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 Steuer.
Episode 19 of 20, Final Presentations. It's time for the megaphone. Just like you might use a megaphone on field day to make sure everyone can hear you or start a race or lead a cheer at a football game, presentations are the megaphone for student voice. When we talk about impact like we just did in the last episode, we talk about empowerment. That's what presentations do. They are the megaphone. They amplify students' voices and their ideas, ensuring that their perspectives and their solutions are heard and valued by others. It's a big deal. Every teacher can use public presentations to amplify the voice of their learners with these three best practices. The first best practice, encourage multiple ways to present. Open it up. Again, there will be a continuum for this, right? You can't just tell your learners the first time you're doing PBL "present however you want." I just did, again, a podcast episode with a teacher, and what he does is he offers some ways to present, like we'll talk about here in a second, and then learners are allowed to pitch to him a different way to present. So they say, "Well, I know that we were supposed to do some digital storytelling, performances. We're going to build a PSA or Google Slides presentation, but could I act this out in a performance?" And you're in biology, and Mr. White might say, "Uh, tell me some more about that. How will you show evidence of mastery of these standards?" And maybe he buys it, maybe he doesn't. But the learners know they can pitch it, and they know that Mr. White might accept it, but he might not, right? So there's always that extra piece. I like having the wild card of if a learner has an idea that personally makes sense to them, as long as they're mastering those standards and you're comfortable with it, go for it. It makes sense, right? So there are a lot of different ways to do this. But having multiple ways to present will really accommodate the different strengths and comfort levels of your different learners. Comfort level is more important than you might think. We all know that idea that some of the biggest fears that, again, adults have, is public speaking, right? Often, more than taxes and death. So people don't like public speaking.
It gets a bad rap. It's really a muscle, right, that we need to help our learners really start to work and hone. They need some practice. So before you get to these final presentations that we're talking about right now, you should have some smaller, low stress practices. So you might have a workshop on presentations where you really just have your learners talk for 30 seconds on any topic to the person next to them. And you might even start with like, "Hey, pick your groups, right? Find somebody you're comfortable with and talk about bicycles for 30 seconds, talk about bananas for 30 seconds, and go, go, go." And you make it kind of silly, right? You can go first, and, like, "Well, I like bananas because they're yellow." And you'll run out of things to say, and it's okay. But as you get better at this, you're, it's easier for you to kind of talk in front of other people. You need to help your learners with this. I had a super awful experience with one of my learners. He, Jim, was a, a tough kid and came from a tough environment, and, but he was trying really hard in my classroom, like he was really trying, and we were doing these presentations in front of the class, and we were just doing straight, you stood up and you talk to 30 kids, right? And I had a little podium because, again, we're talking about comfort. You know, kids might want to put their hands in there or have something to read. And Jim came up, and he had written some original poetry. It's like, "All right, Jim, go ahead and share it." And he wasn't first. He was kind of in the mix. So I thought he'd be good. And he came up, and no words came out of his mouth. So I said, "Hey, no problem, Jim. Just step back, try again." Step back. We did it three different times. And just, words didn't come out, like he wanted to. He was trying. And then, little, little girl up front just let a little, small giggle. She wasn't trying to be mean. It wasn't, like, a mean girl thing. It was just, words weren't coming out of, Chris's mouth, so it was a little bit different. And that little giggle was kind of what he was looking for. He, he was looking for an escape out. He was in fight-or-flight mode.
And he just kind of flipped the bird on both hands to the whole class and said, "I'm out." It's like, "Oh man, that was awful." So he went out. I talked to Chris, you know, and, but what happened? What happened was, is he was not comfortable, right? He wasn't ready. We didn't have enough smaller presentations to get him ready, uh, to perform in front of the whole class. And that's totally my fault. That's not his fault. He is where he is. It's our job to provide these additional scaffolding to help our learners get there. So multiple ways to present. I like that idea because you're giving some choice in that, right? So it's going to build some autonomy. We talked about choice, building, autonomy, and agency. They need to think through and pick the best, the best, uh, mode of presentation for themselves to present mastery. I do think the comfort level is important here, too, and that's they're practicing, and maybe they're going to pick something that allows them to have, you know, slides on the board right up on your projector, and they like that idea. Maybe they're just going to have notecards. Maybe they're not going to have anything. But allows them to pick their comfort level. And you can certainly poke different areas to help them grow in that. But especially as you're starting out with these presentations, maybe for the first time, comfort level is important, important, and offering choice is important. The second best practice is that idea of structure. So if we go, dive into structures a little deeper, I would say that you should never have a full-on presentation without a practice presentation. There needs to be some kind of practice that happens for a couple of reasons. You need to know what your learners are going to say when you have community partners in the room. But it's also super high stress, right? You now have strangers in the room that your learners have never met, and they're going to be presenting these ideas, and they have all these questions, like, "Are these people in suits? Like, are they nice? Are they mean? Are they going to judge me? What will they say?" And all those things are happening in your learner's brains while they're trying to process and present.
