The San Mateo-Foster City School District is expanding a project-based learning pilot that started at two elementary schools in fall 2025. Teachers from five schools attended a national training conference in 2026, according to the district. Cottage Grove Elementary in San Mateo is in its second year of building entire school days around single driving questions instead of separate subject blocks.

The district described the program's growth in a Monday, Sept. 21, news post.

Project-Based Learning (PBL) replaces traditional subject-by-subject instruction. At Cottage Grove, fifth-graders spend mornings on reading and writing tied to a unit theme, then shift to hands-on activities on the same topic in the afternoon.

"We call it ELA, but it's PBL," said Savannah Haley, a fifth-grade teacher at Cottage Grove. "We just read about it, write about it, and talk about it. So they're using all of those ELA strategies just to talk about the content."

The fall unit is called "Our Origin Story." Students start by exploring their own identity, then widen the work to examine the communities around them. They present findings to their peers.

Cottage Grove, formerly known as Lead Elementary, and Beresford Elementary were the district's two original PBL pilot schools in fall 2025. Fourth- and fifth-grade teachers at both schools began using PBL strategies after district educators attended PBL World, a national professional development conference, during the summer of 2025.

The program expanded for the 2026-2027 school year. Teachers from Bayside Academy, Beresford Elementary, Brewer Island Elementary and Sunnybrae Elementary attended PBL World alongside Cottage Grove staff, according to the district.

Pam Bartfield, the district's executive director of curriculum and instruction for elementary schools, described watching educators "engage as learners, asking big questions, collaborating across teams …" She said that set the conference apart from other professional development, in a September 2025 statement.

The district ties PBL to its 2027-2032 Community Strategic Plan. The school board approved the plan's underlying Community Vision on May 28, 2026, according to the district.

The full plan is still being developed. Its three focus areas describe what the approach looks like for students: grade-level standards built into projects rather than taught in isolation, student work made for audiences beyond the classroom, and attention to student wellbeing.

Strategy teams across the district's 22 schools are meeting in workshops through November to develop action steps. The district enrolled 9,708 students combined in the 2025-26 school year, according to state enrollment data.