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 steuerer.
Episode 11 of 20, Rigor and Relevance. In this second episode of this Binge PBL for teachers podcast, I told you about Southport Elementary, a Title One school who crushed their state standardized test to actually achieve the highest growth of any school in the state. So, as we discussed rigor specifically, I could talk about them, but I really want to talk about another school. It is another Title One elementary school, Dixie Elementary down in Kentucky, and they went from a D to an A using project-based learning. They weren't using skill and drill. They were using best practices in their classroom. They were using engagement with their learners that turned into empowerment. They had teachers that were on board and and planning with each other and excited about school and the there was a buzz in the air and the kids got it and the parents got it and sure enough the learners did really well again on their standardized test. Were they also on the news for one of their PBL units? Yes. Did they revamp their playground? and have the learners completely plan all that out? Yes. Did they have a PBL unit where they reworked all their fire drill and uh emergency lines? They did. And were kindergarteners leading some of those? Yes. Did third graders lead some of those? Yes. Were they multi-disciplinary? Yes. Do they have really cool spaces? They did. They had some really cool spaces that they brought in. Just some neat flexible uh seating areas where some of the seats could go up and down. They could collaborate and come together. That was new. But the things that weren't new were the tried and true best practices. It was the six steps of the PBL process. Kids were had entry events with community partners. So they knew that their work mattered. They had workshops that were filled with content based best practices. They had need to knows. They were taking quizzes, formative assessments, right? Your chapter tests. They were doing spelling tests. They were presenting to authentic audiences. They did all the things and they got the results. Not just learners that could speak to you, like look you in the eye, shake your hand, and have a great conversation, but they also crushed the state testing.
So, the rigor's there, right? If you have PBL going on in your school, or maybe you visited a school and it looks neat, but it's kind of fluffy and they don't have the state testing scores, I would say something's a little off. We still think it's authenticity. We think it's the relevancy. They go together because it's really hard to be have a rigorous kind of messy or wicked problem as some folks say that there are a lot of different variables without a community partner and once you get those thing that's when you get into the rigor that's when you get into things that are really difficult and your learners are asking to be taught these difficult things to solve a big real world problem I think every teacher can increase rigor using PBL with these three steps to start with standards we do this in every workshop that we've ever done since we've ever held a workshop is you start with standards because we're in a standards based world. Like you don't have to love that, but it's true. So, we're going to start with our standards, these big beefy standards. I like to say the difference between argument of writing and haikus, right? They're both in your standards if you're a language arts teacher, but argument of writing is definitely using some higher order thinking skills. There's multiple steps to that and it's just beefier than haikus. So, as you're looking at your standards, you really want to un pack them in a different way. So I would say for me when I was in the classroom when I first started teaching traditionally I was an engineer before. So I came in not knowing a whole lot. I had taken education courses but I didn't know the real world of school. Right? So somebody asked about the curriculum map. I said I don't really know. What do we do? Right? So we put it into the system. And what they had me do is is I copied my mentor teachers curriculum map and pasted it. Copied and pasted it. Hit go. And they said all right you're done. Oh cool. Curriculum maps are fun. I had no idea what was in there. Like, we've got to unpack our standards and be super intentional about these things.
You want to look at the verbs that are there, the nouns, like look for the trends and as a team, like let's say you have grade level teams or maybe content area teams if you're in the secondary world, like get together during one of your meetings and get your big power standards up on the board and start to see where they can intersect and where PBL units might come about. Where might you bring in a community partner? But you really have to know your standards. This intentionality that you're going to bring as the facilitator bleeds right down into your classroom with your learners. They're going to see the intentionality and they will step up to it. Step two is you're going to create a depth of knowledge level four driving question to increase rigor. So if you're not familiar with your depths of knowledge and the level four piece where you want to be really you can just Google or chat GPT depth of knowledge week. and it'll come up and it'll give you all the cool verbs that you want to use, right? You're going to synthesize things. So, in your driving question, remember, a driving question is not googleable. It's not a yes or no answer. It's going to take some rigorous research to get done. And if you're using these depths of knowledge verbs, it really kind of holds us accountable as the leader of this classroom, the one that's right leading the learning, facilitating the learning to make sure that we're going deep in this question that's going to drive, you know, four to six weeks of instruction. So, it needs to be a big deal. It needs to be argument of writing versus haikus, right? So, make sure that you have a question that's going to bring real inquiry and that is going to hit depth of knowledge for step three in bringing rigor and relevance to your classroom. You're going to develop rigorous performance tasks as benchmarks. So, look at your assessments. When you lay out your unit, what do your assessments look like? Are students regurgitating facts or or they synthesizing new ideas. Do you see that? Do you see the difference on these?
