Welcome to the Binge PBL for Teachers 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 episodes for inspired classroom teachers exploring project-based learning. Learn the lingo, develop your skills, teach inspired. Here's your host, Ryan Stoyer.
Episode 20 of 20 steps to support your PBL growth. You made it. Welcome to the world of project-based learning. It's a wonderful and life-changing world, honestly, for you and for your learners. You'll find that the PBL movement makers that you come across on your journey are wonderfully accepting. They're always ready to help someone improve their practice. Jump in and ask. Remember to ask them, "How has PBL changed your life?" Go do a school visit. Ask that question. How has PBL changed your life as a teacher and it welcomes you into a life of continuous improvement. You're going to live the mindsets and the processes here. You're going to have protocols of the next Thanksgiving dinner. Like people might roll their eyes, but they're also going to do it and it's going to be awesome. It's just the way we start to see the world. Every teacher can grow their PBL practice with these three moves. The first one is to build support systems. Don't PBL alone. Find some PBLers that you jive with. Maybe you follow them on social media, right? There are some PBL movement makers that are just great follows. It's just great to see what they're doing in their classroom. It's inspiring and it gives you ideas. It might be you go to a school visit and there's somebody else at that school that you stay in touch with. It might be a small group within your school or your district and you meet Wednesday mornings at 6 just to talk about cool PBL stuff. That's how I started, by the way. It was just a small group group of teachers and every Wednesday morning we would meet and we invited anybody. It was open to anyone. We'd ask the whole school who wants to come and learn more about project-based learning. And that's how we built our first school within a school. It started with a small group of inspired, excited teachers that wanted something different for their learners. Don't PBL alone. Build your support system. The second move for your PBL journey is to embed critical friends groups in the different practices and protocols into your daily life. If you are if you go ahead and do the PBL simplified book study for instance, invite some colleagues into that scenario. And again, they don't have to be in your school.
They could be it could be grade level, could be uh just people that you know via again social media. Do the book study, but also do a critical friends group. That's that tuning protocol piece where you're going to send somebody your project planning form and then they're going to give you likes and wonders. It is so prevalent in the PBL world to do that. We love it, right? We just love it. We want to see your idea and then you're inviting us in. So, we want to give you likes, wonders, and some resources and some tips, right? And it's something that we can do pretty quickly. In fact, I still do it. So, if if you can actually reply to an email, we'll put my contact information in here, but I and then I actually leave Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays open just for this process of of continuous feedback because it it's energizing, right? It's energizing and it just fuels movement makers. Like I said at the very beginning, PBL movement makers, they're just wonderfully accepting. They love the work and they want you to be successful. I want you to be successful, but I want you to know that's a heart of really all PBLers. They've got that heart. So, if you've been to a workshop and you've got info from your facilitator, email them. Hey, here's my project planning form. Can you give me likes and wonders? They're going to do it. have some people locally. Can you give me some likes and wonders before I launch this PBL unit? Make it part of your structure, right? So, start however you need to, but then build your own structures. Those critical friends groups, they just make you better and it invites other people into your movement so that things can continue to grow. The third option for improving your PBL practice is to join the movement. Join the larger PBL movement that's happening. We're looking to have 51% of schools using project-based learning by 201. And it's happening. The movement's already started. We've got full schools, we've got lone wolves, we've got small groups, we've got K2, we've got full elementaryaries, middle schools, high schools, colleges that are all moving towards project-based learning because we see that the world is shifting. It needs different things from our learners.
