Welcome to the Binge PBL for Administrators podcast brought to you by Magnify Learning, your customized PBL partner. From over a decade of experience with you in the trenches, we are bringing you 20 podcast episodes for visionary school administrators exploring project-based learning. Launch your vision, develop your staff, lead inspired. Here's your host, Ryan Steuer.
Episode 19 of 20. Consider time, space, and systems. Remember the Dixie Elementary example I used in episode 12? They're a Title 1 school, went from a D to an A using project-based learning. You should go visit. Yes, to feel the culture. Yes, to talk to the teachers. Yes, to talk to principals, to talk to the kids. But they also have some awesome spaces. They have some spaces filled with tables, chairs, uh just just like these different meeting areas that just breathe learning to life. In any situation you bring your learners in there, and they know that collaboration is about to happen, right? They know that something different is happening. Innovating, like creative thoughts are just oozing out of them. The same thing happens to the teachers. They're like, "How can I use this space a little differently?" Our National Model School, it's a high school in Indiana, has an amazing collaborative space as well. They have these collaboration booths. It's like a restaurant booth, but kind of the They call it the collaborator. And you can see when you go visit during a school day, you'll see learners in there collaborating, and it's such a great space for that because what else can you do, right? Your stuff's going to be touching somebody else's stuff. Like it's meant for collaboration. There's glass walls. The staff meeting room uh is all one big giant room. So the teachers have their individual kind of cubby areas on the outside of the room, and in the middle is just this giant table where they can meet. So, most of the time when teachers are on their prep they're in the middle, right? They're They're there collaborating, and they might be working on a few things, but they can always bounce ideas off each other. And then if they know they need true individual time, then they step away back to their desk that's to the side. But the emphasis, the inertia, is towards collaboration. Our national model school is a K-12 environment down in Florida. It has not only withstood two direct hits from hurricanes because it's completely solar powered, but it also has amazing collaborative spaces. So just the idea that it's in uh a community that's solar-powered, the schools are solar powered uh.
It it's meant to withstand these hurricanes and in fact has so it becomes this beacon of help and hope for the community during those times, which is amazing. The learners know how important their buildings are. And this space is again just show that hey, we're going to be working together and at every level, right at elementary, middle school, high school every level showing we're going to work together. That's what we do here. So, what does it look like for you? Because we've developed a pattern, haven't we, with our model schools that we're talking about right now? You might not be able to redesign your whole school, but we really need to ask the question, what can you do? And if you get your teachers asking that question, what can they do? You're multiplying the innovation. So, let's find out. I think you've got this because every administrator can help their teachers develop the third teacher in the room, and you need as many teachers as you can get. So, use these three tips for developing innovative, supportive spaces.
Tip number one, use backward design again to describe the kind of teaching and learning that will take place in your building or your district. And you can do this in a faculty meeting. You can have teachers do this idea. It's that begin with the end in mind. What do you want your learners to be doing? "Well, I want them to be collaborating. I want them to be using tuning protocols. I want their work to get better because they're together, not because they're separate and isolated." Okay, let's look at your room. Where are some spaces where things could become collaborative? And this is an exercise that teachers can do with their students even. They can show the Sir Ken Robinson video like, is education killing creativity? You show that video and it starts to spur some of the creative juices. And then the learners are tasked with how could you re rem uh repurpose these spaces that we have to create more collaboration and more innovation, right? And they say, "Well, we want to buy a million dollars worth of desks." "Well neat, what if we took our desks from rows and put them together in pods? Would that also create an area of collaboration?" "Yeah, I suppose it would," right.
So, find There are things that you can do right now that would help that that third teacher in the room that would move some of those spaces. And you can drive that at the administrative level, the teacher level, and you can even empower your teachers to take it down to the student level. They don't have to take every suggestion that the students give, but it starts to create some empowerment. And it gets people thinking, oh, we should be collaborating. The second tip is to eliminate systems that inhibit collaboration. So that is the single seat desks, the the presentation port at the front of the room. So does a teacher have to be in the front of the room, or is there a way to move them to the side, or around uh to the back, right? So we want to move towards systems that support innovative learning. So if you have an idea where you can get flexible furniture, maybe you've got moving walls, open spaces, you know, do you have a large group instruction area, the media center, is there a grant that you can look for within your district? I I really want to start spurring this. And right now you might think, well, I don't have a million dollars or $100,000 to do this, Ryan. Like I get that, but I want you to have your ear out. So, in the district, when somebody says, hey, there's this grant for flexible seating, does anybody want to go after that? If you aren't ready for that or you're not interested in that, it'll just go right by you. Right now I want your brain to think, I'm looking for that opportunity, and it'll start to come. You'll start to hear it out there in the world, and you'll want to take advantage of that. And even if you can't do every classroom, if you can do one space, an innovative space that teachers can you know that can check out, or everybody gets one innovative space to redo, there's small things that you can do that create more innovations. The third tip is to let go. You've got to let go some of the control as well as the administrator. You're asking your teachers to do that in the classroom so that students can be more empowered. You need to do some of the same things.
So what does that mean? It means that students can lead tours. Students can give tours to visitors that come. The students can sit on interview committees. We need them to have an authentic voice. And I know that you're really good at those things. You're really good at talking about your school. I We need you to get your students to be really good at talking about your school. And that'll take some practice. You're going to need to bring them in during lunch and feed them, give them some extra snacks and then let them practice going from the office down to their room with the community partner. What are the questions that you'll ask? What are the really important things about our school you think somebody else would want to know? You know, how do you make small talk and conversation? And let your students start to do that. And again, I know you're good at it. I know that you've got that talk. You can do that. You're the leader. That's why you do that. But you need to start empowering others to do that same thing. And you can do that. And as you do that, your students are now taking ownership of their building, of their classroom. And it starts to shift in a way that's almost hard to measure. You say, "Well, what's that secret sauce in those PBL model schools that you went to visit?" This is it. It's the empowerment of their learners to do the things that adults typically do. It's such a big deal. So, when you're looking at at time, spaces, and systems, you want to look at it a little bit differently. You want to look at how can you innovate those things? How can you look at your schedule and your time, your meeting times, so that you're maximizing the collaborative nature of those times when you have people together, certain subsets together, your faculty meeting, and I know I've harped on this a lot during these episodes, but I think it's so important. You cannot let them just go grade papers in their individual classrooms. I know that they're overwhelmed or they say they're overwhelmed. But is that really what's going to be best for them long-term to get a few papers graded? It's not. This is the time where your teachers can come together and collaborate and be empowered and be inspired and be encouraged. That's what you need to use that time for. And then how do you use those spaces effectively?
Use the space that you already have. How? Start there. Do not wait for a $200,000 grant. And I'm all for $200,000 grants to get new spaces and new furniture and all those pieces, system. I like it. But there's something that can happen right now. And if you can start to empower your teachers and your students to look at that, you're not doing all the work. You're not going to redo every classroom. You're not going to do 237, 239, 241 is coming up tomorrow. No, that's not it at all. You're trying to empower. And that's part of the systems piece is how do you let go and how do you let your teachers and your students empower and innovate. All right, that's episode 19 of 20. We're almost there, almost done. You've made it this far. Would you please take 2 minutes to pause and leave a review for these binge episodes? It doesn't have to be a Shakespearean sonnet. I don't need the flourishy words, and you can always go back and edit your review if you don't like it tomorrow if you say it's something that you want to redo. But the review really helps other inspired leaders just like you find these resources. It makes us all better. So, thank you for taking the two minutes to leave a review. It really means a lot to me. Here we go. We're almost all the way through. Don't stop now. I'll talk with you in the very last episode. You've got this.
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