a PBL unit. So many new inventions, experiences, and problems that are shared everyday on the internet lend themselves to quality PBL unit inspiration.
Subscribe to a local news channel for happenings in your community.
Use articles from your paper to read with students to teach them to pay attention to potential PBL units around them too.
Check out a 5 minute summary of world news at least once a week (I personally like BBC for a quick summary because they include happy things too). Use this quick recap to find potential areas for your students to study or work towards a solution.
Join Youtube channels that frequently post about things that lend themselves to quality PBL units. Click here to read my blog post, 5 YouTubers You Should Follow For Your PBL Classroom.
Look at Global PBL networks and get involved in a PBL unit on a global scale.
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No matter how you get inspiration for your next PBL unit, be sure to include your students in the process and it will be a smashing success (even if it flops :-).