Just stumbled upon this great tool from the Harvard Business School for creating Elevator Pitches. I love Elevator Pitches as a focusing tool to help people get clear on what they are working on and why. There is something incredibly powerful about the notion of having one-minute in a confined space to share your idea with someone who could potentially make it come to life.

As a tool in PBL, an elevator pitch makes for a great benchmark or portion of a final product. A common early stage benchmark in a project involves groups choosing a topic or direction for their project. While this is an obvious step in any project that involves choices around topic, medium, audience, etc, we often miss opportunities to engage students in deep critical thinking by allowing them to pass through this step without doing the real comparative work that making choices involve.

Having students work through a full elevator pitch using the HBS tool focuses their critical and comparative thinking, scaffolds the writing process, and gives them some really neat features for analyzing the quality of their potential pitch.

This was first published on 12/17/12 on @edutwitt 's blog Abundance in Education where you can find even more posts around project based learning.