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 nine of 20 entry events. When my grandfather would play Uker, he had a saying typically when he was taking the first trick. You can't win them all if you don't win the first one. The entry event is the very first step, the very first mention of your new PBL unit. So, we want to win the very first day. In fact, we want to win the very first five minutes. We might even want to pre-win the day before. So, we're really trying to launch an entry event your next four weeks or so. And we want to carry that engagement over through the driving question, but there's nothing to carry if you don't crush the first day. So, entry events are exciting and they should be portrayed that way. Mindset is super important in PBL. Almost half of these PBL binge episodes have really been on mindset so far. It's likely the biggest move we need to make as educators. Many of us were in a traditional system for our entire educational career. In fact, many of us did really well in that system. So, we we have to change some things. We've got some mindset work to do and we always will. Now, it's time to jump into into some of the PBL moves though. So the first is an entry event. So we're going to move from shifting from that mindset of changing from a traditional classroom into a PBL student centered environment. Let's get into some of these moves. And some of you have been chomping at the bit for this, but you really have to do the mindset work first. So hopefully almost half the episodes gets the point across that mindset is probably the most important part. And as you come into an entry event, I want to keep your mindset high, optimistic, excited while you're in the classroom. And You want to get your students in the same mindset. I think every teacher can start their PBL unit with engagement and clarity with these three entry event moves. What happens in an entry event is you're going to com it's going to be compelling. It's different than, hey, here's the new standards in kid-friendly language. It's time to do something different because we finished the last unit, right? Like that's typically what we've got, right? Or we might show a YouTube video. Now, we're going to bring in a community partner.
And the community partner is going to help us ask our learners for help. When it's Mike from the Hemophilia Society asking for help or the local K-9 police officer asking for help or the local executive director from a nonprofit organization that everybody in your town knows, like when they come in and now they're asking your learners for help, it's such a big deal. Will you talk about standards? Yes. Will you bring out a rubric? Yes. Are you going to do need to knows that going to lead to workshops? that are super academic and have quizzes and very schooly things. Yes. But you're not starting there. You're starting with this idea that there's a problem in your town, in your area, and we think that your third graders, your eighth graders, your sophomores, your seniors can solve it. That's exciting. That's empowering. That's that's giving kids a voice that they don't normally have. Normally, they just kind of walk around and far too often they're just consuming and not creating and now we're going to stir the pot and say, "Hey, we believe in you. We believe in you so much that we're going to ask you to solve this problem." And that's a speech that you could give before your community partner even gets there. Like, hey, Mike from the Hemophilia Society is going to come and he's got a big problem and he thinks that you all can solve it. Let's get fired up and do this. And I don't know that they're going to cheer necessarily the first time, right? But they're going to at least go, "Huh? this is different. This is different than what I normally do at school and I would like to do something meaningful. I wonder if that's about to happen. And then Mike comes up and he presents from the hemophilia society and he lays out like this is the real world problem that's affecting real people and we need you to help solve it. And then you're going to come up and you're going to say this is how we're going to do it, right? We're going to do it through this English nine class. So get ready. We've got whatever 45 minutes every every day we're going to work on this or maybe you're going to partner with the humanities class, right? You're going to create a humanities PBL unit.
However you're going to do it, you're going to explain it so it's clear. So there's a real world piece that you want to explain. There's that's the engagement portion. You want to have clarity so that your learners know how long it's going to take and what it is they're going to be doing. And they're going to get to ask questions. They're going to hear how a community partner thinks, talks, and that's a really important step. The second move for a really great entry event is you're going to sprinkle breadcrumbs and you're going to connect it to your rubric because again clarity is really important from the get-go. You don't want to have some learner creating a brand new business that helps cats wear new pants when you're supposed to be creating a business plan for green businesses, right? You want to make sure that they're now way off in left field. So, we like rubrics. That's how we speak in education, right? We speak in education. through rubrics. And sometimes I think we get a little too caught up in the grading of a rubric. Yes, you're going to have to give a grade in PBL. Like they don't suddenly disappear. And in fact, I think you're going need to take more time to think through it. But rubrics also communicate. I'm going to say it again. Rubrics also communicate. So don't wait till the very end to say this is how I'm going to grade. Right off the bat, you're going to give out a rubric and say this is what we're trying to achieve. This is how you this is how you solve this problem. Right? These are the parameters. I'll give you an example. Uh the Benjamin Harrison home had asked some eighth graders to recreate their curriculum because it wasn't selling, right? The elementary uh was happening in schools and then the Benjamin Harrison home would go to high schools and that was fine, but nobody was asking for the middle school curriculum. It's like, well, why? Probably because it was boring. So, they had middle schoolers redo it and they had parameters, right? When when the Benjamin Harrison home went into schools, they didn't always have reliable Wi-Fi. So, you couldn't rely on Wi-Fi.