And that's what we want for them. We want them to be successful when they leave us. And this is one way that we've seen that it works. So, It's growing. So, how do you join the movement practically? One, just reach out. Like, we'd love to have you on our radar, right? So, we'd love to connect with you via social media. Again, you could just email us, but you can also join the PBL movement online community. So, what it is is it's a ton of things. We tried to put as much value into this to make it a no-brainer as possible. So, the price of a one-day conference, you get two virtual conferences and a one-day conference, right? So, you get all the those conferency things if you like those things, right? Some people just love a good conference because you get a ton of information and you can apply it as you want to when you want to. So you get that but you also get on demand courses from the top need to know. So if you heard me mention something like group contracts or driving questions we have full courses on that that as soon as you join you can instantly start to take those and we see that some people come in and just boom boom boom boom boom they just well maybe maybe it's you because you did this binge PBL podcast, right? It's for you. You can just binge these courses. Like I said, the group contract course alone will make your life better tomorrow because you'll have the resources to make groups clear and you'll know what to do to to mediate groups and instant instant value right there. There's also a project library that you can get into. We actually don't have a public project library because we found that people would take their projects, go out of our ecosystem, and it turned into bad PBL. because they didn't have support and we don't want bad PBL. We want authentic PBL that changes lives. So once you're in the community, we have this project library that you can jump into and see what others are doing. We've got a Facebook group that is vibrant and interactive. It is not one of those where you ask a question and it's like you hear a pin drop. We've actually got moderators from Magnify Learning in there that are stirring things up.
So you get you know that you're getting some expert answers, but you're also crowdfunding from people from all over the country. So, you're getting project ideas. You say, "Hey, I've got this driving question. Does anybody have community partner ideas, right? We put a bunch of content out there to say,"Hey, this is join this challenge to launch your first 30 days of the school year. You've got webinars. You've got things that are continually being updated. You've got coaching days. You can ask any question you want in that community and we will answer it." Isn't that awesome? Like, we want to be that community that's super vibrant, that is there to support you on your PBL journey. So, don't PBL alone build your own ecosystem, your own critical friends groups, right? And also be a part of the larger movement because we need you. You're going to have ideas that we've never thought of before and we want to share those with others in the PBL movement across the country and we were going to have some ideas that you didn't have and some resources. If you're staying up till midnight creating new resources like rubrics and group contracts, I mean, more power to you, but you don't have to, right? We spent over a decade creating these and testing them in the classroom. That's where they all come from. They're all proven and classroom tested. And then they're also editable. So, we don't expect you to use it just as we have it. We expect you to take that and modify it and customize it for your environment. Isn't that awesome? Gosh, I think it's awesome. It's exciting. We're going to hit 51 by 51. Um, couldn't be more excited about it. Things are growing and we want you to be a part of it. So, that's your next step. We've actually got in the show notes a free pager that gives you five reasons that your principal should put you into the POC. Five reasons your principal should put you in the POC because we've got people that fund this personally, but it also fits into title two buckets or title four buckets for professional development. And you're talking about the cost of a one-day workshop. And in fact, it's usually much cheaper than some of the other folks out there for that one-day workshop.
And you get a whole year of support. It's such a big deal. It's growing. and we want you to be a part of that movement. So, I've just super glad that you've been with me on this PBL journey, that you've started your journey. You allowed me to walk alongside you to be one of your collaborators. Again, don't PBL alone, right? I've mentioned 19 different calls to actions throughout this PBL binge episode for teachers, and we're going to try to list all of those in the show notes of this one episode. So, if you look in the show notes of episode 20, as long as the system will let us put them in there, we're try to put all 19 different resources in one spot so that you can grab them. So you can go back, listen to the different episodes that you like to brush up on. You can take the PBL master class for teachers. You can join the PMOC. You got a lot of different options. Uh we want you to teach with passion and purpose. So you can make a super positive difference in the life of your learners. That's why you got into this. It's a calling. You're passionate. We want you to teach like you've always wanted to teach. We want you to do it today. Today, we want you to do it in your area, in your content area, and I know that you can. And I know because we have PBL movement makers just like you all around the country. You've got this. It's time to take the next step of your PBL journey so that you can teach inspired. That's just what I needed to bring PBL to my learners. If that sounds like you, please consider rating and reviewing the show. It only takes 2 minutes to scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select Write a review. Then be sure to let us know what was most helpful about that episode. Your review helps the next inspired classroom teacher just like you find their why and teach inspired.
