Not every student needs to prepare for a Google-like workplace. And, as popular as STEM is presently, most students don’t want to become software engineers or scientists. But every student, in any job, will collaborate as a member of a team. I once talked with a student who told me he wanted to be a Fed Ex driver. “Just drive around and deliver things,” he said, “No teamwork there.” I urged him to look at the handheld device carried by every driver—the one that communicates with a worldwide network and plugs the driver into a global team.

Every student needs to be prepared for that environment, partly for employment opportunity, but mainly because the deeply embedded mental model of learning and creating as an individual process is obsolete. No one, any longer, can isolate themselves from someone else’s knowledge base, and collaboration has shifted from its earlier incarnation as a social networking skill into the chief way in which we talk to one another in order to get things done. Powerful collaboration is driven by incisive communication—and out of that process come the very best expressions of innovation, creativity, and critical inquiry. In other words, collaboration is now the foundational 21^st century skill.

Thinking that students are ‘naturals’ at this is a fallacy. High performance collaboration requires training and the development of key personal skills. For teachers, two initial steps will help launch this process. First, reframe the conversation by using the terminology of ‘teams,’ not group work. Think of your favorite sports team and now call them a ‘group.’ Feel the difference? Teams focus on accountability and commitment; they form for a purpose and operate through norms and shared expectations.

Second, import and adapt the high performance principles common in the work world to teams in the classroom. This requires time, good coaching skills, a relentless focus on the quality of interaction between students, and a set of team tools, including contracts, rubrics, and exercise. But the payoff is noticeable. Once students form teams over an extended period and begin to collaborate well, they learn more, get better at teaching others, produce more powerful products, and enjoy the process. Here are ten principles that can help you design high performance teams:

• Examine individual strengths within collaborative context. Teams form through an intentional process. One starting point is to have members begin by sharing their individual strengths. Who will need help on certain aspects of the task ahead? Use simple tools, such as a basic Myers-Briggs test, to have students individually assess themselves. Have them share results using respectful communication. In this early phase, always debrief the process. Were we fair? Straightforward? Inclusive? Are we on the way to becoming a team? The goal is not to judge differences, but open up the discussion so students make room for everyone to participate.

• Speak the language of commitment and character. Groups fail because members don’t pull their weight, aren’t accountable, and don’t really collaborate at all. Have a thorough discussion about the meaning of teamwork. What do students see in their sports experience that translates? Have them grapple with the question: How will we, as a team and individually, hold ourselves accountable for deadlines, shared products, and overall quality?

• Set the rules. In the adult world, full participation in the team is the expectation (although not always the reality.) Students, however, need support for learning to be a good team member. After a thorough preview of who we are as a team, have members agree on norms or a contract, define their roles, and design specific remedies for situations in which members do not live up to agreements. For students who seem incapable of participating in a team, you might have to make special arrangements. But this should be the exception, not the norm.

• Prepare teams to fall apart. The old formula for ‘forming, storming, norming, and performing’ is a great comfort to anyone working in a team or on a project—because it is a constant. Teams may start off feeling inspired and unified; by week two, personalities emerge, agreements get broken, and—suddenly—everything’s off. Prepare your teams for the process; help them notice when productivity is breaking down. Reserve time in the teaching schedule for teams to sort out differences, regroup, reassess, and renorm.

• See conflict as opportunity. No one likes conflict, but this is the exact point when students in teams learn the ways of non-judgment and conflict resolution they will need in the future. Teach the language of constructive feedback and the golden rule of good listening: Are you listening—or just waiting to respond? Often, you can head off issues by having teams practice this at the beginning of a project.

• Stress design and prototype thinking. After teams become cohesive, the focus turns to work quality. First, make sure teams understand why they are a team. Their goal is to mind-meld themselves into a high-functioning set of individuals focused on creating and crafting the best product they can. Allow time for brainstorming. Encourage failure as a step to eventual success. Give them time to mull, share, and redo. Make sure every idea goes through the filter of feedback.

• Schedule critical thinking. A very powerful training tool is to use protocols, such as a critical friends protocol, visible thinking routines, or other tools for inquiry, to encourage and teach focused communication that uses the vocabulary and terms of the discipline. Early in the team process, teach them to respond to ideas with a “I like…I wonder…I suggest” approach. Once they have the basics, mix and match. Break the teams into pairs to come up with an idea, then pair-share. Have teams present ideas to each other, then debrief. Keep it in motion and, as they proceed, expect teams to get better at questioning and constructive feedback.

• Reward innovation. Teams are designed to produce top quality work, but often they exceed that standard. The team process is inherently creative—and they very well might deliver a product that earns an ‘A” but goes beyond the requirements of the assignment. In our standardized system, we desperately need a way to recognize and acknowledge out of the box thinking. I suggest using individual and team assessment rubrics that contain a breakthrough column. This is a blank column that rewards innovation and invites inspiration.

• Use online collaborative tools. Collaboration and invention have moved online, but the same high performance standards are in effect. Teams should be able to show rich interactions, critical inquiry, and clear communication in their online collaboration. They should hold each other accountable. In this case, teachers need to be part of collaborative teams by being online as much as students. No more hiding behind statements like, “I don’t know much about Edmodo, but my students are really good at it.”

• Reflect and move on. Before teams disperse, close the circle of learning. Allow a class period to debrief and reflect on the experience. Reinforce high level collaboration by using a formal debrief process. What did we learn? How did we function as a team? What gaps were there? What did we learn individually and collectively? How was the quality of our work, and how do we improve it?

Thom Markham is a psychologist, school redesign consultant, and the author of the Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert tools for inquiry and innovation for K-12 educators. To download the tools mentioned in the blog, go to the PBL tools page on the website, www.thommarkham.com. If you can’t find what you need, contact him at thom@thommarkham.com.

Recently a colleague asked me a question that made me pause and reflect. “How successful is PBL, really?” He’s an advocate for PBL, like I am, so the question wasn’t designed to nitpick or argue against PBL. He was reflecting on his own experience, and asking if mine had been similar.

I began to look back on the nearly 175 workshops I’ve presented and the large number of schools I’ve coached that have taken on PBL in hopes of changing the culture of teaching and learning. All of them wanted to move toward more depth and inquiry, and away from direct instruction, pacing guides, coverage, and the general lethargy that pervades schools as they labor under outmoded rules of engagement. Most of all, they hoped to sustain PBL year over year to power their school into 21^st century learning.

