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 7 of 20. Make or break your PBL. I was super excited about bringing this service learning project to my learners. And this is actually before I had the structures of project-based learning at my disposal. But I just knew I wanted to do these big things with my learners, right? Do you feel that? Right? That just that passion. I want them to see more of the world. I want them to do good and feel that I want to do more good. So I thought every learner should create their own service learning project. I thought it should be real world. I thought they should get out in the community and do amazing things. And so they went, they planned, they planned, they wrote, right? They were still engaged to my English standards. Like I understood that portion and they were creating them. So now I've got 95 kids that all have these different 95 different service learning projects and they all thought that poor people were hungry in Africa and they needed canned goods. Again, they're where they're at, right? Like that's what I given them. I didn't give them a bunch of pre-work. I didn't understand research at the time. So, I didn't understand the inquiry to get them farther than that. And I was excited, right? So, I'm passionate about this. Let's just keep running. All right. So, what's it going to cost? It's going to cost a lot. How are you guys going to raise that money? This is real world. I'm just going to give you that money. Not that I had it. So, they said, "We'll wash cars." Like washing cars. Like, you can make a lot of money doing that. Cool. What about the buckets and the hoses and the soap? Like, how do we buy that? Well, we'll sell suckers during lunch so we can buy the supplies.
supplies so we can have a car wash so that we can make money so we can buy the canned goods and send them to people we don't know or where they're going to go and oh I had that conversation a lot because again every kid did it individually and then at some point I said okay kids done by kids I mean eighth graders I can't do it I messed up this is not going to work I appreciate your passion glad you're excited about it anybody know what we should do And Billy, who we've talked about before, says, "My mom actually volunteers at the local food pantry." She said, "We could go there for free." Like for free. For free, right? And this whole idea of thinking globally and acting locally like made a lot more sense. Let's also talk about that. If you've got a bunch of kids and you put them into groups, there's less projects to contain, right? If you've got 30 kids and they're in groups of five, now you have six projects. Right? If you have 28 kids in their groups of four, you've got seven projects to manage. Right? So, it doesn't mean you should just do groups to manage numbers. Everybody needs a role. That's a different episode. But for this episode of realworld problem solving without getting overwhelmed. This is an important part of not being overwhelmed. I got completely overwhelmed, but I did live out this rule of transparency and just let the learners know that, hey, we got to regroup. Part of what we also did is one of my learners This is why I think it's really important to open up the real world to your kids. One, ran with it. And Dakota happened to know somebody from her church that worked at um a law enforcement building where kids would go and adults would go. So if something bad happened in the middle of the night and both adults needed to be taken to police station for questioning or custody, where do the kids go? Well, they went to this building and it was just a building. It was not made for kids. It was really an office building and they would just sit there and they were scared and alone. And Dakota said, "Well, what if we made tie blankets for those kids?" That makes a lot of sense.
So, she started doing that and then pretty soon it was like, "Well, what if we all got behind you and then we could all build tie tie blankets and then like take them there and like we did that and it was real." And she started a little nonprofit out of that action and it was like, "Wow." So, was it a fail? 100%. Did something good come out of it? 120%. and I was able to fail forward as an educator and get better at this. So now I know that every teacher can introduce realworld problems into their classroom without getting overwhelmed using these three ideas. Number one, the closer to home, the more visible the impact. I also like to call it bringing the why closer. Right? We all tell our learners that they need to learn this standard because they're going to need it in college. Okay? But most adults can't see past three years into the future. anyway. And now suddenly we're asking eighth graders to do that, right? It's like that doesn't really make sense. It's true, right? It's not that it's not true. Like it's totally true. The why is just too far away. So for a group of third graders, what we did is they had these persuasive writing standards that were important for them to know and they had these perimeter standards that were important for them to know, but it was too far away to say, "Well, you're going to need them in high school." So we brought it closer and we said, "Hey, there are grandmas and grandpas in our local community that don't get good nutrition. Unless they go to the local senior center. We're going to build raised garden beds there. Do you guys want to do that? Yeah, we do. Right. They got all excited. Said, "Well, great. You need to learn perimeter and persuasive writing to do that. Would you like Mrs. Wisdom to teach you that?" "Yeah, we do." Not because they were excited about perimeter. They were excited about helping. Do you see the quick little switch there? The real world problem was what they were trying to solve. The standards were in the way. There were hurdles that we need to tackle in order to get the real world problem solving. So, they were in, in fact, I had a young guy who had he had cowboy boots on and I used to wear cowboy boots all the time.
