Screech owls, Super Soakers, and school gardens

Project-based learning (PBL) is gaining momentum as a rich and multifaceted instructional approach that is motivating and engaging. Miranda S. Fitzgerald and Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar argue that PBL provides a particularly rich context for fostering students’ literacy motivation and engagement. One reason for this is that characteristic features of PBL closely align with research-supported instructional practices for fostering literacy motivation and engagement, such as peer collaboration, communicating with real audiences, and solving meaningful problems. They describe supporting research and share how educators can use the SMILE concept — sharing, me, importance, liking, engagement — to design and implement PBL to foster literacy motivation and engagement in K-12 classrooms.