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 8 of 20, the heart of PBL, or at least the ventricle. workshops. Brooke was one of my extroverted learners. She was in my advisory class. We had a great relationship. She always did my bulletin board because I wasn't a big bulletin board guy and she generally did what she was supposed to do. So, I was really surprised when she didn't show up to my compound complex sentence workshop. We had given the learners uh four different workshops that they could choose from all from the different PBL teachers that they had and they would go and choose. They go to that workshop and get worked on. And Brooke did not know how to do comp. compound complex sentences. Well, according to her quiz. So, I was really surprised. I said, "Broo, how come you didn't come to my workshop? Don't you need help with compound complex sentences?" She says, "Oh, yeah. I definitely need help. I do not get conjunctions or commas." Like, so why didn't you come to my workshop? She said, "Well, I looked at the descriptions for all the workshops and yours didn't look that exciting, so I just went to Mr. Spencer's." "Don't you think you should have came to the compound complex sentence workshop?" She says, "Well, don't you think you should have made a better descript for your workshop. Touche, young learner. Touche. And that was the day that mandatory workshops were born. You could have need to know workshops where your learners take some kind of a quiz to determine their level of mastery on a certain skill. Like in this case, it would have been compound complex sentences. For me, just quick 20 uh sentences. Can you identify them? Can you use the conjunction correctly? And then if you get 85% or less, it is now a mandatory workshop. At the time, we were doing voluntary workshop. assuming that our learners would just go where they needed to go because they knew and they didn't. So maybe I should have made my description a little better. But the next time Brooke was in my mandatory workshop, every PBL teacher can use workshops to meet the personalized needs of their students through these three workshop tips.
The first tip for your workshops is that the heart of PBL or at least one of the ventricles should be the primary method of delivering content. So small group just in time student centered inquiry based experiences that are connected to need to knows. So when you're launching a PBL unit, you're going to launch with an entry event, probably bring a community partner in. They're going to explain the big problem. It's going to be engaging and you're going to spell out what's going to happen over the next four weeks of your PBL unit. And then you stop and you ask your learners, what do you need to know? If you go back to one of our very first episodes where my uh young friend Skyler was was in my class, we talked about a genetics project. and he had to learn about the punet square. And the way we would approach this is say, "Hey, Skyler and team, do you want to help these parents who just found out their child has a genetic disease?" Skyler says, "Yes." And he looks at the rubric and he says, "Well, what's a punet square?" Oh, well, if you don't know squares, let's make that a need to know and then I'll do a workshop on that. Does that sound good? Yeah, that makes sense because now you can make the best possible product for your client. In this case, parents who found out their child has a genetic disease. So you're looking at the need to knows that came out of that entry event and now you're starting to create workshops around those. You want your learners to to look at the rubric. They they want to you really define the problem that the community partner has laid out and you've probably helped lay out as well. And then they're going to come up with need to know. You come up with workshops. The question is always just like Brooke, what if my standards don't come up in the need to knows? Then you need to have them come up. You need to make them come up. You might look at the rubric and say, "Hey, did anybody notice that in order to get past the middle part of the rubric, you have to know compound complex sentences?" Yeah. How many of you know compound complex sentences? Well, I think we did them in seventh grade, maybe. And okay, do you think you need a workshop? Yeah, we probably do, Mr. Story. You're right.
Or even because we had some teachers like, "It just didn't come up." Well, you still have to teach it, right? So, you're going to say, "Hey guys, I know this didn't come up in need to knows, but we do need to address this standard. in this PBL unit. So, I'm going to make that a workshop because they're very good with that. And it's just one of those mandatory workshop types of things. As you develop the art of PBL, right, that that crawl, walk, run piece, once you're running, you'll have some more tools in your tool belt. But if you're still crawling, just get it on the board as a workshop because those workshops are where the detailed content mastery work is going to happen, right? A lot of your grading is going to happen right in there. Sometimes if you wait for grading to be in the group setting, it gets kind of messy, right? especially when you're first starting out and you don't want to be in that situation where a whole group gets a bad grade because one student made a really bad error, right? Or the whole group just gets passed along on the coattails of a learner who's doing all the work. So, this area of workshops is a great place to take a lot of grades and make sure that your learners have mastery of your core content. The second tip is that some traditional materials will fit in PBL, some will not, right? Your 48minute structure is not really going to fit. But don't throw all your resources out. We're not asking you to do that. Your quizzes, your labs, your best practice activities that you have might be stations for you like all those pieces that are really great engaged best practice learning, they fit. They probably fit right in these workshops. And the beauty is that you've done these before. Now those workshops are going to fit in the context of a driving question in a larger real world problem. Right? Now we need to learn perimeter. So we to make raised garden beds for the local senior center. We're not just learning perimeter because it's third grade and we're supposed to learn perimeter, right? So, we're we're adding an additional why, additional context handles for our learners to get some of these ideas that they might not get otherwise.