So you want to talk about that in a practice presentation. And you want their, the talk that they're going to give, the presentation they're going to give, you want that to be the easier part because standing up the day of, that's a whole learning experience in and of itself. And that first one will be tricky, and after a while your learners will get it. And then suddenly they're not afraid to present. They're excited to present. And what does that do for them opportunity-wise, compared to the rest of society? Most people are afraid to present or talk in front of their peers. What if your learners didn't? It opens up this brand new door for them. It's so important. I had a learner that, uh, he went to Purdue, you know, took that college route, and then he went to go work for John Deere, and he was an engineer. But the CEO of John Deere was coming through his plant, just in, you know, kind of one of those tours, right, that CEOs do and taking pictures and that kind of thing, but he was so confident in talking to community partners because it had been instilled in him that he had thought about it ahead of time. What will I say to the CEO when he comes through my department? And he stopped and shook his hand and had a conversation with the CEO. That doesn't happen in a company that big, right? And there's a picture of him, like, uh, online in the paper, you know, like, having this moment. But it's because he was so comfortable presenting and talking to people that he didn't know. He learned that skill through project-based learning, and your learners can know the same thing. It just opens up so many opportunities. The structures are important. So, practice presentations, probably the biggest one. The next biggest one, I think, is the scheduling of, of the presentations. Your learners want to know before the day of when they're going to be presenting. They really want to know, like, on Monday, if they're presenting on Thursday, they want, I know on Monday, "Am I before or after lunch? You know, am I going to have a little time to prep, or am I the first one?" Right? And that's important.
And you say, "Well, just do it." It's like, "Well, maybe." But if they're new to presenting, I think we need to give them the benefit of the doubt and give them the additional comfort, if you will, of knowing when they present. The same thing happens when I go to present at a conference. I never show up, and they say, "Hey, Ryan, you're number three." It's always, you know, "It's Saturday at 3:30. You've got that slot, right? Or you're the 9:30 slot, you're the slot right before lunch. So be super engaging and don't go long," right? There are just, there are different nuances to when it is that you present. So getting that schedule out, it's an important thing. The third best practice is going to be that final presentations at some point are a little anticlimactic, right? It's not where you're taking all of your grades. The assessment leading up to, or during a practice round, allows for a much more thorough assessment of the actual content standards, right? It's a less stressful experience for the teacher, the opportunities for students to make improvements, it happens during those workshop times. So then, when you get to the final presentation, the content grades have been given at this point, right? You're, you're going to assess presentation skills, of course, but your learners are really celebrating and showing off all the things that they've been learning for the last four to six weeks. They're showing off the solution to a real-world problem to people that care about this real-world problem, right? Like how cool is that? Like, you're elevating all the work that they've been doing, and you're showing it off, giving them that autonomy, right? It's that megaphone of voice, right? The impact that they're having, and we're celebrating that impact rather than creating this, you know, high stress event that we're going to try to grade everything on. By the way, we've seen that, too, right? You've got your rubrics, you've got four, uh, four learners up in front of you, and you're trying to grade if they know their content standards based on what they're saying, [unintelligible] in a presentation. It's impossible. Please don't do it, right? Like, get your content grades before the final presentation. Get them during the workshops.
It works better for everybody. That there's a time where you can actually have makeup workshops so they can do better on their, their content grades, right? So then the presentation, as authentic as possible, right? As authentic as possible. They're just presenting their solution to people that care about this problem, and we're trying to make the world a better place. It makes it so much on. Your learners will love it, and they will step up. They will step up. It'll be awesome. So as you go into presentations, it is a portion that I think is super important in project-based learning because from day one at your entry event, you're talking about the presentation that's going to happen four weeks later. You're saying, "Hey, we're going to do all this great work, and then you're going to present it to an authentic audience." "Why do I have to do this?" "Because your work's important, and we're going to tell this authentic audience about it." Okay? "Why do I have to do this? Why do I have to make up this grade? Like I got to see, I'm fine with a C?" "Well, because I need you to really know your content for when you do the presentation." And this presentation, the authenticity of the work is, it's held all the way through your entire unit. Super important to your process. So you want to bring presentations in, and you want to bring in outside community partners. Uh, we had a group that we worked with, um, down in Florida, and before we went, we said, "Well, what do you guys need?" We always ask that, like, "Well, how can we best help you?" And they said, "Well, we're doing PBL. We're taking all the steps, but we feel like we don't have the engagement from our learners." It's like, "Okay. Well, send us your planning forms and let's take a look before we come down." And we looked, and every one of their planning forms, they had some neat ideas. They were based in standards, some neat end products were creating, but they presented them to classroom teacher, classroom teacher, classroom teacher over and over again. It was really a pretty, pretty quick fix in that case. It was, "Let's bring in some community partners." So we went down and trained their teachers and how to bring community partners
in and how to utilize those community partners in every portion of the PBL process. And, boom, engagement skyrockets because now I'm presenting to someone that's also tackling the same problem I am, right? Like we're making a difference in the world. Presentations can be game-changers. You will not want to do without them once you get them going. So those three best practices, again, you're going to have multiple ways to present. You're going to be looking at strengths and comfort levels of your learners. You're going to have structures, like practice presentation and schedules. And the last thing you're going to do is, in your final presentations, you're not taking a ton of content grades. You're going to make it a celebration of solving this real-world problem and being that megaphone of your learner's voice so they can see their impact. It's going to be exciting. You've made it to episode 19 of 20. Would you please take two minutes to pause and leave a review? It doesn't have to be a Shakespearean sonnet, and you can always go back and edit your review if you don't like it tomorrow. But the review really helps other inspired teachers just like you find these resources, and it makes us better. Thank you for taking two minutes to leave a review. It really means a lot to me. Oh my, we're almost done. You're almost all the way through. Don't stop now. I'll talk with you in the last episode. You've got this.
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