How successful have they been? There are two answers to the question. For schools designed from the ground up to support integrated instruction, an inquiry-based culture, and a relentless focus on 21^st century skills, the answer is clear: Extraordinarily successful. When the organizational philosophy supports student-driven inquiry, the natural outcome is great projects. These schools are the lights across the land—the Envision Schools, High Tech High, or the New Technology High Schools—that have become well known , as well a growing number of similar schools in every state. The students at these schools perform at world class levels, in some cases leading the world.

I’ve worked with many teachers, principals and superintendents who have toured leading-edge schools. They return to their own campus, wanting the same results. So they plunge into PBL. How successful are they? The answer, unfortunately: Not very.

Mostly, the schools start well. A core number of teachers implement projects that begin to show results. Students get excited; teachers feel satisfied; principals report a turning point. But that’s the first year. By the second year, typically after a strong start in the fall, PBL fades. The effort is not sustained. Why? It’s the well known rubber band effect. The industrial system can stretch to accommodate new viewpoints, but over time the constraints—mainly in-the-box thinking about tests scores and the lack of a collaborative culture committed to change—take their toll. Everyone settles back down into the routine.

This same dynamic, by the way, now drives the debate over the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Will they transform schools or become a new and improved laundry list? Here, the lessons of PBL are instructive. More than anything, it tells me that grafting an inquiry-based culture onto an industrial framework is an impossible dream, unless the effort is accompanied by a innovative focus on organizational change and high performance. This is a holistic endeavor, requiring a crucial brew of synergistic elements that work together to create a seamless system for sustainable change.

What are the key ingredients? For those schools that did transition successfully to PBL, I can think of six essentials that enabled them to power through tough barriers and emerge at the other end of the tunnel. I suspect the list for the CCSS will be the same:

• Extraordinary Leadership. Leadership means everyone. It helps to have a Principal who is on fire about new forms of education, and whose focus is relentless. But the distinguishing marks between administrators and teachers disappear in a school trying to reorganize itself. No one is an expert on the 21^st century yet; everyone is a teacher and learner. That means exploring the why together, committing to experimentation, and sharing observations constantly. The most important attitude leaders can communicate is: Let’s problem solve this. If leadership doesn’t convey possibility, teachers eventually walk the halls with a deflated look. The tone of I’ve been here before creeps in. PBL may last a few more months, but it’s gone off life support.

• Collaborative Culture. The best activity at the beginning of the PBL journey? Sit in a circle and talk. Embed the core mission in each person’s mind and heart. Agree on steps. Hold each other accountable. Be kind, because it’s hard work. And then move the collaboration forward by getting on Edmodo or Google+ and start talking to one another. If the school schedule doesn’t provide collaboration time, change the schedule. Start where you need to start—and remember that most problems originate upstream. You have to go to the headwaters for solutions. The takeaway here is that redoing your school is too big a job for just a few minds. As Machiavelli once said, “The times are too big for our brains.” That applies here.

• Tools and Methods. PBL is really two different things. It’s a philosophy of student-focused inquiry that incorporates skillful behaviors and authentic work. It’s also a discrete method, a set of procedures and tools that operationalize projects into powerful experiences that can be replicated, documented, and assessed. By now, these methods have been field tested and refined; they work. To use PBL methods, all teachers should have the opportunity to get to know the tools. (Just as a note: the CCSS and PBL intersect here, but it is the philosophy of PBL that drives the new standards. Not everything needs to be a project.)

• A system wide commitment to reflection. I’ll call this the ‘failure before success’ approach. System-wide, the leadership must build a recurring, reflection process into the schedule that allows for capturing learning and successes. The reflection must be protocol-driven, not a discussion about how ‘great that project was.’ Take time to look deeply at the outcomes. Notice differences in student behaviors. Share the debriefs broadly across the staff, including different departments.

• Agreements on testing. Testing is like the smog in Beijing: It’s in the air and it’s not going away. It’s such a pervasive discussion these days that it acts like an anchor to keep PBL from moving forward. Sit down together and find a common message on testing. Figure out a way to keep it in the conversation without making it so prominent. If your school is doing more projects, but life stops mid-March to prepare for testing, then be able to explain that to yourselves and to your students. The competing demands of test results and API scores versus inquiry-based education must be resolved through an elegant synthesis that puts both in proper perspective. Take time at a staff meeting to discuss this challenge; then craft an elevator speech for leadership (that’s everyone again) to use with parents, students, and among each other.

• Critical Mass. Here’s the basic problem with sustaining PBL at your school: 40% of the staff agrees with you, 40% disagrees, and 20% doesn’t think about it. The goal for sustainability is to develop critical mass—a core of committed teachers who tip the balance and set the direction for the school. Every good PBL effort starts with the champions, the few who by way of foresight or dissatisfaction enter the fray first. They can take a school through year one, but after that the process must be intentionally fed by relentless marketing. Take every opportunity to discuss and debrief projects. Show case projects to parents and the community. Always reflect and be open to refinement. Set up critical friends groups in your PLC’s. And, finally, adopt the mindset of a start-up in Silicon Valley: It will take you three years to get off the ground and start flying. It’s an exciting journey, but a long haul.

In the long term, there is just one answer to the problem of school safety: More love. The short term solution, on the other hand, lies in the unhealthy mix of force, fear, guns, security, locks, and other devices meant to barricade our children from a small, but obviously lethal, subset of the population.

I’ll leave the short-term answers to parents and politicians. Instead, let’s support advances in education that take us closer to the ultimate goal of raising, nurturing, and educating children who feel psychologically safe. That, really, is the sole purpose of whole child education.

The formula is simple. Feeling safe is the central feature of feeling secure. Secure people do not feel afraid, except in the face of dire circumstances. In the absence of fear, positive emotions bloom. When positivity reigns, the brain responds by becoming more expansive, creative, and open to ideas. Emotions stabilize. The terrible effects of isolation, loneliness, depression, withdrawal, and other outcomes of emotional dysfunction disappear or are resolved. Many fewer people feel compelled to murder a child. Those who do receive compassionate help from a greatly enlarged safety net of understanding, emotionally mature adults.

