Be wary, PBL teachers who embrace the opportunity to tackle global problems such as climate change, poverty, deforestation, and etc.

It’s true: most students immediately grasp the authenticity and importance of these problems. Furthermore, mountains of freely available, high quality resources are just an internet search away. And on top of resource availability and the potential for high engagement, addressing global challenges provides an opportunity for encouraging young people to not merely inhabit the world, but to improve it.

But here’s the issue: the distributed geography, sheer scale, and mind-boggling complexity of the problems creates a project design trap for teachers. Unless you’re careful, you can design yourself into a no-man’s land that suffers from one or more of the following:

• Insufficient complexity: students fail to penetrate beneath the surface and draw facile conclusions such as “recycle” or “we all need to work together.”
• Inauthentic audience: the project’s point becomes to “raise awareness” for a vague and unnamed audience, which undermines the potential for high student engagement and reduces the project’s impact.
• Insufficiently experiential: learning experiences lack concreteness and proximity, decreasing the opportunities for significant learnings.

Fortunately, I’ve witnessed quite a few of these projects avoid these horrors. Projects that work often lead to students:

• emerging empowered as changemakers and possessive of the knowledge and know-how to make a difference in the world.
• understanding in new and deeply profound ways how their actions tie into a larger global ecosystem.
• creating extremely high quality products that fill them with pride and substantially impact their audience.

What follows are two sources for large-scale problems, examples of colleagues’ projects that achieved great result, as well as a provocation for ambitious project designers

Identifying Problems

Here are two good places to look for global challenges to begin your project design.

The better known of these two is the the United Nations’ seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, resources for each of which are housed on the UN website.

Lesser known certainly, but still provocative, is this list of “the world’s forty hardest problems,” according to the Silicon Valley private equity firm Social Capital. (for more about this list, listen to Alex Danco on the Invest Like the Best podcast.) Here’s one example problem: “Can we build sustainable power solutions that are clean?” I’m not sure why the “problems” are worded as questions that can be answered with a yes or a no, but it’s easy to create usable essential questions for a project: “How can we design and build clean and sustainable power solutions for our community?”

When you’ve isolated your problem, effective project design choices include focusing on product and narrowing your scope.

A Focus on Product

Although teachers must devote significant class time to building shared knowledge about these complex topics, you must embed time throughout the project to analyze exemplars, learn tools of the trade, and create and refine work in order for students to create high-quality and high-impact products.

Try to avoid frontloading knowledge and then having students, for example, make a poster to represent what they’ve learned, which amounts to what Jeff Robin calls project-oriented learning.

Committing to a final product and exhibition prior to finalizing your calendar and project design will help channel your energy in a productive direction. 2019 is a wonderful time for product creation. Podcasts, robots, books, films, websites, plays, infographics, soundtracks, and more are all within reach of most project-based teachers.

Here are some example products my colleagues’ students created while addressing global challenges:

• Alec’s students studied refugees and created a large scale simulation. In addition to a deep plunge into the Syrian refugee crisis, students studied game theory in order to perfect their final product.
• Brooke’s students also studied the refugee crisis, interviewed local refugees, and produced a documentary film in partnership with the International Rescue Committee. This product required that they hone interview and film editing techniques.
• Kyle and Edrick’s 7th grade students designed and assembled Muppets, learning sewing and design, to tell the story of nutrition and food security.

Selecting a product isn’t natural for those of us who attended traditional schools and/or who feel constrained by traditional requirements, but project designers who force themselves to choose can help students broaden their skill set and transform knowledge into polished work. I’ve written about selecting a product here, and if you get a group together you could use this “50 Things Protocol” to generate ideas.

Narrowing the Project

Another recommended design move it to be mercilessly and radically local, concrete, and realistic. Where do you see local impacts of this global issue and how can students see, touch, hear, taste, and smell them?

Gun violence, for example, is a problem that intersects race, class, geography, and history and addressing it involves policy, politics, campaign funding, disenfranchisement, community organizing, and everything else under the sun.

My colleagues Nuvia and Matt tackled this issue via the essential question: “What can we do to dramatically reduce the amount of gun violence in our country?” But instead of attempting to address this question comprehensively, they narrowed their scope in the Beyond the Crossfire project, sidestepping legislation and partisan political issues and instead focusing on how teen brain health support, juvenile justice, and extra-curricular programming can reduce violence. Note that although the project was realistic, by no means did they sacrifice ambition. The final product was an award-winning, high-quality, feature-length documentary that framed the problem and identified bright spots in this ongoing struggle.

Another example relates to the UN goal of sustainable cities and communities. In their ongoing Re:Vision Project, 12th grade students (working under my colleagues Megan, Max, and (previously) John) function as a design firm that supports communities in designing and implementing improvements to public spaces. Each group is assigned a client, whose concern with a specific geographic location necessarily limits the scope of student work. One student group this spring, for example, was charged with beautifying a specific parcel of land in National City near the coast. Not only was the final design of high quality, the students shared at exhibition a deep understanding of the sorts of processes communities and experts can engage in to revivify communities, which means the students themselves have begun to see how to tackle a large-scale problem on a local level.

Finally, an interesting way to narrow scope might involve having students compose their own “Forty Hardest Problems” for a city or community. In São Paulo, for example, where even helicopter pilots complain about traffic, one might reasonably ask “How can we reduce congestion in order to improve air quality and quality of life?” Or regarding a dreadfully polluted local water way, “How can we improve the health of the Pinheiros River?” Every city and community has plenty of challenges to explore.

Wild Card: Experiment with Collective Action

Perhaps it’s true that some of the challenges we face today do require large-scale collective action. David Wallace-Wells’ recent book on climate change, for example, argues that global-level coordination will be necessary for any hope of mitigating the impending warming disaster.

One way to move beyond the “raising awareness” trap mentioned above, if you’re an ambitious and interested project designer, might be to try running collective action experiments with your students. What mixture of information and incentives could bring about progress toward a goal?

The challenge would be to create and test a system that enables status, or even something tangible, to be earned by contributing to the solving of a problem. Students are familiar with social media, which is such a system, but it’s only goal is for more people to use the system more often. The trick is to tie incentives and sharing to progress in the real world, which is something our students will need to figure out.

By asking students to move beyond a mere appeal to people’s good nature, they’ll be forced to empirically confront what motivates themselves, their peers, and adults in the community. They would think deeply about the structures and systems necessary for local and global progress.

However you choose to go about designing your grand-scale project, take care to avoid ensnarement by the web of abstraction.