They only wanted to spend $500 on this work and it had to hit different standards that happened to align with eighth grade standards, right? So those were parameters that were real that the learners had to abide by. They didn't suddenly have $10,000 to make this thing better, right? So it's okay to have parameters. Creativity lives within parameters. So that's why you bring out the rubric right away. You're going to bring out clarity. It also is going to help you when it comes to need to knows. If you have your learners really looking at that rubric, Mark it up, highlight it, use language that is not necessarily kid-friendly. That's number three. This is disciplinary literacy. So don't be afraid to use big words. Disciplinary does not mean like discipline like you're in detention. It means like your discipline of your craft. So if it's science or math, social studies, arts, whatever it is, use your language and your vocabulary. So you're going to say punit square, you're going to say mitochondria. You're going to use words that you want learners to learn and yes eventually we want kid-friendly language so they understand but right now we want them to ask questions how in the world am I supposed to present on mid kachubijua you mean mitochondria that's right I don't know what that means how am I supposed to present on that because you're going to tell them hey in four weeks Mike's coming back you're going to present everything you learned to Mike so again do you see how everything now has this extra level of importance of why it needs to be done and why it needs to be done with excellence So, you're going to put in all these big words. We're going to call them breadcrumbs because now you're going to ask your learners for need to knows technically in the next episode, but they're going to get these need to knows because they're going to have questions. Mike's going to get them to a place where it's like, hey, do you guys want to solve this problem? They're going to say, "Yes, I'm ready to solve this problem." And then you're going to say, "Well, how are we going to do that? Look at the rubric. This is how we'll do it.
What questions do you have on this journey of solving this big real world problem?" And they're going to raise their hand. They're going to have there's words they don't know. Are they going to ask, you know, like who's in my group? Yes. How many points is it worth? Yes. But you're also going to have these breadcrumbs sprinkled throughout your entry event so that they're curious. There's inquiry involved. They're leaning in and saying, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I care about this. I actually want to do this." To the point where you say, "Well, do you want me to do workshops for you so you can learn about it and do this really well?" And they're going to say, "Yes." You say, "No, Ryan, that can't be." Yeah, it happens. They actually say yes. I want you to teach me these things so I can solve this real world problem and help people in the real world. So, you're going to launch with an entry event. Again, if you go to the download from the last episode, PBL versus a project, you'll see a big purple box called the entry event and you're going to launch with that. And it's actually something I think you can do even if you're teaching traditionally. So, if you're in that kind of crawl walk space, you're not sure what to do, launch with an entry event. Why not launch your traditional unit with engagement and clarity, right? It makes a ton of sense when you actually sit down and look at it. So, when you look at an entry event, there's three things. You're going to have a community partner come in because it's compelling. It makes everyone realize that it's real world. You're going to sprinkle breadcrumbs that are connected to the rubric throughout. And you're going to be you're not going to be afraid to use these big words because you want your kids to use big words. So, you're going to really lean into your discipline, which whatever that is, whatever your content area is, it's like, hey, my content area is important and this is how it applies to the world. and I want you to be involved in it. Man, that's exciting, isn't it? That's just super exciting. Even if you're in like an academic silo and you're like, academics are so important. Our content has to be taught. I agree.
Like, let's get people excited about it, right? So, we're going to wrap it up in this real world problem and we're going to use the content area to solve the problem because if you can't tell, it's starting to get really exciting. So, here's what I would like for you to do if you wouldn't mind. Would you please take two minutes to pause and leave a review for this podcast. You've made it about halfway through. You made it through the mindset work. You're doing the hard work to say, "Hey, I need to change my practice and I think I could teach the way I've always wanted to teach. Now, we're getting into the technical portions." Like, if you made it this far, like, you're going to make it. So, would you leave a review so other educators can find this and they can go through the same process. Now, it doesn't have to be a Shakespearean sonnet and you can always go back and edit your review if you don't like it tomorrow, but the review helps others inspired teachers like you to find our resources, which honestly makes us all better. Thank you for taking two minutes to leave a review. It really means a lot to me. Your PBL has launched. You've done an entry event. Let's ramp up the inquiry and engagement while we have momentum. Tune in to the next episode to see how we build culture and and sustained inquiry through nos and need to knows.
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