The foundation for this transformation is love. However, I don’t mean a kind of greeting card, Valentine’s version of love, as in, “Oh, aren’t little children just the sweetest little souls? I just love all of them!” Rather, I suggest that it’s overdue to recognize the hard science informing us that care counts. It’s time, really, to get out of our own way by integrating the most recent evidence-based findings about positive emotional development into schools and make healthy emotional development the centerpiece of learning.

Until society is willing to turn that corner, unsafety will plague us. With that in mind, here’s my list of simple ideas for educators to embrace that reflect the science of the second decade of the 21^st-century. These findings point us toward designing schools as havens of safety and seedbeds for stable individuals who can be beacons of love throughout society and the global village:

Emotions and thinking are not separate. The 200-year misconception that emotions and cognition are separate has been disproven. The brain is an integrated organ that processes thoughts and emotions simultaneously. In fact, positive emotions help power the frontal cortex. Rather than an academic downside, a greater focus on the emotional health of young people will result in better performance, particularly in areas like 21^st century skills and critical thinking. See Barbara Frederickson’s book on Positivity for the evidence.

The brain changes with the culture. There is no greater story at the moment that brain plasticity. Neurons change every millisecond, and the neural pathways work as fast as they can (and they’re fast) to adapt to new surroundings and the incoming culture. Everything about schools should be reviewed in this light. What messages do the hallways and the classrooms send to the brain? What is the atmosphere and climate of the school? Is nurturing the norm or the exception?

Let go of the brain. Now for the flip side. Not everything occurs from the neck up. Recent science shows intricate connections between the heart, gut, and the brain. Fear registers in the heart before the brain, and then communicates via the vagal nerves. The body acts as a sensory organ for safety—and the brain follow the lead. More fear equals less activity in the prefrontal cortex, the favorite part of the brain for any teacher (that’s where attention and learning take place.) In other words, holism is a reality, not a wish.

Emotions and physiology are one conversation. When you see a child in emotional distress, that means the child’s body is not working optimally. For example, stress is an over-mobilization of the natural resources of the body (too many hormones, at abnormal levels, and a high octane sympathetic nervous response.) The good news is that by calming the physiology of the body, we also alter emotional states.

Emotions are good, not bad. Research into positive emotions is shaping up as the next big advance in science. The old model of emotions, focused solely on survival mode, is a legacy from the caveman days. We’ve evolved; now science has confirmed that humans who generate and experience emotions such as contentment, joy, inspiration, and love respond by becoming more fulfilled, higher achieving people.

Relationships change emotional states. The connections between us and others alter emotional states. The mind, in fact, is not just within us any longer; it’s somewhere in that space between us, as Daniel Siegel in Mindsight shows us. The constant interplay takes place subconsciously, either through mirror neurons in the brain or energetic exchange. Regardless of the mechanism, it’s now clear that humans communicate in real time, at all times, on an emotional level. Every message from teachers, conveyed through facial expression, body language, words, or hidden assumption, carries weight.

Stress and challenge differ. Love does not preclude challenge, meaning you can still test children to figure out what they’ve learned. But it does tell us that removing the unnecessary stress of learning is a good thing. Constant testing invokes stress; a few meaningful exams pitched as a way to understand the gaps in your knowledge stirs up challenge. Here’s one clue to the difference: Stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, causing the armpits to perspire and one set of muscles in the face to contort; challenge brings a blended response of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems—and a genuine smile.

Mindfulness works. Whether you choose mindfulness, meditation, or heart-focused breathing, they all work. Each dissolves stress and liberates a calm, safe feeling that leads to positive health and better learning. It would be interesting to see the results on high stakes testing if every school day in America began with a five-minute meditation!

Love, compassion, and gratitude make you smarter. Some of the most powerful research recently shows the impact of gratitude on brain function and physiology in the body. Love calms, and the simple, yet profound, act of appreciation seems to have forceful consequences. As we move forward in schools and society, it is the job of adults to create a world in which children have ample reason to feel appreciative. If that happens, we’ll all feel safe.

Thom Markham is a psychologist and author of the Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert tools for inquiry and innovation for K-12 educators, and the forthcoming book, Redefining Smart: The return of the heart. Download Tools for PBL on his website, www.thommarkham.com or contact him at thom@thommarkham.com.

The debates go on about value-added ratings for teachers, teacher quality, teacher effectiveness, teacher tenure, teacher unions, and teacher this and that. Many powerful forces in society have taken aim at teachers and schools, dwelling on mediocrity, resistance to change, an easy work day, and outdated methods. In no small way, it’s been open season on the education profession.

I share concerns about the adequacy of the teaching profession. But I always am brought back to one constant about teachers: Mostly, they love children. Sometimes I see teachers as more of a problem than a solution, but even in those who frustrate me, or disagree, or prefer the safety of the old ways, a certain light and commitment shines through. They have put their lives, their working days, and their ambitions to work on behalf of young people. They believe.

Never has this more apparent than in Newtown, where teachers defended students with their own lives. How many of our elected officials, the critics who can’t seem to find sufficient funding for schools, or work on behalf of offering teachers solid middle class wages, or imagine any model of measuring teacher effectiveness other than test scores, would stand between children and a shooter?

Every discussion about teachers should begin with one fact: In over 100,000 schools, private and public, this nation is honored to have a corps of people who go to work every day to make society a better place now—and a generation from now—by trying to figure out what makes children tick and what they need to learn. Very few people can make this claim. And until many more of us—including those who move money for a living or exploit workers overseas or persist in rancorous attacks on American education—step up and show that they are willing to do as much as teachers, its time for teachers to stay proud, stiffen their spine, and say to all: Care counts, and that’s what makes me an effective teacher.

STEM education—the focus on science, technology, engineering, and math—is rapidly becoming a national priority. Having helped start several successful STEM schools, I like the trend. But as I read the national conversation about STEM, I see educators falling into the same traps that keep education from truly becoming a 21^st century enterprise.

One sign of the confusion is the newest acronym, STEAM, a push to include the arts in STEM programs. I like this trend, also. But it misses the point. Art and design thinking permeate the adult workspace these days; similarly, every class and program should be partly aimed at teaching a design and problem solving approach. It’s takes imaginative thinking to design a better widget; so does solving the problems of the Middle East.

