**Resources are at the bottom of the post if you want to skip my meanderings…

Have you ever dropped an education buzzword in a perfectly normal conversation with a colleague, only to catch an eye-roll, a slightly furrowed brow, or the polite-but-pained smile that says, “Oh no, you’re one of those teachers”?

These conversations are perfect examples of Roland Barthe’s concept of the “Death of the Author.” Your meaning doesn’t just get lost, it gets immediately hijacked by the listener’s own experiences, biases, and educational battle scars. I’d dare say most of us have been on both sides of such conversations. Education is overflowing with jargon, and it’s equally full of people who wield that jargon with such confidence and frequency that it crosses the line into full-blown Edu-babble.

I fear that the terms “inquiry” and “project-based learning” have entered that foggy purgatory between genuine pedagogy and meaningless catchphrases. Like so many strategies, both inquiry and PBL have value in the right context. They can improve motivation, problem-solving skills, collaboration, and communication skills. In social studies, PBL reinforces how seemingly disparate classroom skills like source analysis, contextualization, argumentation, etc. come together in a meaningful way while inquiry reinforces conceptual thinking, questioning and critical thinking.

John Hattie cites Project-Based Learning in his Meta-Analysis as having an impact of .78, nearly double the “hinge point” of .40 that represents a year’s growth for a year’s effort. Feedback, a critical component of project-based learning is rated at an impact size of between .50 and .92 depending on its purpose, timing, and context. Inquiry-based learning is rated at .49 while other related strategies like cooperative learning, alternative assessment methods, appropriately challenging goals, and success criteria are rated well above the 0.40 hinge point. Still, it’s not a magic wand. One of the key points of his research is that context and process matter. Arguments against meta-analyses do not entirely refute the trends either.

Inquiry

There is an important difference between inserting inquiry into a unit and designing a unit around inquiry. Adding a small inquiry task to an otherwise traditional unit often feels like a square-peg-in-a-round-hole situation; It can be useful at certain moments but is disconnected from the overall learning experience. They can hook students into content, spark curiosity, and offering meaningful practice with source analysis or disciplinary thinking, but they are not the heart of inquiry-based learning.

Meaningful inquiry-based learning begins with purposeful unit design. It places a compelling or driving question at the center, then builds a coherent learning arc that guides students as they investigate that question from multiple angles. This includes scaffolding the inquiry process, modeling what strong questioning and evidence use look like, and gradually releasing responsibility so students feel less like passive learners and more like emerging historians, geographers, psychologists, or social scientists. Student agency is one of the most critical ingredients in this recipe.

To do this well, students also need content knowledge. Inquiry is not an excuse to de-emphasize knowing things; rather, it demands that teachers curate content more intentionally. The work is to select the most essential knowledge, embed it directly into learning activities, and avoid overwhelming students with unnecessary detail. Inquiry-based learning and direct instruction are not mutually exclusive. Inquiry gives content purpose, and content gives inquiry substance.

Designing with inquiry at the core transforms a unit from a sequence of lessons into an intellectual journey. It sharpens thinking, fosters agency, and invites students into the authentic work of the discipline. The C3 Framework for Social Studies is an excellent resource for supporting effective inquiry-based learning. However, as John Hattie frequently mentions, the most powerful variable in student success is the teacher. It is up to them to design learning experiences that do more than create a checklist of buzzwords.

Project-Based Learning

There is also a meaningful difference between adding a project to a unit and designing a unit around project-based learning. A project for the sake of differentiation of product can be engaging, but risks remaining peripheral to the core learning experience. These types of projects reinforce content, offer creative outlets, and even a break from routine (all good things) but they are not the heart of project-based learning. Just as with inquiry-based learning, true project-based learning requires intentional design from the start: a compelling question, problem, or product, sustained investigation, authentic audience, and structured opportunities for students to make decisions, revise their work, and apply disciplinary thinking over time.

In my classes, project-based learning takes shape through National History Day projects. Students choose their own topics, conduct original research, analyze primary and secondary sources, and develop evidence-based arguments. Along the way, they refine their research and supporting questions, corroborate sources, identify gaps in their understanding, and solve problems as they prepare to share their final product with the community.

Project-based learning with NHD is not minimally guided instruction; skills and processes are taught directly and refined through practice and feedback.

National History Day Resources

I am convinced that what helps makes NHD projects effective are a series of basic guidelines and practices that I have refined over the last several years. They are not exactly unique, but have taken time to refine and tweak. Some of them I do better than others, and some of them become the focus of my annual instructional improvement goals. Some of my updated resources for this year are below. Yes, some of the word docs are formatted using AI. Claude can do tables better and quicker than I can.

Strong scaffolding and structure: All aspects of the inquiry process are explicitly taught in my 9th grade classes. Checkpoints, models, conferencing, and other supports are used to guide students.

Collaboration structure: Students have explicit collaboration expectations, draft and agree to team contracts, and set regular goals for themselves. I monitor their progress and try to help them hold each other accountable. Since I started spending time on collaboration reflections and team contracts at the start of the year, I have spent less time dealing with problems related to group dynamics. It is tempting to skip these crucial steps to save time.

Formative Feedback: This one is kind of the most obvious. One of these years I will have to try and keep a count of how many check-ins, quick conversations, or formal advising a group gets. It’s a lot.

Teacher knowledge and skill: Teacher difficulty with content and skill is a predictor of PBL failure…not a surprise. There is no way I can know everything about the topics my student select. However, I can (and do) frequently sit down with them, model the research process, analyze sources with think-alouds, and show them the power of having mastery of the historical thinking and research skills.

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