Just recently, a topic of discussion on a national list-serve of which I'm a member, turned to "project-based learning". I HATE PBL, which is essentially a way for the type 'A' personalities to show their stuff and the laziest students to hide behind their work.
Project-Based Learning (PBL) has a very long history that goes all the way back to John Dewey - a Marxist Progressive Constructivist - who believed that children learn best by 'doing'. He developed this idea back on his rural Vermont farm watching kids do their chores (I often wonder if he was in fact simply observing because he wasn't interested in 'doing' himself...).