The larger issue with STEAM, however, is that it reinforces an old notion: That STEM is a collection of math, engineering, and science classes that students ‘take.’ Line up the required classes in the proper sequence, graduate more students with additional math and science seat time, revive the science fair, schedule in an honors class in molecular genetics, and from that emerges a STEM program. Add an Art class down the hall in 5^th period—and call it a STEAM program.

As I’ve written previously, most people don’t know the history of STEM education. The term was first coined in the 1890’s by the Committee of Ten at Harvard, charged with the task of reforming an agrarian school system. In their view, STEM described the attributes of a good industrial school system that would raise the standards of excellence for modern students.

Whether we choose STEM or STEAM, if we remain wedded to the view that school is simply a collection of classes and activities, I believe we’ll get the same result envisioned in 1890:  Better education for an industrial world. STEM will take its place as a place marker for more math and engineering classes. But if we want to turn STEM into a transformative idea that can fuel fundamental change in schools, I think the following ideas are important:

Use PBL as the primary teaching method. Great STEM education arises out of the process of teaching and learning, not coverage of a specific curriculum. The most powerful STEM programs adopt an inquiry-based, student-centered, skill-driven approach to teaching and learning. Most use high quality project based learning to achieve their curriculum outcomes. The Common Core is taking all subjects in this direction; but I believe that STEM courses will be among the first beneficiaries.

Make STEM and innovation indistinguishable. Thinking in terms of STEAM isn’t necessary if a STEM program values and teaches innovation. I italicize that sentence because many values we hold in education never get explicitly taught. Use creativity rubrics with breakthrough categories, teach students to follow a design rubric, turn student teams into peer evaluators, allow time for prototyping, failure, reflection, and redesign—all these train students in innovative thinking and spur creativity. Of course, as the Committee of Ten recognized, this is good training for life as well.

Don’t confuse technology with STEM education. Hopefully, we have matured on this subject. In the early 2000’s, STEM programs started up with all the digital, gee-whiz tools available. Then programs failed. The reason: Technology is a tool for good education, but not a substitute for the personal skills necessary to be a good investigator or competent engineer, such as attention to detail, willingness to redraft, and perseverance in pursuit of perfection. At its heart, STEM is a way of systematically examining the world and identifying critical elements that lead to great change or improvement. This is a human factors subject, and good STEM programs start with building a culture of engagement, excellence, mastery, and effective collaboration prior to turning students loose on their iPads.

Attend to core content. Certain disciplines rely on argument and the exchange or development of deep ideas. STEM courses are not exempt, but they usually have more rigorous core content requirements and greater cognitive demand. Even a 9^th grade Biology class, for example, introduces more new vocabulary than a Spanish 1 class. Good STEM programs blend inquiry with traditional teaching and core content methodology. They also sequence and scaffold the balance between student-centered inquiry and adult-facilitated instruction through the grade levels, expecting their 12^th graders to be far more inquiry-driven and self-managing in terms of information than 9^th graders. The goal is to have STEM students exit with an excellent command of the material, plus the skills to apply it, use it, and demonstrate it.

Trade in groups for teams and cohorts. Helping students move beyond FaceBook posts of their faves is essential to educating young people to work as effective collaborators. We can start by letting go of outdated concepts of group work and cooperative learning, and teaching the values and language of teams. Use contracts, peer collaboration rubrics, individual work ethic rubrics, and protocols to train and assess students on their ability to create a quality product through teamwork, as well as teach them about the accountability and commitment required for teams to operate at a high level. For STEM students, who may end up working in medical and engineering design teams, this training is vital. To give students practice in collaborative communication, as well as promote individual achievement within a team environment, have students form cohorts that help them track and refine their individual products during a project. Cohorts rely on careful analysis, precise feedback, and shared observation. This will make for better learners and products—and better scientists

Welcome the challenge of STEM. I have yet to see a good STEM program compatible with the existing rules and structures of traditional schooling. STEM teachers, if they’re doing their job, should bump up against grading systems, scheduling issues, teacher evaluations, curriculum requirements, collaboration time, graduation requirements, course sequencing mandates, pacing guides, and just about everything else associated with industrial methods. A good STEM system reflects the operating values of a tech-driven, design-oriented, can-do, entrepreneurial society. Schools can get there, and STEM can help.

Thom Markham is a PBL consultant and author of the Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert tools for inquiry and innovation for K-12 educators. Download Tools for PBL on his website, www.thommarkham.com or for more information on STEM contact him at thom@thommarkham.com.

The news coming in about neuroplasticity—the finding that the brain changes dramatically in response to experience—continues to amaze scientists and intrigue the general public. But the news hasn’t yet impacted education, partly because the gap between teaching methods and neuroscience can’t yet be bridged, and partly because our profession, though relying on the brain more than any other, can’t quite fit a standardized curriculum into a new paradigm that has made obsolete the old view of the brain as hard wired and immutable, or even as the repository of a fixed IQ.

However, maybe we need to take a leap of faith and make best guesses about the relationship between brain function and classroom instruction. My guess is this: Based on preliminary findings in neuroscience, I suggest that PBL fits perfectly with what we can surmise about encouraging optimal brain function.

Just to clarify, I’m not talking about cognitive studies showing that working memory—the ability to manage facts and short term responses—can be marginally improved with practice. These studies aim us at better test taking, but little else. The real prize is increasing creativity, problem solving, and fluid intelligence, which is the ability to adapt to new experience. This ability to innovate in response to environment, in fact, seems to be the main message of today’s brain science. It’s what we do as humans. For example, imagine our Neanderthal ancestors around the fire 200,000 years ago. Somewhere in their brains lurked the ability to do AP Calculus, program an Android phone, or parse a presidential debate. What’s lurking in the minds of the 1.5 billion children alive today that can help them manage their adult world? Inquiring teachers should want to know.

