Designing Your Next PBL Unit With Guided Inquiry Design®

Designing Your Next PBL Unit with Guided Inquiry Design® is a concise, practical roadmap for building sustained inquiry inside Project Based Learning.

With four focused sections, more than ten videos, a downloadable workbook, and a simple PBL + Guided Inquiry Design® planner, this course gives you everything you need to design gold-standard PBL units that are grounded in curiosity, meaningful research, and deeper learning. The inquiry structure you’ll learn also prepares students for responsible, thoughtful use of AI, making your PBL units more future-ready and grounded in deep thinking.

Dr. Leslie Maniotes—co-creator of Guided Inquiry Design®—guides your learning with clear explanations, practical tools, and a research-backed process you can use right away.

This course offers a clear, replicable design path for teachers, librarians, curriculum designers, and instructional coaches. You’ll learn how to guide the most important part of the PBL process: the middle space where students build background knowledge, explore ideas, develop their own questions, conduct research, and make meaning. With GID embedded into PBL, students approach their projects from an informed, thoughtful, and empowered stance. Isn’t that what we want for every learner?

For individuals, the course works beautifully as a self-paced experience. Set your goals, reflect on your practice using the workbook prompts, and apply the ideas to an upcoming unit you’re designing. By the end, you’ll feel completely confident adding research and inquiry to any PBL unit.

For schools and districts, this course serves as high-quality flipped content for professional development. It’s ideal for districts wanting to strengthen PBL with sustained inquiry, research literacy, and thoughtful instructional design. Use the videos and workbook to anchor collaborative planning sessions, build team alignment, and spark powerful conversations about how students learn. It works for teams, PLCs, departments, school-wide PD, and district-wide curriculum initiatives.

Let the author of Guided Inquiry Design® effectively “join your PD” and support your teachers in building richer, more rigorous, more future-ready PBL.