So, you're still going to have a lot of the same uh workshop materials that you've had before. They're just going to be repackaged, maybe in a little bit different sequence, too, because you're going to launch the event first, the big problem. And then your workshops are going going to come after those need to know sessions and now again they're in context and we know at the end we're going to present so there's a presentation coming so now when you're in that workshop it's like well I really want to make sure you've mastered perimeter because you're going to be presenting that to an authentic audience a whole set of master gardeners are going to come in to hear about your raised garden beds and how you know perimeter so I want to make sure that you've mastered it right so you're adding this extra accountability beyond grades just the importance of the work that needs to happen is elevated and now you see more engagement in inside of your workshops, which is really your core content, which is why we see our state testing scores go up in PBL, right? Even against skill and drill, where it gets like crazy skill and drill, still doesn't match the results of PBL. And we'll get into some of those stories as we go throughout this binge PBL podcast series. The third step tip is that students and community partners can deliver workshops, but they're going to need scaffolding or a structure. It's neat to have your learners that have mastered a topic teach another set of learners. Like it can work really well, but don't expect it to suddenly be hands off and you're just in the back with your feet up on your desk twiddling your thumbs, right? That doesn't work. It might be more work. Uh but I would say it's worth it, right? So I wouldn't do it like your first PBL unit. It'd be a point where your learners have seen you run workshops. You've run protocols. You've got structures. You take need to knows within that workshop. So then they can mimic the things things that you've done, right? So, you want them to be looking at what their learners need. You want them to have an assessment at the end of that workshop to show mastery that the learners have, in fact, relearns that content and they've mastered it.
So, you want to give them some structure to this. Same thing with the community partner. Community partner is kind of an advanced move to have them run a workshop, but it's super cool. You might have someone who's an expert in marketing come in and teach a workshop on how to build logos out or how to create, you know, an avatar or or a unique selling proposition for this business that your kids are creating, right? Or how to run a meeting for this nonprofit that your kids are going to develop a logo for. The marketing person might come in and say, "This is how we run these meetings." And you're probably going to need to educate your community partner just a little bit on what your learners are going to need because your learners are going to need more structure in the classroom setting because they don't run these meetings all the time and your marketing friend probably does. So, they might not always have a sheet printed out for notes, but we're going to probably need them to print out a sheet for notes so when they lead the workshop, your learners have a place to put their new learning so that they can apply it later. So workshops are going to be really we say it's the heart at least the ventricle because there's a lot of awesome portions to PBL. Uh but your workshops if you're worried about like where does my content go and how do my kids learn a lot of this is happening in your workshops right and the the switch is that now these workshops maybe some of the best practices that you've used before you know they work and kids learn they're now going to be in the context of a larger PBL unit that's real world and you're going to have more engagement. It's really exciting. So, those are the three tips. Uh you're going to be delivering content in small groups. It's just in time and it's student centered. You're going to not throw everything out. Isn't that exciting? You don't have to throw everything you've ever done out to do PBL. In fact, it's the opposite. You're just going to repackage it. And then your third tip is that your students and your community partners can also run workshops. And in your second tip, said don't throw everything out unless maybe it wasn't working right.
So, we do need to make sure it's best practice. Again, if you're just uh using workshops as an excuse to talk at kids for 48 minutes, that is not really going to fly. But that really doesn't fly in traditional classroom either. It's not working. So, PBL is not really going to fix that. But, we know that you've got some really great things that you know work with kids. I just want you to know you don't have to throw those out. All right. We've got a PBL versus a project download for you right here in episode eight. So, go into the show notes. You can download that and it's going to show you the difference between a traditional project and a PBL unit. It can really help you understand the process, but it can also help those that you're trying to bring into your movement. You know, where your content will be taught now. It's going to be taught and caught. But how do you actually start a PBL unit? The next episode will spell out that very first day. I kind of teased it a little bit. It's that entry event day. See you in the next episode. 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.