So, teaching students in a brain-friendly way is crucial. Here are reasons that I believe PBL supports the brain:

Rich experiences create dense neural networks. Of course, walking alone down a deserted street at 3 a.m. in a dangerous city is a rich experience, especially if you’re being followed. But in the classroom, PBL is designed to offer an educationally rich experience: A complex problem to be solved; multiple inputs and potential solutions; a team-based environment that relies on extensive collaboration; adult interactions; and exhibitions that stretch students. Contrast that with coverage, front of the room instruction, and even low level activities aimed at solving known problems. In workshops, I urge teachers to aim for the top of the new Bloom’s Taxonomy, the sections focused on critical inquiry and creativity. The brain is drawn to those sections as well.

Neural development depends on feedback loops. The brain has an intelligent system for improving itself. Neural development takes place in areas of the brain most useful to solving the problem at hand. Most of the research these days focuses on understanding the pre-frontal cortex—the site of execution, planning, and problem solving. This is a tricky area, because if you present a problem to a student that is too difficult, it activates the hind brain and the stress response. But an appropriate, engaging, manageable challenge is exactly what the brain likes. The brain, in fact, loves novelty. PBL is an excellent method for inviting novel solutions to authentic problems—a combination that feeds the brain and speeds connections.

Risk and failure feeds the brain. Neuroplasticity tells us that neurons form alliances, hook up, unhook, and reform their networks in milliseconds, always on the hunt for the right response or a new solution. In fact, it seems apparent that without challenge, or in the presence of low level facts, the brain gets bored. Working memory is crucial to us on a daily basis, but if that’s all we used, life would be a monochrome. On the other hand, using a design mentality, with the constant goal of getting better, more thoughtful, and finding more elegant solutions, is second nature to the brain. Quality PBL makes failure, risk, and improvement an integral part of the process of learning. No wonder that, with PBL, teachers see extremely high levels of student engagement.

Integrating thinking and feeling fits with the design of the brain. The old view that cognition—the ability to think—is separate from the ability to feel is not supported by current neuroscience. The brain operates as in integrated organ, processing emotions and thinking together in the amygdale, limbic system, and other parts of the brain still under investigation. Significant evidence also exists that the heart drives brain function through nervous connections to the hind brain and cortex. This is close to the frontiers of science, so we don’t know much yet as to the exact mechanisms. But it is well established that love, care, and personal mentorship increase educational achievement. In PBL, this is critical. Basically, a teacher won’t get performance in a PBL environment without creating a culture of care and connection. In my view, this sets up the brain for learning. Without the care, the brain says, “No.”

The power of reflection. Studies show that mindfulness increases neural density as much as a multi-stimulus environment. This tells us that the brain doesn’t just respond to massive amounts of information or a super-interesting problem; in some way, it also benefits from stillness and a meditative look at its own performance. In quality PBL, reflection is critical. This includes reflective pauses in the process of a project, as students review and assesses their progress in solving a problem, as well as more in depth reflection at the end of a project. The end of the project reflection encourages students to power down and probe their development. Evidently, the brain thinks this is a good idea, too.

Thom Markham is a psychologist and author of the Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert tools for inquiry and innovation for K-12 educators. Download Tools for PBL on his website, www.thommarkham.com or contact him at thom@thommarkham.com.

Master teachers are usually measured by their ability to deliver high quality instruction and manage classrooms so that every child learns. These basics apply to project based learning (PBL) as well, but I have found that successful PBL teachers must possess a more diverse—and demanding—set of skills to make project based work effective.

I call these skills the seven essentials for PBL teachers. The skills can be parsed separately, as I’m going to do, but they only work synergistically. Designing and executing engaging projects that move students to a new level of learning and self-awareness—which should be the goal of every project—derives from seeing PBL as a set of moving parts that mesh to create a powerful experience for students. Partly, PBL is an instructional process powered by teacher knowledge; partly, it’s a facilitated process that draws heavily on people management skills; and partly, it’s an intuitive process that relies on open communication between students and teachers.

Some of the essential PBL skills can be taught or learned, and some, frankly, are more personality driven. But every PBL teacher should think about becoming skillful in these seven areas:

1. Know world-class PBL methodology. Project based learning and ‘projects’ are two different worlds. Over the last decade, PBL teachers in many countries have developed high quality methods that work. The methods begin with organizing a project around a central, vital, and engaging question, moving students through a deliberate process that requires them to think, inquire, share, reflect, and perfect their products and reasoning, and concluding with a meaningful demonstration of their learning that surfaces content acquisition, conceptual understanding, and application of 21^st century skills. Getting results from PBL is not serendipitous; it comes from using thoughtful, replicable methods.

1. Create a culture of care. You might prefer to call this a ‘student-centered’ culture, but I believe that the underlying dynamic that drives better performance in PBL is a personalized classroom culture in which every student feels known, respected, and communicated with. This isn’t just a nice thing to do; it’s the known result of years of youth development research that demonstrates that a culture of care allows you, as the teacher, to assume a mentor role. The mentor role allows you to both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ students through the ups and downs of the PBL process. If you’re not in that role, you will find it difficult to move from a classroom manager to a project manager, a crucial shift for successful PBL.

1. Shift from teacher to coach. In a traditional classroom, human variation is muted by rows, a standardized lesson, and the teacher’s ability to keep an eye on every student. In PBL, personalities bloom, tendencies—good or disruptive—emerge, and students often confuse the freedom to inquire with the license to mess around. The messiness can be cured only by coaching individual students to perform better—by speaking to their strengths, helping them see their challenges, and returning at all times to the standards and norms for top performance. In a traditional classroom, the end product is paramount. In PBL, the process of learning assumes equal weight as an outcome. Success on the journey often entails what I term the art of ‘ruthless compassion.’ Give every student maximum support; require every student to perform at their best.

1. Use the tools of people management. Like the methods for world class PBL, a set of tools has been developed, largely in industries outside of education, that help people stay on task, achieve goals, and work harmoniously. In PBL, nearly everything you do has people management ramifications. This begins with norms and performance expectations, agreements on behavior, and clear directions. But other elements contribute just as much: (1) A clearly stated Driving Question that captures imagination and starts the project in the right direction; (2) a consistent explanation of the why behind the project; (3) an air of experiment, problem solving, and discovery; and (4) a promise that, at the end of the project, the results will matter to someone besides the teacher or the test designers.

