Project+Sketch-++The+Essential+Question

=Can an entire school staff buy into the advantages of PBL and adopt it across the curriculum?=

There is more pressure and individual accountability than ever on all stakeholders in education. To meet the demands of Pennsylvania's SAS (Standards Aligned System) and its content specific Keystone Exams educators are going to have to find a way to cover all essential curriculum and standards in a way where all their students retain more information than ever. Not only that teachers outside of the core are being asked to play a greater supporting role than ever before in bridging curriculum gaps and teaching across the curriculum. On top of these pressures teachers are working in the most heterogeneous classrooms educators have had to face since the days of the one room schoolhouse. To meet the challenges of being an educator in the 21st century teachers are forced to take an in depth look at their core beliefs and philosophy of education. What role should a teacher play in the classroom and how does that role insure that all students are getting the best education available to them? How can the lone teacher or in the ideal way a group of co-teachers make sure that students get everything they need to contribute to the 21st century? Fortunately there is a proven research based and student centered way to meet these chalenges facing today's educators. What teaching strategy can do all these things in the limited time we see students? Why it is PBL or Project Based Learning. Project Based Learning works so well because it is what students will be required to do when they enter "The Real World". They have to take what is often a very ill defined question or problem and create a very sophisticated answer based on what actually will work. To do this students are required and forced to take a more active role in their own education and in the end learn more than they would have any other way.

If PBL is so effective why then do we even have to worry about our essential question? Why wouldn't an entire school just want to jump into PBL? The answer to this question alone could be the subject of many other projects. To keep it simple one is safe in assuming that due to the needs of the 20th century blue/white collar world education took on a form that was ment to successfully prepare students for the postindustrial revolution age of the late 20th century. Unfortunately, these valued skills will not help our current students meet the societal needs or values of the world they will have to survive in. At the same time schools are filled with teachers who have spent their entire lives teaching and modeling what they believed to be the ways to success in the world they lived in. It is the collision of these two worlds where we find the reluctance to change the way things are done. So the question is by what method can one get an entire staff to buy into and adopt PBL.