We are so glad you have found our website. It is designed to either accompany our books or to just be a place you can go for encouragement and support. Project Based Learning [PBL] should not be attempted alone. If you don’t have friends, peers, or admin who are able to help you on your journey then consider us your new PBL friends.
We have been fortunate to know a lot of people who can help us when we are in need of some feedback and support. But that hasn’t always been the case. Both of us have had times when we were trying new collaborative processes in our classrooms and we weren’t sure if anything we were doing was the right way of doing things. Both of us came to PBL early on in our teaching profession. We discovered it wasn’t just a great process for helping our students be more engaged in class, it was a way for us to know our students better through their daily interactions, reflections, and their feedback to us on how we were doing.
Both of us sought out training from people who are experts in the PBL process. For me, Chris, it was as a new New Tech Network [NTN] teacher. Even though the training was through NTN, they were using material from the Buck Institute for Education [BIE]. And right away I had NTN teachers and BIE trainers as people I could get help with as I learned this process. It didn’t hurt that I was in a NTN school where every class was taught using the PBL process and every teacher wanted to help other teachers in the building. I then went on to be an Instructional Coach for PBL at a school in our district and, at the same time, became a trainer for BIE (PBLWorks.org). For Telannia, it was an early introduction to BIE. She was not in a school where anyone knew PBL and so BIE became her lifeline. She is honored to be a trainer for PBLWorks and to help teachers begin this journey.
Most of the teachers we help now are the only ones trying this in their school. Maybe they are the only teacher in their district. Maybe you are like them. You want to produce great projects. You want your students to understand math at a deeper level by having more interaction with the math that is happening in a problem or challenge that they are facing. We want to help you get there.
Thank you again for finding our site. We hope you are able to obtain one of our books (insert page to the books) as well. The book will help you get your head around the process of teaching math through PBL. Even if you don’t have one of the books, we hope you find this website helpful in your pursuit of excellence. A great PBL teacher is just a great teacher who understands PBL. Because you have made it this far you are already a great teacher. Welcome aboard.