1. Make teamwork productive. PBL is a group based form of learning. But an essential step is to move from the language of groups to the more powerful vocabulary of teamwork and to teach team members to think deeply together. To achieve high quality work in PBL, there can be no, “Well, she’s sick today and she has all the stuff and we don’t know what to do.” Or, “I did all the work and I got a ‘C’ because my group slacked off?” In teams, everyone is committed to each other’s success and everyone assumes accountability. PBL teachers have developed tools to spur this process, including work ethic and collaboration rubrics, contracts, and bonus point systems to reward initiative and empathetic behavior. If you’re not using these tools, you’re not taking advantage of methods that work. And, most important, if your teams don’t work, neither will your projects.

1. Know how to teach and assess 21^st century skills. PBL is the best method we have for teaching students how to solve complex problems. But to get to a meaningful solution, students need to master the skills of collaboration and self-management. And, to show us how they arrived at a conclusion or created a product, they need to communicate effectively. That’s a short version of why PBL is central to teaching 21^st century skills. But PBL teachers face a challenge: Nothing has been standardized in regard to teaching or assessing these skills. Solid performance rubrics have been developed, but are rarely used school wide. I urge PBL teachers at every school to band together and agree on rubrics and methods for assessing 21^st century skills (this is a prime topic for PLC work), as well as sharing ideas on how to teach these skills.

1. Value reflection and revision. Finally, educators can learn from the slow food movement. High quality PBL requires a different time frame and expectation, primarily because problem solving is not a linear, 50-minute period experience. This means not just being flexible (one of the prime qualities of the successful PBL teacher), but also making reflection and revision, in pursuit of excellence, central to the process of learning. This takes several forms. First, during a project, encourage drafts and prototypes, then structure time for peer debriefs, jig saws, or other disciplined ways for students to share and exchange ideas. At the end of a project, reflect and debrief thoroughly. Make excellence a standard for your projects.

Thom Markham is a psychologist and school redesign consultant. He is the principal author of the Handbook for Project Based Learning, published by the Buck Institute for Education, and the author of the Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert tools for inquiry and innovation for K-12 educators. Download the Top Ten Tools for PBL on his website, www.thommarkham.com or contact him at thom@thommarkham.com.

Recently, a 7^th grade teacher told me a story that thrilled her. She had passed a team of four students in the quad at lunchtime and overheard them having a spirited debate about what they had learned in their latest project in her class. They were exchanging cogent ideas, using the vocabulary of the discipline, and listening carefully to each other’s arguments. That was all the evidence she needed to know that her project had met its goals.

If you’re a PBL teacher, using high quality project based learning methods should lead to these kinds of results. PBL promotes curiosity, purposeful engagement, and—quite often—a noticeable shift in student attitudes. Students begin to demonstrate that they care about their learning—and they talk about it.

But it is also a fact that often PBL teachers feel dissatisfied with the intellectual outcomes of a project. I believe the reason behind this is that we as educators are in the early stages of learning how to use teamwork to achieve high performance. This is an issue in PBL, which relies on teams to solve problems, but it’s also a challenge for all 21^st century educators. In today’s world, collaborative groups in schools must step up to meet the requirements of the global age, a process in which teams routinely focus on a problem, design solutions, and navigate differences to achieve a result, with members using a variety of thinking tools to brainstorm and improve their ideas, and relying on evidence, facts, persuasive arguments, and knowledge of the subject to succeed. We haven’t yet built these new skills into team routines in the classroom.

I also believe that promoting quality interactions among student teams has a larger purpose: Preparing students for the rise of a networked, collective intelligence. Whether it’s putting a ‘like’ on a Facebook post, retweeting an idea, or blogging an opinion and receiving feedback, it is now the norm for individuals to bring their singular gifts to a communal discussion, assimilate information from multiple sources, and sample each other’s ideas before passing judgment or deciding a course of action. We’re all getting smarter together—and this is the environment in which our students will come to adulthood.

This means that it is vital that educators help students move from a Facebook culture to a thinking Facebook culture. The ultimate promise of good teamwork is that young people may learn collective ways to think more deeply about their world and design a better future. In fact, I’ll pause and put the term ‘depth’ in the context of another global age trend: Our knowledge of brain plasticity. What we know is that in the presence of attention and purposeful engagement, the brain is working very hard. Thousands of synapses every second are formed and reformed. The goal of teaching teams to think is to take advantage of the brain as a dynamic enterprise by having students exchange ideas in ways that promote a high level of engagement with each other, require the intentional use of appropriate terms and vocabulary, and challenge inattention and mediocrity.

This is a work in progress for all of us, but here are several ideas on how to make teamwork more effective. If you have other methods that are working, I’d love to hear from you.

Move to the vocabulary of teams. We’re doing much more collaborative learning in schools, but the group work strategies of the last twenty years are aimed at cooperating, not necessarily at quality of thinking. A good first step is to move from the terminology of groups to the more powerful vocabulary of teams. The concept of a team—a focused, committed set of individuals operating as a cohesive unit in search of a solution or attempting innovative thinking—raises the bar by replacing the old notion of having children circle a desk and exchange information with the idea that students team for a purpose.

Use a three step process to train your teams. Moving from groups to high performing teams is a three step process. The first step is to establish a collaborative culture by setting norms for teams and scaffolding essential skills like listening, eye contact, body posture, voice tone, and empathic responses. (These are best taught early in the year, before launching a full scale project.)

The second step is to form your teams intentionally. Balance your teams based on individual strengths and challenges, a profile of their creativity or critical thinking skills, or their personality traits. With younger students, this works best if teachers choose team members. But older high school students can be taught how to choose their own teammates—a valuable lesson in self-awareness and self-management.

The third step is to use PBL team tools. Three basics tools will do the job: A high quality collaboration rubric; a work ethic rubric; and a team contract that defines their operating agreements.

Grade teamwork. Teamwork should not be a serendipitous byproduct of a project. You can mix and match between grading individual students in a team, overall team performance, or a mix of both, but teamwork must be graded and show up in the final project grade. Depending on the time of year, age of students, and your goals in establishing solid teams, the grade percentage can change with each project.

Challenge your teams. We treat 21^st century skills, such as communication and collaboration, as isolates. But at a deep level they emanate from one place—from some inner dialogue, vision, stimulation, exchange, wondering, surprise, validation, and joyful recognition of a new idea. A new idea may start with an individual, but we know they gain exponential power in the presence of a team. The kick start for this process is an engaging, powerful challenge that liberates ideas and draws teams together for the common purpose of solving an important problem. Without this challenge, you won’t get far on deep thinking.

