Finding Community Partners for PBL

Connecting students with community partners can turbocharge engagement by increasing the real-world context for learning. Yet teachers who are eager to try project-based learning often struggle when it comes to finding willing partners, clients, and experts outside the classroom.

CommunityShare, a national nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona, matches teachers with partners for authentic projects. Behind the organization’s compelling motto—“Imagine your community as a human library”—is a thriving ecosystem for learning and strategies that can work anywhere.

Early lessons

Josh Schachter didn’t intend to start a national network when he began volunteering at a Tucson high school serving a large immigrant and refugee population. A professional photographer, he offered to help an English teacher use photography and multimedia to support her students’ literacy development and civic engagement.

They started with a simple prompt: What does it mean to have a home? They never imagined that the students’ powerful images and reflections would lead to a book and students sharing their insights at a congressional briefing in Washington, DC. “To have students born all over the world sharing their stories about what it means to feel at home—this was the ultimate PBL. It was an incredible journey,” says Schachter, who brought in additional community members as the project unfolded. But, he says, “it was not sustainable.”

He recruited a small group of teachers to brainstorm “a system for sharing.” A dozen years later, CommunityShare has evolved to include an online platform for matchmaking and fellowships to support teachers in designing community-engaged projects. The network now reaches across 11 states.

Preparing Teachers

Through its fellowship program, CommunityShare provides peer-to-peer professional development before teachers embark on projects. Participants learn how to hold listening campaigns to find out about their students’ passions and concerns. They create asset maps of community resources. They discuss concerns about facilitating student-centered classrooms and gain advice from project veterans. “It’s a safe space for educators to take risks,” Schachter says.

Lisa Nielsen, an elementary STEM teacher in the Tanque Verde Elementary School near Tucson, says she joined a CommunityShare fellowship “because I wanted to expand my PBL opportunities. I knew there were people around me with resources and expertise, but I didn’t know how to design learning experiences they could contribute to.” One of her first projects led to students collaborating with park rangers on a project about invasive species. “I saw students figuring things out versus me telling them. I could see their engagement grow.”

For middle school teacher Rebecca Oravec, the fellowship experience “changed my entire perspective. I thought I was doing best practice,” she says, by giving students limited choices in what they created. In art projects, “my idea of student voice was asking: Do you want to do blue or red? Colored pencils or markers?” Her approach changed when she invited students to consider, “What’s something we haven’t done before that you want to try?”

When her students expressed an interest in chalk pastels, Oravec connected with an Arizona artist via the CommunityShare platform. He worked with students several times, driving 90 minutes each way to her school in the Sahuarita Unified School District south of Tucson. The resulting project involved students conducting interviews and then creating artwork about someone important to them. “I never would have gone that deep with it,” Oravec says, “and I learned right alongside my students.”

Preparing partners

As part of their fellowship, teachers learn to think strategically about how and when to engage partners—not just as a guest speaker at the beginning or audience at the end. Once teachers have a plan in mind, they post a description of their project on the CommunityShare platform along with specific requests for partner participation.

Making it easy for partners to engage is key to successful matchmaking. When partners sign up on the platform, they choose from a menu of options, from guest speaking to hosting a field trip to longer-term mentoring. Along with their professional expertise, partners share more details that can factor into a good match. For example, are they comfortable working with young children or would they prefer to connect with teens? Outside of their careers, do they have lived experiences to share with students, such as military service or becoming the first in their family to attend college?

STEM teacher Jackie Nichols has found that many partners return year after year. In projects about the design of sustainable cities, partners bring content knowledge in engineering, landscape architecture, and more, while providing relatable role models for students in her Title I school. “Many of my students don’t have engineers and scientists in their families—yet,” she says. One former student, now studying engineering in college, shared this reflection after having her design for a lunar city critiqued by retired NASA astronaut and current Arizona senator, Mark Kelly: “I used to think that engineering and science was for smart people. Then I discovered that I’m smart people.”

Expanding the Reach

Since her own teaching was transformed, Rebecca Oravec has become a catalyst for change across her district. With support from administrators, she has launched a local community of practice modeled on the national fellowship. Participants meet monthly and receive a small stipend and grant for supplies. This year, more than 20 teachers are participating.

A similar story is playing out in the Sunnyside Unified School District in Tucson, where Jackie Nichols has started a community of practice. Along with feedback from peers and project veterans, teachers receive mentoring from high school students who took part in projects in Nichols’s middle school classroom. “They lead the learning experience,” Nichols says, putting student-centered learning into action. The web of support sustains community-engaged learning. “It lives on, even if a teacher retires,” she says.

In addition to communities of practice that are springing up locally, CommunityShare is expanding nationally by engaging with school districts, county offices of education, and nonprofits to create regional ecosystems.

Schachter cautions against thinking of community partnerships as “one more thing” to add to already full plates. Instead, he suggests looking at existing initiatives—such as STEM, career education, or portrait-of-a-graduate profiles—and asking how they could benefit from engaging the community. When students learn in partnership with their communities, he says, “they are not the only learners. How are educators growing? How is the community learning from the student perspective?” Partners are often surprised, he adds, “by how much they get from the experience.”