If you have your learners present because you're using the six steps of PBL, so they're presenting, but if every group gets up and regurgitates the same facts over and over and over again, you can be pretty sure that your performance task was not super rigorous and it was really a pretty low level for them and they're just going to regurgitate facts. They're not coming up with new ideas. They're not synthesizing or creating these new ideas. So looking at your performance tasks, your benchmarks, uh your presentations. If you've got a skilled eye in PBL, you can do it right away. But if you're just starting, which is why you're probably in this binge episode, is you need to look and for a couple different things. So again, look for those depth of knowledge verbs. Like where are the verbs at that you see in presentations or assessments or in your language or your driving questions. So like look for those verbs. It's a big deal. Presentations. Presentations are a big deal in project-based learning because it prepares for learners, but it also makes our work very transparent. Right? Sometimes if you're just going through those five paragraph essays, you can see these trends, but they're not super transparent. When you have four group members up front and you've got community partners all around you, and again, let's just the example, they're just regurgitating facts. Well, 1967, this happened, and then in Georgia, this happened. And then the next five groups do the same thing. You're like, oh, some something's not right. And By the way, it's okay. Remember, give yourself grace. I've been there. We've all been there. It's like, but then you go, well, what do we do? Okay, so that's where you're going to go back to your depth of knowledge verbs, right? And try to figure out where our assessments lacking and where do we need our learners to have some more creativity and some higher order thinking skills. So, if you dive into your standards, find the trends, right? Really look at those verbs, right? What are your kids actually doing, learning? Where's the inquiry? like unpack those. You probably have power standards within your district or your school. If you don't, it's a great first step.
Just say, "Hey, boss, I what are my power standards?" And if if it's a blank stairs like, "Hey, could we use a couple PLC's to develop our our power standards? It sounds like that'd be a great exercise, right?" And then find a book, walk through it. Uh we like Chad Dumis who uh puts the C in PLC's. So, he really creates a really collaborative PLC environment. If you start attacking those power standards, you're just going to get better. Like even if you don't inject project-based learning at that point, you're going to get better. Then off of that foundation of your power standards, now you're going to build your PBL units. You're going to look at when you develop a driving question, you're going to evaluate your driving questions. Look at those depth of knowledge verbs again. And then the third thing you're going to do is you're going to develop rigorous performance tasks as benchmarks. So look at those benchmarks that kids are walking through and say, is there rigor in here? right? Is is the rigor is the hurdle there so that they want to get over these hurdles that are hard things to do so that they can solve this real world problem. Right? It's it's neat to solve the real world problem, but we also want to put our content in the way, right? Like our content should be so connected to it that we really can go deep. You can get into the geeky portions of your content like you want to. But now you've got context around it and your learners will be engaged and they'll go with you, which is awesome. You're not just pulling them along. They're there with you and they want to attack them too so that they can provide a really excellent final product. It's exciting. So yes, there should be rigor in PBL and it's connected directly to the relevance. That's why we're so geeky about the authenticity of the real world problem in your PBL unit because it's what it's what lets us go deep, right? Helps us get to the rigor portion and we've got to get there. All right. What's your call to action today? Today on this episode, we've got an on demand course on end products. Now it's in the PBL movement online community.
So if you want a deeper If you're like, "Yeah, this is good, but I want to go deeper." Come into the online community and here's what you get. You don't just get this one course because this is a paid feature that you come into. But for the price of one workshop that you can go to or one conference, actually less than some of our other friends out in the world, the price of one conference, you actually get two virtual conferences and you can come to the PBL movement conference in person and you get all this other stuff. You get on demand courses, not just on end products, but also those driving questions. that you're looking at. Also, group contracts, that's another one that will instantly make your life better. That group contract workshop and they're all on demand, so you can take them whenever you want. You can pace them whatever you want. You can skip around to different ones if you'd like. So, if you need more help keeping your PBL movement growing or you're looking to increase your PBL network, we have a live vibrant Facebook group that's private and the only people in there are people that have paid to be in there. So, they're excited about it and it's super active. We have paid moderators that are in there that make sure that we're answering your questions directly and that we're keeping the conversation going. So, it's not one of those where you ask a question and you you just never hear anything like we're in there and we're actually answering your questions and we want to hear it. Do you need more PBL resources? As you're going through this binge PBL podcast, if we're giving you a resource every single time, this one is one of the paid ones, right? And when you get into this, you get a plethora of other resources. There's a project library in there. There's group contracts, rubrics, and products, uh, driving question rubrics, and all of them you get to use right in your classroom. So, we wanted to give you the ultimate resource and just give it all to you so you can make it happen in your classroom. So, that's what we tried to do with the PBL movement online community. And we know we don't want to just give you resources. We want you to be super successful.
So, that's why we're also in there live so we can help you out and help you use them in your classroom to give you instant benefit. It's awesome. You'll love it if you come on in. All right, the next episode, episode 12. Like at this point, you may have launched a PBL unit, but if you have, your students are curious, they're learning deeply, right? There's rigor in this. So, what about your classroom space? Is your classroom space working for you or against you? I mentioned it with Dixie. They have some flexible seating that is used very purposely to as soon as you walk in, you think, "Oh, collaboration's going to happen here, right? It starts to immediately start that process and that conversation. So, tune in the next episode. to intentionally build out your learning space.
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.
