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 18 of 20. Voice is not the same as choice. They just rhyme. I've got twin boys and they are such an awesome adventure. They can read each other's thoughts. They're their best friends. They can help each other in all kinds of different situations, but they're different. Like super different. One's introverted and wants to be in the woods chasing birds. The other one is super extroverted and wants to be on his mountain bike like out jumping over whatever he possibly can. Always have been super different dudes. They grew up in the same house, but very different dudes. udes. I feel like voice and choice kind of get lumped together in the same way because the same thing happens with our twins where they say, "Well, do the twins do this?" It's like, "Well, they're different people, so they do different things." Voice and choice is the same way. Don't lump them together. I mean, you're going to say them together because they rhyme. I get that. But I think it's really important to know the difference. Every teacher can bring voice and choice in their classroom at different levels, but you should know the difference. Choice Choice is different than voice. Choice is about autonomy and agency. You're giving choice like maybe you have a choice board for instance. You're allowing me to pick what I will individually, you know, create to show mastery of my learning. I've got autonomy of that. You're letting me choose. In fact, the agency portion is you're really forcing me to choose. You're forcing me to take the effort to choose these different things to show mastery. That's what happens when we give our learners choice. You get to sit where you want, right? Hey guys, this nine weeks, no seating chart. I'm not assigning it. You can sit where you want and then I'll make the seating chart. Whoa. You've given me autonomy to pick my seat. You've given me agency to think through, should I really sit next to my buddy who's just going to talk the whole time and not get any of my work done. Should I sit in the back where I can just kind of hide out or should I sit up front because I know that if I sit in the front kind of that T area that I'll learn best.
So, we're providing an opportunity for choice being autonomy and agency. Now, what about voice? Voice is about impact. Students all don't all know how to use their voice because often they've been taught in our systems to be passive and compliant, which means often quiet and not really giving their opinion. So, voice is often discouraged and quieted when you when we speak up. So, what we're doing with voice is we're giving our learners a chance for impact. We're letting them say, "Hey, your voice is important." This is a big portion of moving from passive to active. Passively, I can sit back and say, "Well, most of the time you just ask me to talk if I raise my hand. So, I'm not going to raise my hand. I can passively sit here and I can still get a good grade, but I'm going to passively do it." Or maybe I'm not going to get a grade, right? I'm going to passively sit here. If you call on me, I'm going to be grumpy about it. Which is fair because if you were in a faculty meeting and the principal called on you, you'd probably be grumpy, too, right? Because you weren't asking to be called on. But when we start to give our learners voice, they start to step up and they want to speak. They want to be empowered. They know that their voice matters in your classroom. So when you ask for likes and wonders at the end of a PBL unit or you ask for ideas of how to rearrange your classroom so that it best fits collaboration, you're asking for your learner's voice. And that is super empowering, right? That's going to move me from passive to active. Now I get to have impact on this classroom because I'm going to give my voice and you're going to make one small change. So even if you don't take my idea, you asked for my idea. You considered it and that's really all I want. I just want to be heard. So that voice is about impact. Choice is about autonomy and agency. So you want to look at them separately. They certainly work together to build your culture, but you want to look at them separately to make sure that you're addressing both right and getting what you want. Now the third aspect of voice and choice is the idea that it's I think it's on a continuum.
It's how I like to talk to teachers about this because you've got some teachers that you you kind of start out where it's like you're going to sit where I tell you to sit. You're going to use a Tyonderoga pencil. You can ask to sharpen your pencil and maybe I'll let you at a lot of times. And you start to move across and you say, "Well, you know what? You can pick your seat, right? There's some teacher. Go ahead, just pick your seat and you can use a you can use a book fair pencil. That'd be fine." You know, you're kind of moving across and then you keep going and then eventually you hit anarchy over here, right? If you keep giving all voice and choice to the learners, eventually hit an anarchy and anarchy is not good in any level of education, right? It's just it doesn't work. So, there's some portion where you're most comfortable and where your learners are most comfortable. Now, I'm going to guess that anarchy is very empowering and that there's a lot of autonomy in that. However, it doesn't work well in school. So, as you're going across, yes, it's building that autonomy and agency as you're giving choice and it's building the impact and empowerment as you're giving voice. It's true. As you go across, but you've got to be at a place where your learners are ready for that and you've got to be at a place where you're ready for that. Like that's okay. You just want to take a step that makes the most sense for you, right? So, as you're doing looking at voice and choice, you're looking at them separately, but they still rhyme, so it's so easy to put them together. But voice and choice is going to look different for third graders than for sophomores. And it might be flip-flopped if third graders have been in a PBL environment, it's the end of the year, like they might be able to use a bunch of voice and choice. and sophomores at the beginning of the year that have only been taught in a traditional classroom, they might implode with too much voice and choice. What do I want to do? I don't know. Where do I sit? What do I want to study? I have no idea. Stop it. Just tell me what to do. Right? So, it depends on where your learners are at and where you're at.
So, when we say you should bring voice and choice in your classroom, don't freak out and just hand over your car keys to the kids. Right? That's not it. It's take some small steps, see what works, and if you go a little too far, just come right back. Hey guys, we tried this. I think voices and choice is important because I want to give you autonomy. I want to empower you, but that went a little too far and it didn't seem like it worked. Do you guys think that it worked really well? No, we don't. It was It was too loud. It was kind of chaotic. We weren't sure what to do. Just bring it back a little bit. You can always do that, right? So, just move your way across. Build autonomy and agency with your learners with choice. Build their empowerment. Move from passive to active by giving them a voice. And you'll start to hear what it is. that they want and you're able to customize and personalize the learning through that. And then just remember that you're all on a continuum. So give yourself grace, try some things out, fail forward. All right. If you've been picking up what we're putting down in this binge PBL for teachers podcast, you might also want to jump into the PBL master class for teachers. So if you're ready to run faster on your PBL journey, the PBL master class is going to give you the full overview of PBL from entry event to presentation. Will you be a PBL certified teacher by the end of this master class? No. PBL certification takes years. It takes a lot of feedback. It takes implementation. It takes a lot of training. But this master class will help you jump into the full vocabulary and processes of PBL to give you a full overview in less than an hour. Some teachers will go for the master class to get an overview of PBL and then go deeper with exactly what you're doing. So you might be coming from one going to the other. You might suggest it differently for your colleagues of where you think they would best fit. And then some of our teachers go straight into the PBL movement online community because they're ready to level up. Some will go from the master class straight to the POC, that online community. Some want to go through these podcasts first. Everybody has a little bit different path.
You might be a north that's like going to go after it. You might be a west that wants a bunch of details. However you do it, it's totally fine. We just want to make sure that we're alongside you for your PBL journey. We want to help you. So that's another option for you would be the PBL master class. You'll see the link in the show notes. What about public presentations? Isn't that important in PBL? It is. Totally is. So let's check out the next episode. Get an overview and key tips for success.
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