. . .  In Most Likely to Succeed, a film focused on the largely PBL-based High Tech High, one of the two main students takes over a project that he has obsessed over and then fails to complete it in time. Somewhere along the line, the classmates who were once part of his group disappear. They seemingly abdicated their roles, and it is not clear how they benefited from the experience or how they were able to demonstrate their achievements in order to be assessed. The featured student himself doesn’t even master the knowledge and skills critical to the project!

“PBL may work well for kids in boutique school settings” with highly qualified teachers, writes Huff. “But it offers scant hope of solving education problems on the scale that America needs.”

Getting Smart’s Tom Vander Ark, who’s It’s a Project-Based World, is a big PBL fan. He thinks “personalized project-based learning” will “build on ramps to the new economy.”

If students spent five hours every school day engaged in high quality project-based learning, they would put in more than 10,000 hours from kindergarten to graduation – they just might become an expert project manager.

He advocates Gold Standard PBL, which means students choose “challenging real-world problems” that “require demanding demonstration of key concepts and high quality public products after critique and revision.”

I think Huff would ask: How often can schools pull that off?