Other
Instructional Organizer: A Guide to Developing Project Based Learning Units
By following the guidelines provided by moving through the organizational links on this page, teachers can learn how to create, facilitate, and assess successful project-based learning units for any grade level.
Other
Developing Project Based Learning Units: Driving Questions
Learn how to use open-ended and directed questions to drive the development of driving questions for project-based learning to take place. This includes several charts and checklists to help teachers develop good driving questions or to...
Buck Institute
Buck Institute for Education: Pblu: The 22nd California Mission
When fourth graders are required to learn their state history, this California teacher takes it across the curriculum implementing a project-based learning unit highlighting the Spanish Mission Era of California in the 18th and 19th...
Other
Duke: Center for Inquiry Based Learning
Duke University has established the Center for Inquiry-Based Learning. It serves to enhance math and science lessons. Click on Resources for good examples of Inquiry-based lesson plans.
National Geographic
National Geographic: Programs: Chesapeake Bay Water Quality Project
A project-based collaborative unit of study that teaches students about watershed health using real-time geospatial technology. Students engage in outdoor field experiences while using twenty-first century learning skills.
New York Times
New York Times: Learning Network: Election 2016: Our Teaching and Learning Homepage
A compilation of resources, often updated, to enhance studying the election process for the Presidential Election coming up on November 8, 2016. Find lesson plans, project-based units, articles with follow-up questions among the collection.
Buck Institute
Pbl Works: The Best Unit I've Ever Taught
[Free Registration/Login Required] An article outlining a PBL unit taught in an eighth grade history class. The educator discusses how the unit was developed by accident and how he drew on the students interest to make it successful!
Cengage Learning
Investigating Social Change: Midwest
Explore the evolution of the Midwest region of the United States. Young scholars and teachers will gain a different perspective about the Midwest when they check out this site.
Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College
Serc: Inquiry Page
An on-line community that uses inquiry-based and collaborative approaches to study inquiry-based learning. Features a database of inquiry units covering a wide range of topics, or you can also build your own inquiry units.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Energy Systems and Solutions
The Energy Systems and Solutions unit brings students through the exploration of science and engineering concepts as they relate to energy issues in everyday life. Issues surrounding energy production and energy consumption provide a...
FNO Press
From Now On: A Questioning Toolkit
What exactly is a "questioning tool kit"? This resource provides techniques for asking essential questions, hypothetical questions, telling questions, planning questions and organizing questions.
Alabama Learning Exchange
Alex: Gossip to Learn: A Juicy Approach to Research
Though teachers might use this student-centered, technology-based, one or two-day research project to introduce any author, English 12 teachers may wish to use the lesson to jump-start a unit on British literature from the Romantic...
Other
Indiana University: Atlantis Remixed
A research-based, immersive 3-D world where students aged 9-15 can have an impact and feel a sense of empowerment as they strive to make the world a better place. Has a wealth of resources, including research articles, educational and...
Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College
Serc: The Heat Is On: Understanding Local Climate Change
A lesson unit where students analyze long-term weather data for Phoenix to look for changes that have occurred over time. They look at factors that would cause climate warming, including greenhouse gases and other phenomena. They then...
Alabama Learning Exchange
Alex: Extra, Extra!! Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Newscast
This lesson will be an interdisciplinary lesson that involves both English Language Arts and Social Studies (History). The lesson will be primarily technology-based and also project-based that will have the students performing historical...
Alabama Learning Exchange
Alex: Telling Time to the Hour
This lesson plan helps children make a connection between the digital and analog clock. In general, the number system is based on units of ten which can sometimes make it difficult for children to realize that time is based on cycles of...
Alabama Learning Exchange
Alex: The Circles of Life
This is an inquiry based cooperative learning unit that can be used in biology as a graduation exam review or in botany for a nine week project. The students will learn the life cycle of mosses, ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms. The...
Alabama Learning Exchange
Alex: Plan the Adventure of a Lifetime With Lewis and Clark
This plan is the first lesson in my unit on Lewis and Clark. This is a project-based, hands-on unit in which learners "become" part of the Corps of Discovery - the members traveling in the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In this lesson, the...
Alabama Learning Exchange
Alex: Native Cultures in the Americas
This lesson is part of a project-based, hands-on unit in which children discover the native cultures that existed in the Americas prior to the arrival of explorers. The students will "become" part of their assigned culture through...
Alabama Learning Exchange
Alex: Taking Apart and Reconstructing Stories
This lesson is designed as a project-based unit plan that will take students through the narrative process from deconstruction to construction. After initial discussion, students will use the Interactive Story Map feature at Read Write...
Alabama Learning Exchange
Alex: Native Cultures vs. Explorers in World Court
This lesson represents the end result of a project-based, hands-on unit in which children represent a culture they've researched in a World Court Hearing against the explorers they encountered.
Other
Eduscapes: Themes & Literature Circles
This site provides guidance in creating literature circles based on cross-curricular themes that will help to improve literacy. The site emphasizes both theory and practice, with lots of practical suggestions.
Alabama Learning Exchange
Alex: Hail to the Chief!
The students will use prior knowledge of Presidents to complete this project. They will devise a platform based on past presidents' qualities and their impact on the nation to run against classmates in an election. Students will use this...
Michigan State University
Michigan State University: Lets Net: Worm Bin Project Unit
Students learn about the worm life cycle and decomposition of life by creating small-scale worm ecosystems. Research groups share scientific data with groups at other schools using web-based communication tools.