Each new generation of students enters university with a different set of experiences, expectations, and skills, and instructors’ pedagogical methods must adapt to meet them. This is the context in which L. J. Sobehrad and S. J. Sobehrad situate their work on the use of Project Based Learning (PBL) in the History classroom. The book begins with a summary of the current situation in higher education regarding student demographics and History courses offered in the authors’ home state of Texas. They use this as a basis for presenting the difficulties of teaching undergraduate History, supporting their argument that we cannot expect students to have, let alone master, skills that we do not ourselves teach them. They thus propose PBL as a method whereby students acquire mastery not just of historical content but also of practical historical skills.

Chapter 1 begins with a survey of History courses versus enrollment numbers across Texas universities, introducing the question of students’ expectations entering university and universities’ ability to meet them. This sets up a recurring theme throughout the book: setting course goals and assessments’ ability to measure them. For example, discrete testing (such as multiple choice) provides students and teachers alike with no feedback beyond content that a student failed to memorize, focusing on performance rather than on improvement. The authors suggest instead a focus on skill acquisition while acknowledging that this requires the sacrifice of content coverage. In other words, students engage more deeply with a narrower breadth of course material.

Chapter 2 proposes PBL as a method to address these concerns, describing the history of PBL and its various iterations under different names. This serves not just as a defense of PBL as a legitimate pedagogy but also as a critique of current pedagogical training and of Academia’s ability to meet current student needs. The authors argue that PBL is an effective strategy to combat these systemic issues, focusing on learning-centered course design rather than content-centered course design. While not explicitly tied to PBL, this chapter also introduces “culturally responsive teaching,” relating both methodologies to intentional course design. Designing a course with intention places emphasis on skills rather than on content, and, further, it is not the instructor but the students who choose the content. While granting students this autonomy would seemingly require a certain omniscience on the part of the instructor, solutions to this problem are proposed in the following chapters.

Reiterating the dangers of misaligned learning goals and outcomes, Chapter 3 emphasizes intentional course design, seeking to situate PBL within activity theory by proposing daily activities such as in-class debates, leading summary discussions, and engaging with peers’ writing. The reviewer would add that this is good advice for courses even beyond History. Alongside these activities, the authors insist on real-life, hands-on, authentic practices in the classroom. To intentionally plan a course, the authors introduce several key factors, such as “the driving question” and student reflective activities, which are explained in further detail in the following chapters.

Indeed, the last three chapters focus on practical application of PBL, describing and giving examples of the aforementioned components of project design. Chapter 4 focuses on project management, with an emphasis on teaching students how to collaborate. To this end, the chapter provides several scaffolded protocols for managing student collaboration, including conflict resolution, as well as examples of activities for student reflection as mentioned above. Chapter 5 emphasizes the importance of integrating technology into the classroom, pointing out that Medieval Studies-Digital Humanities projects thus far have focused on content delivery rather than on teaching. The authors call for a reorientation of this trend, which would additionally parallel their intentions for the classroom. The chapter engages with multimodal literacy proficiency as a vital pathway to future generations of students’ learning and sense-making. It also includes examples of potential DH projects, integrated into a matrix that ties together the key terms from Chapters 3 and 4, demonstrating how project management fits into intentional course design.

Finally, Chapter 6 gives several explicit examples of projects for the History classroom, from full term projects to unit projects (four to six weeks) and short-term, limited outcomes projects (one to two weeks). The project examples are scaffolded to include learning outcomes, rubrics, assessments, and supplemental instructions for the instructor, all integrated into the design and management elements outlined in Chapters 3 and 4. The book ends with a brief epilogue, reiterating the defense of PBL based on current trends in higher education enrollment and PBL’s unique positioning to respond to these trends.

The book includes four detailed Appendices, which include: International and US historical standards for instructors’ use in developing explicit course learning outcomes; grading rubrics and rubrics for scaffolding historical skill acquisition; supplemental tools for students, such as rubrics for evaluating sources and grading their partner’s or group’s contribution to the project; and results of the surveys conducted across Texas universities that informed the studies described in Chapter 1.

Medieval History in the Modern Classroom is a pedagogical tool that models its own proposed methodologies. Each chapter begins with explicitly stated learning outcomes, modeling by example the intentional course planning proposed in Chapters 2 and 3 and, indeed, modeling how instructors should scaffold each lesson and each course project. The reviewer does wish, however, that the book itself had been more explicitly scaffolded, as there is content overlap across Chapters 3 through 5 which can make the text hard to follow. For example, the driving question is first mentioned in Chapter 2 but is not outlined until Chapter 3 and examples not given until Chapter 6. This overlap makes the book recursive, as any good pedagogy should be--another excellent way to model by example. However, subheadings provided in the Table of Contents or perhaps project examples given up-front would help the reader to cross-reference the different steps in the PBL process. As is, this reviewer would recommend that novice instructors read Chapter 6 first so as to have a template onto which to map subsequent chapters.

The authors explicitly state that the intended audience for this book is instructors of undergraduate medieval History who have likely not been formally trained in pedagogy (ix). However, the reviewer would add that the book’s arguments are applicable across disciplines, and there are two points upon which the authors could have insisted: 1) instructors of literature, language, philosophy, composition, and beyond can easily tailor the project examples given in Chapter 6 to their respective classes; and 2) the historical skills developed through these sample projects can be translated into a toolkit of transferable skills which students can take with them throughout their academic career and onto the job market.

Medieval History in the Modern Classroom is a useful tool in terms of both practice and theory. The numerous matrices, rubrics, and outlines for scaffolded lessons are detailed, systematic, and comprehensive. Instructors, and perhaps particularly novice instructors, will find in them extremely useful templates as they intentionally design their own courses and course projects. The book is well researched and thoroughly cited, particularly Chapter 1 whose methodology is made transparent by the survey results provided in Appendix D. There are two protocols given in Chapter 4, however, where references are desired: Peer Evaluation and Conflict Resolution. Sources would be helpful to support the pedagogical basis of such protocols, especially as students are asked to manage potentially sensitive topics. These two exceptions aside, the authors provide a critical summary of related scholarly work without impeding the narrative.

The Sobehrads’ book is timely and cogent, as today’s educators seek to revise current pedagogies and develop new ones to best serve a generation of students whose high school careers were conducted almost entirely on-line. Project-Based Learning, with its emphasis on transferable, interdisciplinary skills and practical, real-world applicability, is well-placed to respond to the needs of both instructors and students.