Use protocols for thinking. A variety of tools exist to help teams learn to inquire, contribute, comment, share, respond, listen, and revise ideas. Use the visible thinking tools developed at Harvard, protocols that force attentiveness and careful responses, or team to team and peer to peer exchanges, with a clear goal and prompts, at every opportunity. Make the students do the heavy lifting and hard thinking. Have them track and report out on their discussions.

Create a design mentality. Drafting, critiquing, and revising are what teams do best. From the beginning of a project, expect students to think in engineering terms: As designers of a prototype that needs to be reviewed and tested for quality and specifications. The product may be a written piece, a media presentation, a drawing, or a gas-powered boat. It doesn’t matter. The objective of teams, in Ron Berger’s words, is to build a culture of craftsmanship.

Use the power of reflection. A project is never over until a one to two day reflection takes place after the products are delivered or the exhibition is complete, with probing questions to be answered by the student teams regarding their performance, quality of work, and overall learning. This is an excellent time to use thinking tools to explore good thinking—a proven metacognitive approach. Your goal is to help the teams move through a two-stage process: From the So What? (What did we learn?) to the Now What? (How can we improve, think deeper, and move forward?).

Meeting Common Core Standards requires more emphasis on inquiry and project based learning (PBL.) Increasingly, in the 2012 -2013 school year, teachers will be asked to design and implement high quality, student-focused projects that help students go deeper into subjects, think harder, and perform better.

Teachers with experience in ‘doing projects’ often feel that they know how to do this, but delivering high quality PBL that yields ‘visible greatness,’ in the words of a teacher I talked with recently, is not easy work. Effective PBL begins with mastering a design methodology that combines discovery with accountability. After that, the power of PBL is harnessed when teachers employ a set of tools and principles aimed at engaging students in a powerful learning experience—the kind that directs them toward deeper thinking, and that often permanently shifts their behaviors and attitudes in a positive direction. That’s the standard we now seek in our schools.

That standard can be met through PBL, but not without overcoming certain pitfalls and gaps in PBL by letting go of ingrained practices in education that actually retard deeper thinking. What should you look for, either to use or avoid?

First, I’ve found that high quality projects begin well before students ever see them. This is the stage in which you are conceptualizing a project and working on a design idea that will engage students in solving an important, relevant, open ended problem. What do those problems look like, and how do you get there? Here are ten tips:

1. Start with a challenge, not a predetermined outcome. Letting go of predetermined outcomes sounds simple, but industrial education is built on the premise that we teach students what we believe they ought to know. That’s why we have standards. But PBL aims at getting students to know and apply the standards. If you know the answer to the problem already, it’s not a good project idea. Here’s a good test: Can the answer be Googled?

1. Think of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, which emphasizes creating and evaluating, rather than remembering and understanding, is a helpful tool in the early stages of project planning. Your goal is not ‘awareness’ or ‘recall’ or even ‘analyzing’ in the academic sense; your goal is to direct students into the deeper domains of learning, in which they struggle with ideas, draft conclusions, weigh alternatives, and create solutions. Stay away from project ideas that result in students listing, defining, or categorizing. If the products of the project sound too conventional to you, they probably are.

1. Commit to inquiry. As you plan out the teaching and learning on a project schedule, commit to keeping the inquiry alive. It’s easy to default to teaching the curriculum rather than allowing students to think for themselves. Use lots of triads, pairs, and teams to get students to brainstorm and trade solutions. Given time constraints, this is tricky territory for PBL, so you probably will need to decide how to balance direct instruction with think time. But err on the side of thinking, and as you plan out the schedule, allow the time necessary for students to work their way through a complex problem.

1. Refine the DQ. The challenge needs to be captured in a solid Driving Question for the project. This question is not an essential or thematic question; it’s designed to tell students what they need to learn in the project. At the end of the project, they will have answered this question, either through the products they prepare or the reflection at the end of the project. Getting to the right question is hard work. Think of it as an editing process. You’re trying to identify exactly what you want out of this project. Often, the right question emerges when you investigate the purpose of the project. Recently, I discussed a cell structure project with a 9^th grade biology teacher. Once he realized that the purpose was not to teach the parts of the cell (that’s Googleable), he moved onto how the structure of a cell compares to a virus, and how students can use this knowledge to probe diseases and their cures.

1. Beware the PowerPoint and the tri-fold brochure. It’s hard to design projects with products that matter. The usual suspects—such as a PowerPoint or a brochure—rarely invigorate students. Your first objective is to plan for products that mirror what professionals would do. For example, in a recent health/fitness project, students design a Personal Fitness plan that matched the form used by a local health club. Similarly, in Biology, students designed a zoo, and in Algebra, students created a chart that matched school attendance to District revenue—and placed the chart in the front hall for all students to see every day (attendance went up.)

1. Use a protocol to tune your project. There is one key best practice that has emerged at schools that succeed at PBL: Teachers review their project plan with colleagues prior to launching the project. This process works very well if teachers use a Critical Friends Protocol to analyze the project plan. Discussions alone (“I have an idea I’d like to run by you.”) aren’t sufficient. PBL is complex, and benefits from multiple viewpoints and detailed feedback.

1. Grade work ethic. Good rubrics are essential to defining performance in PBL, both for assessing the application of content and 21^st century skills. However, good performance is very dependent on training students to work hard. A work ethic rubric is your most essential tool here. It is a flexible rubric that can be adapted to different grade levels, defines expectations for students, and grades them on the kinds of skills and attitudes that employers seek today. In many schools, work ethic is now ten percent or more of the final grade on a project.

1. Design a breakthrough column. Ideally, PBL doesn’t result in ‘A’ work; it encourages something better. Every well designed project offers the opportunity for students to go beyond mastering concepts, facts, and skills—and to demonstrate ‘break-through thinking. This is the kind of insight captured in the top of the pyramid on the new Bloom’s Taxonomy, but in a strict standards-based environment, that kind of thinking is not encouraged or supported. But any rubric can be adapted to this vital goal by having a breakthrough column. What do you write in this column? Nothing, leave it blank. Let students show you what insightful solutions look like.

