Tips for successful driving questions in pbl

The last unit of the subject was about project-based learning. It is basically working around a project for a lesson, a week or several months. The challenge of a successful project starts with an engaging driving questions which will guide our students' work and will be the basis of their final product.

But, what does this question need to be engaging? Here I'm posting some tips for it to be succesful.

OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS

While direct questions are ok during the development of our project, open-ended questions are perfect as driving questions because they force our students to do a research before answering. Open-ended questions have more than one possible answer so this will encourage them to be original and offer different final products.

But do not forget about directed questions. It is great to pose them while our students are working to direct or redirect their projects (eg.: does this have connection with your final product?).

OBJECTIVITY

Our driving question has to be concise and objective. We do not want our students to decide on 'good' or 'bad' subjective opinions but to propose clear products, services or solutions based on objective ideas. For this, we can use the "how can we + challenge + audience" formula:

How can I/we + raise bullying awareness + in English classroom?

How can we + plan a trip + that all the class will want to attend?

ENGAGING TOPIC

And last but not least, to make an engaging driving question the topic has to be engaging for our students!!

I know it can be tempting to talk (once again) about climate change, pollution, recycling, or travelling, but let's ratchet it up and involve our students on the topic choice. They will, for sure, surprise us and this will totally involve them in the project.

Theses are three useful tips that have helped me to ask sucessful driving questions. Have you ever proposed an engaging driving question for a project-based lesson? Please, share!!

In my Tasks' section, you can soon find a lesson template based on pbl, stay tunned.