By Thom Markham
Change today often arrives not through straightforward cause and effect but through sudden, field-like shifts that reveal what was hidden a moment before. Project based learning (PBL) has experienced one of those shifts. Ten years ago PBL was celebrated as an innovative instructional model—an approach that organized inquiry and problem solving so students could blend academic content with authentic learning experiences. It encouraged collaboration, communication and deeper engagement with learning.
PBL still delivers those benefits. When implemented effectively, it provides a richer, more engaging experience than traditional instruction and supports development of real-world competencies. Around the world, interest in PBL is growing because the old transmission model of education—lecturing facts for students to memorize—is no longer adequate. The future of learning centers on exploration, questioning, inquiry and the communal application of knowledge to meaningful problems, and PBL is designed for that purpose. However, PBL must evolve significantly if it is to remain relevant; it cannot survive as merely an alternative way to teach content.
Alongside PBL’s rise, social emotional learning (SEL) has become a dominant trend in education globally. While educators long acknowledged emotional and character development as part of schooling, the past decades’ intense focus on standardized academic outcomes pushed whole-child concerns to the margins. That has changed. Schools, districts and systems across nations now prioritize social emotional education—using different terms but pursuing the same goal: preparing young people to be curious, resilient, empathetic and self-aware.
Meeting that challenge is complex. Parents and teachers know how difficult it is to shape character. In institutional settings the constraints are sharper: traits like curiosity or kindness cannot be taught as discrete facts or assessed in the same way as content knowledge. You can’t fairly grade a student “Be curious!” and expect consistent results. These qualities are dispositions or strengths—ways of being—whose origins are not fully understood by science.
What we do know is that these strengths emerge in the right conditions: environments characterized by authentic challenge, purpose, passion and opportunities to solve meaningful problems. That is why PBL is a powerful vehicle for developing social emotional strengths. Less widely recognized is that PBL was originally conceived as a human development model rather than solely an academic mastery model.
PBL’s roots trace to the 1960s in medical education in Canada and the Netherlands, where “problem based learning” used clinical cases to teach diagnostic reasoning. Rather than relying on passive textbook study, students discussed patient cases, asked questions and narrowed diagnoses together. This inquiry-based, case-centered process aimed to produce more empathic, reflective medical practitioners—and it worked. Many medical schools still use that method today.
The broader cultural context mattered. The human potential movement of the 1960s, influenced by thinkers like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, emphasized internal capacities and personal growth. Those ideas persist in today’s positive psychology movement, where concepts such as grit, growth mindset, curiosity and empathy are seen as essential to 21st century education.
During a well-designed PBL experience, students do more than learn content: they develop. They discover the joy of learning, enjoy the satisfaction of mastering complex work, become more engaged and often mature into more thoughtful, capable people. PBL situates learning in contexts that allow character and strengths to surface naturally.
We can explicitly redesign PBL to prioritize that development. I refer to this approach as Strengths-Based PBL or People-Based Learning. This reframing does not discard the best elements of high-quality PBL; instead it makes social emotional growth an explicit design intention. In Strengths-Based PBL, the learning process is the product—teachers design projects so students can name, reflect on and grow their personal strengths and confront challenges with guidance and mentorship.
Practical steps for integrating strengths-based goals into project design include:
- Begin projects by having students inventory their strengths, areas for growth and personal goals. This creates a starting point for intentional development and reflection.
- Link project tasks to personal strengths explicitly: curiosity supports understanding a problem; persistence sustains work on a driving question; empathy and listening enable teamwork; clear communication and feedback underpin designing solutions; presenting findings builds confidence.
- Build reflective practices into every project. Use journals or digital portfolios where students regularly document emotional and cognitive growth across a semester so progress becomes visible over time.
- Adopt student-friendly assessment tools such as single-point rubrics, peer reflection protocols and performance rubrics that include an open “breakthrough” or “wow” column to recognize creativity and risk-taking.
- Leverage team-based work in PBL to practice deep interpersonal skills—empathy, respectful feedback, active listening—and assess those skills alongside academic outcomes.
- Redefine the teacher’s role as mentor and co-learner. Use coaching protocols that emphasize attentive observation and deep listening so teachers can respond to students’ emotional needs and support growth.
Educators worldwide are developing methods to promote positive emotional growth. The next step is integrating those methods with inquiry-based projects so emotional development and academic inquiry reinforce each other. When PBL intentionally cultivates strengths—curiosity, empathy, persistence, collaboration—it becomes not only a method for learning content, but a framework for developing capable, resilient young people.
Thom Markham, founder of PBL Global, is an author, psychologist, and international school consultant who has worked with hundreds of schools and thousands of teachers across five continents to implement project based learning, 21st century competencies and inquiry-based systems of teaching and learning. He offers workshops, virtual coaching, online courses and strategic consulting through www.pblglobal.com. Email [email protected] or follow @thommarkham.
This article was originally published by The Learning Counsel, a research institute and news media hub focused on the shift toward digital curriculum in education.