1. Use visible thinking routines. I’m will elaborate on this in a coming blog, but the most pressing issue for PBL teachers is how to encourage students to talk intelligently in teams about problems that matter. Moving from groups to the language of teams is a first step. A second step is to require protocols that train students to share prototypes, probe each other’s thinking, share and evaluate solutions, and use the vocabulary of the discipline they are studying. The Visible Thinking routines developed at Harvard are ideal tools for your PBL teams.

1. Plan to reflect. Follow this rule: Your project does not end until you have led students in a reflection on what they have learned. Use a systematic approach to reflection, with key prompts that review student performance, the project outcomes, and your contribution to the project plan. The general approach is to get at three elements of reflection: (1) Encouraging deep learning and retention; (2) Focusing on quality and excellence; and (3) Developing a ‘growth’ mindset.

Thom Markham is the author of the Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert tools for inquiry and innovation for K-12 educators, and the principal author of the Handbook for Project Based Learning, published by the Buck Institute for Education. Download the rubrics and protocols mentioned above, and other Tools for PBL, on his website, www.thommarkham.com or contact him at thom@thommarkham.com.

As I’ve reported in the past, IQ scores are on the move, rising nearly ten points with each generation. Known as the Flynn effect, after James Flynn, a cognitive scientist, the reason behind the rise in scores is widely debated, but answers focus on one area that should be of interest to teachers: Scores are increasing because children are showing greater capacity for fluid intelligence. That’s the ability to see patterns and solve novel problems without prior information, which relies on better working memory (the capacity to manipulate information) and a longer attention span. Intelligence researchers consider fluid intelligence to be the ultimate cognitive ability—a kind of gold standard for smart. Until a few years ago, fluid intelligence was considered immutable, but research in 2008, using computer programs, showed that it may be improved through training.

The fall out from the research was predictable: Brain boosting software flooded the market. In our data driven, analytic, brain-centric-society, the enhanced ability to count and remember squares on a screen was seen as a competitive edge.

But I suggest that teachers approach fluid intelligence differently. First, don’t be fooled into thinking the brain alone is at work here. The brain is not an isolated cognitive organ whose neuronal pathways and exact mechanisms for problem solving have been identified, or whose mysterious interactions between emotions and a conscious thought have been parsed. Neuroscientists themselves caution us not be overconfident about applying brain science to the classroom.

Second, don’t be misled by IQ results. Another significant reason that IQ scores are rising is that formal schooling teaches students to categorize objects, which helps them on IQ tests. In 1900, for example, an IQ test might have asked about the relationship between rabbits and dogs. The correct answer: Dogs chase rabbits. Today’s correct answer? Both dogs and rabbits are mammals.

This leads to a culturally self-fulfilling prophecy: You have to go to school and learn facts in order to be considered smart. Richard Nisbett sets this standard in his book Intelligence and How to Get It, stating that, “Without formal education, a person is simply not going to be very bright—whether we measure intelligence by IQ tests or any other metric.” Sorry, natives of the rain forest.

Rather than a hyper focus on the brain and IQ, I believe we should put our faith in a multi-faceted, holistic approach that respects and enlarges human capacity, so that fluid intelligence includes the ability to create, empathize, and solve the issues of a divided global world. It’s quite possible, in fact, that fluid intelligence flourishes in a whole child environment, and that—in the 21^st century—the whole child is a smarter child. It tells us also that, with contributions from all of us, we can make children smarter. My ten point action plan:

Take charge of your teaching. In my last post, I advocated for teacher empowerment. Fluid intelligence requires a fluid environment, like moving waters seeking a new outlet. Rather than remain a pawn of a top down system, use your own creative and visionary ability to move your teaching and school forward. Students will respond by ‘feeling’ the shift and acting more intelligently.

Pose questions, not answers. Teaching to the test stops fluid intelligence in its tracks. By definition, the highest form of smart is the ability to question, see gaps in patterns, solve problems and create ideas. Either we teach young people to do this, or our civilization will wither. The choice is that stark.

Stay focused on the future. The new indicators of smart use the language of the future: Resiliency; empathy, collaboration; communication; creativity; ethics; and character. These are difficult to teach, but can be learned by students when teachers make these habits and skills important.

Practice the power of care. Know the basics of why small people become good big people: They feel loved. A recent news item detailed how a Missouri kindergarten teacher required a six-year old to sit in her pooped pants while the rest of the class took a test. The rationale? The teacher was preparing her for the rigors of state testing in the future. Enough said.

Start with the heart. The heart and brain work in an intimate partnership. In simple terms, this means that all successful learning begins with emotional safety. Take time to create a climate of safety, belonging, and transparency in your class.

Learn about the brain. Most teachers know remarkably little about the chief tool of their trade. It’s important to know about advances in neuroscience, as well as the current limitations of neuroscience. Mostly, learn about the frontal lobes. That’s where most of your words are processed by your students.

Tap collective intelligence. No more than anyone else do I understand world trends, but one fact is clear: people are now woven into a web of intelligence. They get smarter because other people help them get smarter. Our job as educators is to figure out why this happens, how to make it happen faster and better, and how to direct it for positive results. We can begin by teaching students to work in highly committed teams focused on deep, productive work.

Dive into creativity. A very recent study reported that only 25% of people thought they lived up to their creative potential. One major factor? They were not encouraged to develop their creativity in school. Yet creativity is the highest expression of fluid intelligence. Two useful tools: Use creativity rubrics and designate one column in other rubrics for ‘breakthrough’ thinking.

Be a coach. Whether you feel comfortable with student-centered learning or not, it’s day is here. The role of the modern teacher is still to convey information as appropriate and necessary, but that skill set must now be expanded to include coaching and mentoring. Intelligence can’t be taught; neither is it a fixed commodity. Somewhere in between is your role as a supporting adult who guides and instructs in a way that stimulates a young person to grapple with life in a way that kindles the growth of intelligence.

Model intelligence. What if fluid intelligence is increased by good modeling? Are you a good model? Are you whole and healthy? Do you convey curiosity, joy, an open attitude, and commitment to your own growth? As a test, how would you answer the question about dogs and rabbits? Are they just mammals, or do they represent two beautiful and amazing species in an amazing world that’s getting better by the day—because we’re all getting smarter?