- Plan, and alert the students
to, how their investigations will be assessed. If the product is to be marked, for example, allow the students to know the marking criteria before they start.
- Provide a scaffold of what activities are required in order to answer the ‘driving’ question and create the ‘product’.
- Be a facilitator, rather than a traditional teacher. Resist the temptation to answer the students’ questions! Rather point them in the direction where an answer can be found. Manage the process to ensure the project stays on track and to purpose.
Information & Communication Technology (ICT) can support PBL. How it does this is up to the teacher and the students to determine. Learners will gravitate to using tools that satisfy their learning preferences. (Remember Gardiner and his Multiple Intelligences theory?) Obvious tools include the Internet and the vast amount of information contained there. It can be easily searched for information, so ensure your driving question is broad enough that it can’t be answered by a simple Google search! Electronic presentation tools will also be useful for report backs. Electronic probes could be used to collect data.
Describe how collaborative, as students come to understand key concepts, processes and skills in the subject matter and use them to solve real-world problems (KD.3.a).
