How cross-country partnerships bring project-based learning to life

An administrator explains why PBL is equity work, and how it connects students’ learning with the world beyond the classroom.
Peter Harris
Peter Harrishttps://www.ulsterboces.org/
Peter Harris is the director of learning and design for the career pathways programs at Ulster BOCES. He can be reached at [email protected].

My grandfather, who was born in the 1920s, once showed me the one-room schoolhouse that he attended as a child. There were rows of desks, and he said that the students would stoke the fire and work with the teacher. It was easy to see how it could be home to a comforting community feeling, but it was also clear that it was a place that schooled students for a different economy, a different era than ours.

Since then, technologies and the economy have advanced, yet many of our schools still look more or less the same, even if the fireplace has been replaced with a furnace. At Ulster Board of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) in New York, we’ve been modernizing the classroom experience for our students through project-based learning. Rather than teaching different subjects in silos, PBL integrates them in a way that provides a much more engaging learning experience for students. We also believe that it creates a more equitable learning environment because students work to solve problems that are relevant to them using whatever prior knowledge and existing skill sets they bring to the table.

A big part of strengthening and refining the PBL skills of our teachers is our relationship with High Tech High, a public charter school located on the opposite side of the country in San Diego, California, while Ulster BOCES sits in New Paltz, NY. High Tech High, which specializes in PBL, even has an on-site graduate school. Here’s what our partnership looks like and why we think it’s important for our teachers and students.

PBL partners with a history

Approximately five years ago, I was one of a group of principals from Ulster BOCES to begin our work with High Tech High, to improve our understanding of PBL. They offered us a primer focused on topics such as why we should implement PBL, and I learned how it could augment or enhance learning in specific areas within the Hudson Valley Pathways Academy, where I was principal, and in Ulster BOCES programs more generally.

In year two as our relationship deepened, we changed themes to look at community partnerships. High Tech High had strong relationships that enabled its students to impact the local community.

Some of our teachers really dug into that and launched a project called “Water in Our World” built around the essential question, “Should everyone have access to clean water?” Students designed their own essential questions around that larger one, and our teachers Zoomed back and forth with High Tech High teachers, who shared their protocols for design and their other processes.

One teacher had the idea of having students from the two schools work on something together, as a sort of exchange. That was the year COVID hit, but the students still put together an online zine called Teen Voices: We’re Smarter than You Think that featured articles and interviews from students at both locations. It was a cool project that went a long way toward building community and partnership between our organizations, but we also wanted our PBL efforts to be geared toward making our students more employable.

To get there, we looked at how we could make global competence a part of the next collaboration. This year, we’re not just Zooming back and forth. Educators here at Ulster have been learning about PBL, and we’re all taking a trip out to San Diego to see it in action in person on the High Tech High campus. We’re fans of deeper learning, and we think High Tech High’s PBL approach delivers it for students on a pretty consistent basis, so we want to emulate it with adjustments for our students and our community.

Building project-based learning on empathy interviews

PBL creates equity of opportunity and experience because students aren’t hindered by a lack of prior knowledge or skills—they determine what question they will explore. They come to that question with help from peers and teachers, but the prior knowledge, skills and interests they do bring with them are baked in from the beginning.

High Tech High is a great example to learn from because of the way they get students involved in the ideation of the project from the very beginning and carry it forward throughout the project. One way they ensure that their students are tackling challenges that are relevant to the real world is by using empathy interviews to inform students’ formation of the essential questions they will explore in their projects.


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An empathy interview involves asking someone what they need, why they need it, and how you can help them get their desired outcome. If you want to solve problems for a hat maker, you need to talk to someone who makes hats. What are their design challenges? What issues do they face in the supply chain? Do they have any difficulties in bringing completed hats to market?

Empathy interviews are part of the development process in which students figure out what problems they are going to tackle. At High Tech High, they tend to work with nonprofits, social advocacy organizations, and people working on environmental challenges. As a BOCES, we’re more focused on solving challenges for industry, but the principles and processes work just as well in both worlds.

Creating PBL ‘algorithms’

Providing our educators with an introduction to PBL was just the beginning. We also help them understand things like project launches, how to work with partners to create essential questions, student critiques and revisions, and assessing exhibitions of student learning. But when we bring them across the country to see all of that working together in a place that’s unfamiliar to them, it’s easier for many of them to see the value of a new kind of approach to teaching and learning.

High Tech High and Ulster BOCES may work with different types of partners, but many of the teachers we send to San Diego for this camp are educators teaching at traditional schools within our catchment area. Whether they end up working with similar partners to Ulster BOCES, High Tech High, or people from completely different areas doesn’t really matter. By the time they’re done, they have a kind of algorithm for creating PBL experiences. Their plans become replicable, and teachers can lay them out on a calendar. They understand how to integrate subjects rather than stick them into silos.

Connecting with outside experts

A core belief in all this work is that if there’s an expert out there who can help a student tighten and tune their project, we should be seeking that expert out. If a student is learning about hat design, they need to talk to a hat designer. If they are learning about clean water, they need to talk to hydrologists and geologists. Their teacher may not be the best resource because they probably don’t know much about hat design or clean water.

A lot of school projects fall flat because students don’t have access to pure expertise. They need open communication with experts to access the core knowledge, research, and information central to their project. They need real feedback that’s relevant and meaningful to the outcome of their project and how it will perform in the real world.

Just as students need access to experts to make their projects important and relevant learning experiences, we believe that if our district is aware of an expert out there doing something we value at the highest level, we should emulate their work and implement their practices where it makes sense for our students.

When it comes to PBL, offering students all the resources at our disposal is doubly important because this is equity work. It’s learning that allows students to create mastery of content or skill sets. It’s learning that allows students to explore an essential question that is meaningful to them and to members and even leaders of their community. It’s work that allows students to find a sense of identity and self-value that simply can’t be found in a worksheet.

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