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 10 out of 20. Halfway you've made it. How do we bring inquiry into the classroom? Knows and need to knows. Quick conversational insight here. This is me during an early teacher evaluation before I was doing PBL. Principal asks, "Where are you bringing inquiry, Ryan?" Well, Mr. Anderson, it's in my bell ringer. It's super engaging question about skateboarding, and all the kids love skateboarding. We all know that. Is that does that really work? Now, I will tell you I got points in that evaluation for that answer. Actually, I would claim that maybe maybe that's the super shallow end of the pool. Right? If we're looking at Trevor McKenzie's inquiry ideas, I think I might be close to the pool on that one. Right? It's it adds a bit of inquiry maybe for, you know, 30 seconds, but after that, we're done. What we're going to do in in PBL, what we're doing with nos and need to knows is we're bringing true inquiry. What I call inquiry is when learners actually kind of they lean in and they ask a question. Well, how will we are we going to be able to do we actually get $500 to do this? Right? Once they start asking some of those questions, that's when you've got them and you've got real inquiry and real engagement. Every teacher can create a culture of inquiry and engagement by using need to knows. So, the purpose of need to knows is one, they're central to practice. You're going to ensure that the learning lands where learners are. So, I could do a full workshop on compound sentences, but what if what if the teacher before me just crushed it? Like, what if they all know compound sentences? Like, for real know it. When I usually ask learners if they know compound sentences, it means several different things. Some will raise their hand and say, and that means they could identify them. Some raise their hand and say, "I've heard that term before." Some people, some kids will actually say, "Well, I can actually write a compound sentence." Right? So, there's different versions of that.
So what need to knows do is they take it a step further and they say well let's do a 20 question quiz right just a prequiz and call it a a need to know quiz right like let's just see what you actually need to know and that's one version of need to knows right is it's actually database need to know is what we call them and you're going to go through and let's just say that I've got third period that for whatever reason they all had Mrs. Rosenberg and she crushes compound sentences is and they all ace it. I don't need to do that workshop on compound sentences. In fact, in some ways, it's insulting to do that. They've already learned that. So, I do something different. At the same time, fourth period apparently, I don't know, had Mr. Stoyer who didn't teach compound sentences at all and they need a total brush up. Well, guess what? That's fine, right? I'm going to same database need to knows. We're going to take that quiz and I'm going to do that workshop. But what need to know allows you to do is you're hitting the ers exactly where they are. Cuz if I've already mastered it, why should I go through this process? We've all been in a faculty meeting over something that you already know, but you still have to sit through it and you're like, well, this doesn't make any sense. It's true. Doesn't make sense for kids either. So, need to knows are going to be super specific. You also have a set of need to knows that are just learner queries. Like they just have questions. Like there was an entry event and a community partner and now they're going to start asking questions. You say, "What do you need to know in order to solve solve this problem. So they might come from your rubric. We talked about that in the last episode, right? I don't know what punet square means, Mr. Storyer. How am I supposed to present on that? Right? Let's do a workshop so I make sure that you're fully prepared. Would that be helpful? Yes. And anxiety goes out of them, right? Like you've got those learners that like if I don't know it, how am I supposed to present it? Right? And that's what needs to knows do is it makes it super personalized learning. So it starts to establish an inquiry practice in your classroom as well.
You're starting to teach teach your learners how to ask questions and I had a learner named YaKob and he was struggling in school to say the least. So eventually he stopped trying and part of it was he would ask questions and people wouldn't answer them and maybe they didn't have time maybe they had a class of 30 like it's probably understandable and so he just stopped. Well he got PBL and then we started doing need to knows and if he asked a question or if anyone asked a question we made it into a workshop. and he started doing the work, right? So, part of it was engagement, right? Like I know for real like he actually started trying on some of those some those formative tests, right? Because he went from the very lowest in the school to a very respectable score, right? Because he figured out how to ask the right questions and he figured out that we would actually answer those questions by teaching him things. It sounds basic when you explain it like that, but that's not how traditional school is set up a lot of times. Right? We wait until there's a grade that comes out weeks uh uh down the line. And I should have been taught this a long time ago, right? So, I missed it. But what if I was able to ask to need to know early? Mr. Story, I know we're supposed to know about compound sentences, but honestly, I don't have a good handle on them. That's a super like SEAL appropriate like mature thing to say if your class is that safe and you have that culture. And this is how you bring out that culture, right? Same thing. You can have activities, but ultimately you want a safe space for your learners to be able to learn and need to know starts to bring that into the equation. It's going to guide your lesson planning for this whole project, which sometimes freaks people out because it's like, well, can I plan my lesson plan for the next four weeks or do I have to wait for need to knows? You don't have to wait, right? Because you generally know what those need to knows are going to be contentwise, right? You know, if just to stay with my my theme here with language starts like you know when compound sentences are coming and you know that most kids don't know them, right?
