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 17 of 20, Inquiry, the spark that ignites the flame. Inquiry is the spark that ignites the flame of curiosity, turning passive learners into active seekers of knowledge who fuel their own intellectual growth. We're moving our learners from apathetic to engaged to empowered. And don't think this only applies to low-scoring learners. It applies to all of the learners in your classroom. I bring in some dramatic language, but it's true. True inquiry gets our learners to lean in and actually become learners, to move from student to learners. We like Trevor McKenzie's work, Inquiry Mindset. You can go to pblpress.com, pbplress.com, and we didn't we didn't help Trevor publish his book, but gosh, we like it so much, we've got it listed as one of our resources. Uh, a lot of times that's one of our giveaways because inquiry is so core to the PBL work. We really see that PBL is that instructional model that gives you the structure and the framework to make this work in your classroom from start to finish. But inquiry is what really gets our learners to dive in. The authenticity of your PBL unit is where the inquiry really kicks in and it will engage, like I said, your low-scoring learners, but your point-getters. Just because you have point-getters doesn't mean they're leaning in. It doesn't mean they're curious. It doesn't mean that they're really even trying. It just means they're getting points. And we need them to be learners, not point-getters. Because there's nobody in industry or when they get out of college that's going to say, "Hey, we're going to put 30 people in this room. We need you to consume some information and regurgitate it back to us. That doesn't happen. Every time you look at any type of survey of industry partners, the top five skills are problem-solving, collaboration, critical thinking, agency, and some form of making it happen, right? That this one kind of changes number five somewhere in there. And do they need to be able to write and speak? Yes. Like those content things are important. Do they need to have some basic math skills? Yes. But they're really going to ask for those five and they're not point-getter fives, right?
These are the ones where you have to really be a learner and have a mindset of learning. So, I think every teacher can use inquiry to spark curiosity and create active learners with these three moves. The first move is student-led questions, guiding students to develop their own driving questions, fostering ownership and curiosity. Now, this is a move. This is not a have to, right? Sometimes people come and say, "Well, the learner just has to make the driving question. I don't think there are a lot of have-tos because your classroom is different than a rural classroom in Kentucky or an urban classroom in Kansas City or you get it? Your classroom is different. Your skillset and level of PBL is different. Your learners are different. But as you start to move into bringing this inquiry in, you can have student lane questions. Maybe somebody brings a question to you. Why are so many of our learners missing school? That might be a question they bring and you turn that into a PBL unit. So you want to have the framework live the framework so that you can emulate the framework and the framework is built into a driving question. So again if you go into the book PBL Simplified you've got a free copy in episode 5, lay out the framework of a driving question and if you've got that your learners can start to plug those things in. And as you do that you're building inquiry. You're starting to get them to lean into the process. And it becomes a really big deal. And I don't know if it sounds like a big deal to you or not or if it's just one of those things that's embedded in PBL and you you have to do it. But as you do it, it starts to create that culture. And again, the culture is the current. When you get the current moving, it's it's unstoppable, right? Like water's really hard to stop and that culture is too. So whether you've got a learner that starts to get outspoken or they want to disengage, that current can really move them along. The second move is we're going to scaffold inquiry. So um you know you can just there's a lot of different frameworks for inquiry. Trevor McKenzie has again in his books and his work great follow on Instagram he's got a lot of different frameworks that you can use.
