It is almost 12 years to the day since I facilitated my first PBL workshop in China. The teachers in a gleaming Shanghai high school were smart and disciplined and eagerly asked questions. I loved the experience.
Flash forward to 2024. Last week I visited Hangzhou for a PBL conference sponsored by the Zhejiang provincial government. It brought together a team of colleagues from the Center for Excellence at New Tech, Advanced Reasoning in Education, Global Education Community schools, and PBLWorks.
Over the course of a week we visited five schools, worked with teachers and administrators from two other provinces (Hunan and Xi’an), and provided panel discussions, curriculum reviews, keynote addresses, and workshops on PBL and related topics.
The popularity of PBL in China is undeniable – more than 60,000 viewers tuned in to watch the livestream of my session on PBL design using AI. That popularity is driven by many factors, the most important of which is a government mandate in at least two provinces (Shanghai and Zhejiang) to adopt PBL as a primary instructional methodology.
Policy vs. Reality
As we know all too well in the U.S., what is dictated by policy looks quite different when it meets the reality of the classroom. I have worked in many U.S. districts in which the superintendent has mandated the use of PBL only to find that in practice it lives in the shadows. The same thing is true in China,
The teachers and principals we worked with in Hangzhou indicated that about 10 percent of instruction occurred via PBL. These projects almost exclusively occur on Friday afternoons during an hour of enrichment. To quote a famous phrase from the Buck Institute for Education (PBLWorks), what we were seeing was “dessert, not the main course.” New Tech Network uses the phrase “doing projects vs doing Project Based Learning. Both phrases try to achieve the visual that we help learners engage in the learning throughout the project. Here at the Center for Excellence, and with the teachers at our school, we like to use the phrase, starting at Transfer. This points to how we want learners to see where they are going in their learning to be successful.
The justifications echoed those I have been hearing from U.S. teachers for decades: Our national curriculum requires us to cover too much content; it is difficult to design projects our students are interested in; our students and parents are worried about hurting their chances on the college entrance exams.
The stages of PBL adoption follow a path I have seen repeated around the world:
- Traditional Instruction Stage: Lecture, textbook, homework/classwork, and tests are the exclusive way knowledge is delivered.
- Stage 1 PBL: PBL in enrichment or after-school programs. Lecture, textbook, homework/classwork, and tests are the dominant way knowledge is delivered (dessert)
- Stage 2 PBL: PBL in the regular classroom as one of the main (20 to 40 percent) pedagogical delivery systems for knowledge and the construction of understanding.
- Stage 3 PBL: PBL in the classroom is the dominant (80 to 100 percent) pedagogical delivery system for the construction of understanding (main course).
What does “Main Course” PBL Look Like in China?
Four years of work in Korea taught me that some of the most effective PBL instruction comes from outside organizations (in the case of Korea, the Korea Development Institute) who partner with public schools and provide materials, professional development, and even classroom instruction. China is much the same, and that’s how I saw a project that combines my two loves: PBL and AI.
I firmly believe that AI solves one of the biggest hurdles to widespread adoption of PBL: The burden of designing rigorous, relevant projects that engage students in extended inquiry on authentic tasks. PBL requires teachers to be both curriculum designers and instructional guides. Few educators can perform both tasks at a high level. AI solves the first challenge with aplomb.
Chinese educators are no strangers (wink, wink) to the dominant Western AIs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. But they have AIs of their own that are increasingly being used by educators for instructional design. Much to my delight, AI use among students in China is widespread because the AI age and policy constraints placed on U.S. students are not as restrictive in China.
Lusi (not her real name) is an instructional support provider for a company in Hangzhou that works in a small subset of public schools. She co-taught a semester-long project in which her third- through sixth-grade students used the image generator Midjourney and the Chinese AI Kimi to produce gorgeous picture books on culturally relevant topics.
“In this project I witnessed a harmonious collaboration between the students and AI,” she told me. “The students discovered the creativity of AI and integrated it with their own. Seeing works that exceeded our expectations has made me look forward to more co-creations.”
What do the next steps for PBL in China look like?
Now that both the U.S. and Chinese governments are encouraging educational exchanges, PBL schools in the U.S. can expect to see an influx of visitors. In October I will lead a group of school administrators and government officials on a four-city tour of innovative schools doing good work with PBL, SEL and AI. This year alone, we as a school have hosted Beijing National Day School as well as Yungu School. We are also in a partnership to deliver our Teacher Tools of the Trade Workshop Series with TeachFuture and Chinese educators across the country!
Like organizations I mentioned earlier we at the Center for Excellence are providing face-to-face and online workshops as well as coaching for Chinese educators interested in PBL. Beijing Normal University has published a number of research pieces on PBL. Two Chinese organizations are planning conferences this fall focused on SEL, PBL and AI. The number of PBL-related books being translated into Mandarin is growing rapidly.
As much as the PBL work in China gives me hope, it also brings me sadness when I return home. PBL has become mainstream in the U.S., which means the passion has been replaced by standardized routines. The excitement I saw here 20 years ago when interest in PBL first exploded is alive and well in China. That’s why you’ll see me there, pushing the practice school by school, teacher by teacher.
David Ross (@davidPBLross) is the retired CEO of the Partnership for 21st Century Learning and the former Senior Director of the Buck Institute for Education (now PBLWorks). David was an 11th grade American Studies (History and English 11) team teacher. David created curriculum design templates, exemplary projects, rubrics for critical thinking and collaboration, and project management techniques.
