PBLWorks (formerly the Buck Institute for Education) has many resources on project based learning, some of which are better than others. I have always appreciated their essential project design elements (above), which they believe should be a part of every project based learning experience.

This article – Gold Standard PBL: Essential Project Design Elements – has a nice summary of each element. Anyone starting out with project based learning (and some veterans) will probably find the article to be useful. An earlier version of the article was my first go-to resource on the topic. PBLWorks has also created a rubric for the essential elements – Gold Standard PBL: Project Design Rubric – which can help when designing/assessing a project based learning experience.

Of course, when teaching, we do not have to use all of these elements, all the time. We can (start to) incorporate any number of them into our teaching, regardless of whether or not “full-blown” project based learning is the goal.