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 16 of 20. Reflection. When I used to live in the country, we had a good-sized garden and 30 chickens, and we loved it. My five kids had a great time raising those chickens. They didn't love pulling weeds out of our really big garden so much. So they would actually try to get the chickens to do the work for them. The problem, if you have chickens, you know this for sure, is that chickens don't mind eating weeds or your vegetables. So it didn't quite work out. But we had this really big garden. It took a ton of planning, a lot of work to create. And as we're building building it, we would take the gardener's pause. The gardener's pause is when you're in the thick of planting all these different plants you just bought at the farm stand and you stop, stand up, step back, and assess what is working and what is next. If you don't do that, you've got some crooked rows. You got things all bunched together. They're not in the right spot. Some things end up in the shade that where they shouldn't be. So you have to take this gardener's pause. But the gardener's pause doesn't stop there. A gardener steps back to assess which plants are thriving and which need attention. So throughout the phase of a garden, even during harvesting, we're still assessing. We're still taking this gardener's pause to say, "What's working really well and where do I put it need to put additional attention." And reflection is similar to this gardener's pause. It allows you to evaluate your actions and nurture your growth to step back and say, "What's working? What's thriving in my PBL practice, in my classroom with my learners, and what needs attention?" You probably have some natural inclination to take this gardener's pause, but you also need to work that muscle, right? You got to get the muscle moving. You need to use this every day. So we need to be doing some intentional exercises as well as practicing every day. Every teacher can help themselves and their learners use reflection to step back and assess what is thriving and what needs attention. So feedback comes from others. It's an external perspective provided by peers, mentors, other stakeholders to help you see things that you may not have noticed yourself.
So in a tuning protocol, for instance, right, there could be some self-reflection on your part, but mostly the the idea is to give feedback, right? So we're giving feedback, you're going to get likes, you're going to get wonders, you're going to get all this feedback, and then you can take it and put in your practice or not. Now reflection, on the other hand, comes from within, in it's a self-directed process where you analyze and evaluate your own experiences, your thoughts, your actions. It could be as a group acting as one, so like a group could do reflection as well, but we're it's an inward process versus feedback being outward, and the ideas are coming in. So reflection, we're going to stop. So we want to build this practice of reflection in our learners as well as ourel, right? We're going to model all these processes and have the mindset. So we want to reflect so we can talk about how reflection is important. Now, you can use protocols to scaffold this. You can use likes and wonders. You know, you could even do like if there's a five-paragraph essay, if you're a language arts teacher, you know that it's there. It's always there. Grading those are awesome. Hopefully, ChatGPT can figure that out someday. But it's a thing that has to happen. So instead of saying, like, "How do you think you did?", you can have a rubric or a best practice sheet for each paragraph. And you can have your learner look at the five-paragraph essay, look at this best practice sheet or this rubric, and compare how they did. They're giving themselves feedback if you will, right? They're trying from within. They're saying, "Oh, I could have done this better. Oh, I could have done this. Look, I'm I to move from the middle of the rubric to the right side of the rubric. Here's what I need to do." And you can do that in biology or social studies or math. Any of these your content areas, you're still going to have a rubric on one side, the learner's work on the other. We're trying to help them reflect and it's going to have to be intentional at first, right? You're going to have to take class time to do this and teach them how to do this. So yes, you're going to take 15 minutes of your precious class time, and that's not sarcastic.
I understand it's precious, but what it's going to do is it's going to build dividend and momentum later on in the year. Because if you can teach your learners how to reflect later on in the year, they're building on that because they're reflecting automatically, right? They have that muscle and they're using it, and their work's getting better before it ever reaches your desk. That's the goal. So I love the idea of teaching collaboration, feedback, reflection early in the year because then you're building on that, right? Like, you get to reap the harvest later because your grouping's better. Uh, your learners are giving each other feedback and they're accepting feedback. They're self-reflecting all those things before it gets to your desk, right? Because sometimes you get those things in your desk and you're like, "Whoa, how in the world did you think that was where we're supposed to go with this?" Right? They're way off in left field. But if you've got these other things in place early on, then you can reap those benefits. But yes, at the beginning, you're going to have to intentionally teach these things, like reflection. The other piece you the other important idea around reflection is just like feedback, it's a muscle. So we're going to do it every day all the time. You've got to grow your reflection muscles, right? We And if you think about again long-term life skills that we want our learners to have, we want them to be reflective. So it's super important to have this skill set for them, right? We want them when they're 26 to look at their budget and stop, take a gardener's pause, assess what's thriving, what needs attention. This credit card bill needs attention. It's out of control. Let's create a process for that. We want them to be able to stop. "Do I enjoy this job that I'm in or is it awful? Is it sucking the life out of me?" We want our learners to stop, reflect, assess, right, and make a good decision. So this is one of those lifelong skills we want them to have. It's going to help them inside of school and it's going to help them in life. So it's worth putting time into for the near benefit and the long-term benefit, which is kind of one of my favorite places to put energy.