So you can have that ready and you should be able to map that out. Now are you going to adjust things and personalize them? Yes, you are. But you don't it's not like you just don't do any planning until the entry event. You're still going to have these anticipated need to knows that you can plan for. So the first thing is I really want you to know what the purpose of need to knows are. You're going to build inquiry. You're going to personalize the learning and you're going to personalize your lesson plans as you go forward. This Second really important point of nos and need to knows is just the practices of them. So you're going to have one of my favorite ways to do need to knows is let's say I don't know let's say you bring all of your learners together. So you've got a hundred learners in one big room. Mike from the hemophilia society presents to everybody. You lay out the rubrics and the plans. Right now it's time for everybody to write down their individual need to knows. They write them down. Now I want you to get into small groups. I want you in groups of three or four. Compare those need to knows. Put them together. Okay. Now, put them on post-it notes. We're going to bring them up to the front and we're going to affinity map those. We're going to put those in a larger groups. Oh, that one goes with this one. That one goes with this one. And now suddenly we've got five to seven workshops that we know that we're going to address and they've all been asked for by your learners. So, your learners are going to say like that the age-old question. They get into a workshop and they're like, "Why do we have to learn this?" Well, you asked me to teach it. Like it was a need to know. So, I thought I should teach it since you asked it. Oh, yeah. Right. Right. And you can even head that off at the past. You just at the top of your workshop, you just put the need to know that you've addressed. This is the need to know that you all have. That's why we're doing this workshop. You're adding meaning to every workshop that you do. I just love it.
So, there's a lot of different ways you can do this because you can separate your need to knows into contentbased need to knows, technical need to knows because they are still going to ask how many people in a group, how many points are things worth, right? When is it due? in addition to your standardsbased and then maybe some community partner need to knows as well so you can separate those out so that you can address them well. The third big idea with need to knows is just how empowering it is for students. You want to invite them into the process. Even the idea of facilitating the moving of need to knows is such an opportunity for them to work with their own learning. So if you got a big chart paper over here that has all your need to knows on it and we like to put them on post-it notes. I should probably buy stock in 3M. because we buy and suggest a lot of Post-it notes. Uh, but they're on the need to know side. And this is what we actually do in workshops over the summer. It's like a 3-day workshop. We take all of your need to knows, put them up on on this big chart paper, and then as we do a workshop, we actually move them over to the no side because now we know those things. Now we know how long a PBL unit is supposed to take. Now we know how to get all of our standards in there. Now we know how to assess those standards in a PBL unit. And we move them over. What's really powerful is to have your learners do that. Have them start to move them over and they can see that they're learning. By the end of your PBL unit, the need to know side is blank and the no side is filled. Look at all the things we now know. We didn't know this four weeks ago and now you do. You all are learning. In this class, we ask questions. We seek out answers and we learn things. Again, it seems really simple when you put it in those kind of words, but if we're not explicitly saying and showing those things, our learners are not picking them up. They're just there to do their job, to put in their time, and move on. So, we want to make this whole idea of need to knows kind of a big deal, right?
When you go and visit a PBL classroom of someone that's operating at a really high level, you're going to see inquiry at a high level and you're going to wonder how in the world does this happen? It didn't happen because they got the right protocol. It's just days and days of transparency of the inquiry process and really honoring the questions that learners are asking and answering them as well as we can. It's an exciting process. So, you've got an entry event, you've got need to knows, we're moving right down the line uh of lining up this PBL for you. So, a need to know the purpose, it's just central to your practice, right? We're trying to bring inquiry because that brings engagement and empowerment. Uh there are definitely some moves around need to knows that you can get used to, but the basics are to use lots of post-it notes and chart paper. Have all the need to knows that your learners can come up with as you address them, move them over the no side. It works remarkably. Well, the third is the empowerment of your students to really include them in the process. Explain the metacognition of of what they're doing and how they're learning from asking the question to researching to getting an answer. That is the skill and the process that will help them the rest of their lives. All right, we've got a new resource for you. The resource is PBL Simplified for YouTube. So, there's a YouTube series again specifically for you classroom teachers. You go to PBLSimplified com. That's pplsimplified.com. You can sign up and you get a whole set of videos. So, if you're looking to level up your PBL game. If you need short engaging videos for professional development, these work. We know people use that use them that way. If you want to learn through proven stories, experiences, and expertise, sign up for the free PBL videos and ramp up your PBL movement. We're going to roll right into the next episode to see where rigor fits into PBL. Somebody's going to ask you if PBL is rigorous, and you should have answers.
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