You know you can use I wonder boards. He calls them provocations you know like I I love the example he gives of you know if something's happening outside of his classroom like there's some big equipment that's starting to dig things up and learners start looking out instead of being like, "Move your eyes over here to the board, kids." He says, "Whoa, what's happening out there?" And he starts to engage their curiosity and he knows that once the curiosity is moving now he can move it back into a direction that's academic but you've got to get the curiosity muscles up and moving and running. So you've got a lot of different questioning uh structured tools that are out there. I think Trevor actually just came out with a whole book just on questions. Uh, I was talking to him and uh I just happened to mention I said, "I think this book has more questions than any book I've ever read in my life." Which makes sense from the inquiry like curiosity guy, right? And he lives this out in every school that he goes to visit. So grab some books that have just a bunch of questions in them and start to bring those out. Have a lot of questions in in your classroom. Answer questions with questions, right? I think as adults, we love to do that. If you've never done that, it's it's really fun. And then your learners start to go, "Well, if you go ask Mr. Storyer, he's just going to give you another question. But we need to know the answer. So let's go find out what the question is, right?" And But it builds inquiry and I think the inquiry fits into the PBL models in a super, super smooth way. Uh, so I agree that you know inquiry can be in a lot of different models but PBL gives you the instructional model for structuring your daily and monthly activities in a way that a lot of other models don't. Right? So there are not a whole lot of national models like this. Like the STEM doesn't really have a national model that you can put your your curiosity and inquiry into. Service learning I love but doesn't really have a full national model to follow. Um several other larger models. I'm trying to think of design thinking is what I'm trying to think of and love design thinking. Makes a lot of sense.
I actually love that first step of empathy and I think it fits well into PBL as well, but design thinking has been a difficult model to put into a K12 classroom. So project-based learning has that instructional model, these six steps that we walk through that allows you to have some structure that allows you have creativity inside of there. Right? Any super creative artist if they're painting there the structure is the canvas, right? Like they are there are limits that allow creativity to thrive. So scaffold your inquiry. Number three, emphasize inquiry that links to real-world problems and authentic methods used by professionals. We always want to be in real-world problems because I think there's internal engagement, but there's also embedded in those some difficult difficulty that gets us outside of the school norms. Right? I just used the example on a different podcast that sometimes in math, you know, that if you've got a remainder, you did it wrong. Right? Sometimes you're supposed to have a remainder, but sometimes, you know, kids know, ah, I didn't do this right. There's not supposed to be a remainder. So, I got to go back and rework this. But when you start doing real-world problems, there's a a wicked problem. There's uh some unknowns to it that allow our learners to develop skills they wouldn't otherwise. The employability skills that we talked about of you know the through problem solving and critical thinking and working with others are embedded in the authenticity of the work. So bring inquiry that's embedded in these authentic methods and real-world problems because really the PBL process itself it's a model for inquiry. So step one again you can get this in episode 5 from the book PBL Simplified. You're going to define the problem. Step two solution criteria. What's it look like when the problem's solved? Step three research possible solutions. Step four, four, pick a solution. Step five, test that solution. And step six, we're going to reflect on that solution. So in that, you're you're bringing inquiry and you're figuring out how do we walk down this path of inquiry to start answering our own questions. So you can put this process on your bulletin board.
Show your learners how they can walk through it as they solve their own problems just like professionals do every single day. And we're start to level up the opportunities that they can go after. So bring inquiry in, invite inquiry, and then have that process for helping us, our learners and ourselves process those questions to find your own answers. It's super empowering and your learners, they do a 180. You know, if if they're apathetic or they're not engaged, you can really see the empowerment that comes from the control of knowing that when there's an unknown in my life, I know how to start solving it. Super important. Today, look in the show notes and we'll give you a six steps download. Those six steps I just went through, we've got a download for you so you can see exactly what those looks like and kind of walk through that. I also want you to know there's a PBL Simplified for teachers podcast that's ongoing every week and the PBL Simplified podcast empowers teachers with examples from PBL classrooms and practical PBL resources. So, you subscribe to that weekly podcast, it'll help you on your PBL journey because you're going to hear what others are doing. I just recorded a podcast uh of a biology teacher, chemistry teacher, he does a little bit of everything, engineering class and they created created this rotating stage cuz apparently the the play Anastasia that the high school wanted to do requires some kind of a rotating stage. So, the engineering class actually created that. That's a messy problem that takes a whole lot of things out of the book and they had a lot of trial and error and they messed up a lot. But you get to hear that story and you can learn from the story of other teachers out in the real world doing this work. So you might want to tune in to the PBL Simplified for Teachers podcast. All right, this is a leveled-up version of inquiry that we're looking at in PBL. We're building student empowerment. The next episode is on voice and choice where we're going to ramp up empowerment even more. We'll also discuss the mystery of the differences between voice and choice. 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 most helpful about that episode. Your review helps the next inspired classroom teacher just like you find their why and teach inspired.