So just like you want to build up that feedback muscle, you also want to build up those reflection muscles. So you want to find multiple times to take the gardener's paws so it becomes a part of your classroom culture. So you may be asking again, kind of where do you get the time for all this feedback and reflection? Because it can be a bit counterintuitive at first, but as you create that classroom culture, remember that current that's moving everybody along because you could have a new student come in that gets transferred in halfway through the year, right? That's a real thing that happens. And suddenly they're in this current, and they're going to be looking around going, "Why is everybody taking people's feedback so appropriately? Like, why are people being nice when they're getting critiqued?" Well, because in our classroom, like we think that's important, right? And you'll feel that. And again, you're going to benefit from that. You're going to reap the harvest if you will, and eventually, it will save you time. When you go into a great PBL environment, and again, I encourage you to go to a school visit, you're going to see the facilitators that are walking around and they're going to stop and talk to you. And eventually, you're going to have that question of like, "How is it that you've been talking to me for 10 minutes and all of your learners are doing what they're supposed to be doing?" I I remember this feeling of like, "How is it that you can stop and start talking to me like this, and things are still happening happening appropriately." And then I got to that point, right, where it was like, "Oh, well, come on in anytime." Because people, "Is it okay to come in?" "Yeah, anytime. Come on in." Right? And we just start talking to them, and our learners were doing what they're supposed to be doing because of the culture. And this reflection piece is going to be super important to have inside of your culture. So instead of you having to give feedback 28 times to each student, four times a unit, that's a lot of time. You're like, "I can't do that." That's right. You can't. Your learners begin to receive feedback from each other or from in the last episode, but they're also self-reflecting. So is this perfect?
And do you stop giving feedback and reflection uh to your learners? Like, are do you stop being a part of the process? No. No. No. Your your learners aren't going to do it perfectly, but it does help get the big stuff out of the way. It starts moving people in the right direction. So then when you're investing that time on one-on-ones or working with groups, uh, you've you've got them in the right spot, and you can work on the really important pieces, the smaller details. So what happens is you essentially you start to multiply yourself, right? You say, "Well, I need like three people. I need to be cloned so I can get all this stuff done." This is how you do it. You do it with culture, right? So reflection, feedback, twin sisters, and they're super important part of your culture because it saves you time and increases the excellence and quality of those final products. So you're going to teach your students how to use what comes out of those reflections as well. You've got to provide some time to apply those reflections. So this is All right. I've definitely goofed up here and we see it often is you know, let's say practice presentations come up. So there's a time for reflection and feedback and then your presentations are just the next day and you say, "Well, how come you guys didn't fix any of that stuff that we talked about in the practice presentation?" because you didn't give us time to do that. And it's, "You're right." Like, it totally happened to me. Like, I saw it and it's like, "Okay, so practice presentation at least a day to to fix those things, and then you can have presentations." Same thing. Five-paragraph essay example, I'm looking at it and say, "Oh, I need to change these things," and then you ask me to turn it in at the end of class. Well, I didn't have time to change them, right? So we need to give our learners time to apply and revise the feedback and the reflection that we're giving them time for. So reflection is going to be one of those super important pieces that is going to help you. So you need to invest the time in it so it becomes a part of your culture. You do that with protocols. You do it by finding ways to do it every day.
And you do it by giving your learners time to apply those reflections. Right? If you have a specific need to know as you'd like me to answer on the podcast because we have an ongoing podcast. There's a PBL Simplified for Teachers podcast, and that one's happening every single week. And if you want your need to know answered on there, you go to pblshare.com. That's pblshare.com. And the way it works is we get an email. Our team kind of processes that. We answer your question directly to your email. And then sometimes it hits the podcast as well to help others. So we really appreciate when you answer those because we get your question answered and almost always somebody else has that same question. So if you've got a need to know that you want to hear on the ongoing podcast, PBL Simplified for Teachers, just go to pblshare.com. We'd be happy to answer your specific need to know. All right, so we've got feedback, we've got reflection, we've got to dive into inquiry and make sure that it's at the heart of the PBL work that you're doing.
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