It’s been a monumental year for our project-based learning team, officially expanding the Consortium’s engagement from coast to coast.
The school year began with a Labor Day week training in Willingboro, New Jersey, with our professional learning team providing a tailored training for educators in an alternative school, and ended with a trip out west to Portland, Oregon to train a cohort of career and technical education instructors.
This year’s trainings add to the growing list of national work of the PBL team’s previous work, which included a school in New Jersey in 2025, as well as cohort trainings for schools across New England in 2019.
Educators attended the most recent training from schools across the greater Portland area as members of Portland Community College’s Portland Area Career Technical Education Consortium (PACTEC). Spanning a wide variety of programs of study, project topics ranged from students reconfiguring a conventional engine to run on electricity to a cross-curricular campus greenhouse-to-restaurant concept.
Having provided PBL instruction and support to more than a thousand educators since we launched this work in 2017, our team combines a wealth of real world project examples with on-the-ground experience and design tools to deliver trainings that delve deeply into the day-to-day planning and execution of classroom projects.
At the close of the Portland training, one educator shared that, “Just having the step-by-step explained and then having time to work was exactly what I needed!“
In the spirit of PBL, there is very little “sit and get” content in the training. Participants learn about and brainstorm ideas for the key design elements in chunks, starting with student voice and choice all the way through to students’ public presentation. Throughout the process, they draft project prototypes, offer feedback to colleagues using structured protocols, and wrap with small-group presentations of their fully-drafted project plans.
One CTE instructor summed it up well: “I am a big fan of PBL, and this session gave me the tools and time to develop a powerful multidisciplinary project for my students for next year.”
Interested in bringing practical project-based learning training to your district? Contact Aaron Altemus at aaltemus@tcfpe.org to learn more about tailored training opportunities or visit our website for more information.
Special thanks to Dan Pounds for providing instructional support and expertise for the Portland PBL training.
