Project-Based Learning: A New Project Management Opportunity?
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at andy.jordan@roffensian.com. Andy’s new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
I will freely confess that until recently, I had never heard of the term “project-based learning” (or PBL). I came across it recently when I was speaking with the principal at a school near where I now live. It’s an approach that she uses in her school, and it is proving to be very successful with her teachers.
It’s also something that the children are enjoying (children as young as 5, by the way). I suspect that unless you have children in a school that uses a PBL approach, you likely haven’t heard of it either—and I think that’s a shame, because there are a lot of opportunities for project managers to add value to PBL approaches.
What is PBL?
If you ask Google what PBL is, you’ll get a lot of different answers, but they aren’t all as accessible as we might like (Wikipedia’s explanation includes the term “student-centered pedagogy” in the first sentence, for example). In the simple terms that I need to understand a concept, PBL is a project-focused way for students to learn. It involves working as a group over an extended period of time to solve a real problem or answer a complex question. It allows students to explore concepts more deeply than in traditional learning and focuses on “learning by doing” approaches. It has been used successfully at all levels from elementary on up.
This…
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Published at Wed, 01 Aug 2018 04:00:00 +0000