So, we were buddies right away and we're moving these cinder blocks so that, you know, we can build these raised garden beds. And I asked him like, "How many are on that pallet?" And he starts to count. I said, "No, no, no. Like, do the math." Right? So, he knew what that meant. So, he started counting all of them and then counted down and he did the math. Six weeks earlier or four weeks earlier, there's no way he was going to do that math. Like, it didn't make sense. But I was like, we need to order more of these and we need the right number. So he was going to do the math. That's part of the power of the real world problem solving. And there are some groups that will say that scenario projects are okay or that a canned project that you just download and grab and run are okay. And we just disagree at Magnify Learning with that. We think the secret sauce is in the real world problem solving. That's where it's at because you're bringing it closer to home. And if it's fake, we all know it's fake. And if it's too far away, Okay, right? Like you're going to need this in college. It it may be true, but it's too far away. So, we're going to bring that why closer to home. So, NASA's super cool, but how can you bring that really close to home, right? The second idea for bringing real world problems in your classroom without getting overwhelmed is to have a driving question and it needs to be real. And we're going to use a formula for that. We have a formula you can fit in there. And you're going to let community partners emerge out of those stand ards. So the standards aren't just coming from you and the state. They're coming from your community partner. So when you bring this driving question to your class, it's going to have a role in there that they're going to play. There's going to be an action they have to take and there's going to be a so that that will come out of it. And as you do that, if you follow that formula, the learners can see who it is they're emulating in the real world, who they're and not just emulating, they're being that person because it's real world problem solving. That's the difference between the fake ones and the real ones.
The fake is you're going to pretend to be a scientist and the real one you are that scientists because you're taking the action of those scientists and and the so that is that you can see it in the community. So your community partner is going to bring that in to your classroom. Remember we're going to bring that why very close and now you're going to make it real because Claudia's a real person, right? And that real person is issuing that problem that needs to be solved by your learners and you're going to give them the role, the action and the outcome. And when you do that, you talk about the driving question every day. Even when you're in a workshop on fractions, you're still bringing out that driving question. They now know why they're doing those fractions. That's the context that the research talks about is so important for our learners to understand the content and really start to master it. The third idea is the dis disciplinary practices of your content. That means you still teach your content, right? The skills, the content, those things are still important. We still need to understand In argumentative writing, we still need to know how to set up uh a lab experiment appropriately so that we've got one variable that we can actually understand instead of 42 different variables. Right? This one I think it's one of the best science uh activities you can have. If you've got time, just have learners make their own scientific experiment without any type of teaching and they've got 43 variables. It's like, well, how do you know it's not the temperature of the water or the movement or the water or the dye that you put in that made that result? Well, I don't know. All right, let's talk about independent and dependent variables, right? And now there's context as you have these real world problems that are kind of messy. Now, you know where to fit in your content and your content is absolutely essential for them to solve this problem. Right? In my third grade example, they can't figure out the perimeter if they don't know if they don't understand how to do perimeter classroom. There's no way they can figure it out when we're actually outside.
We actually have to place an order and pay for these cinder blocks or the amount the cubic volume of the dirt that we're going to put in there. Like those are real calculations. And sure, it's generally 8 by six, but really it's 7 feet and 11 in and right and like 6 feet and 4 in. And now the math is real tricky and hard. Good. You want it to be hard. And you're still going to do the classroom work, right? And things are going to work out reasonably well. Probably there's no remainder, right? So they know it's right. But now we're going to go through the hard work of what's it look like in the real world? and your learners are going to start to struggle with those things and that's actually the skill they need. Perimeter, we can teach them really quickly, but the application of it in the real world that takes time and there's extra wrinkles in their brain that they need to figure that out. So, I'm going to remember the title of this one in episode 7 is make or break your PBL. I don't think that's over dramatized. We believe the authenticity of a real world problem makes all the difference. Like all the difference. So this is a super important idea. Find a community partner so that you can make sure that it's a real world problem and let your learners know it's real world. Let them know it's different than a scenario project. But I got to come back and and wrap this in this way because I said every teacher can introduce real world problems into their classroom without getting overwhelmed. I don't want you to be overwhelmed by it, but I do want you to be wellelmed, right? Not overwhelmed, but wellelmed. And your students need to be wellelmed as well. Not overwhelmed. but wellelmed and perimeter in the classroom is different than perimeter in the field. They need to feel that difference. Okay? So, they can do that by making it closer to home, by having a driving question and a community partner that bring the standards off the page and out of the test. And idea three is that your practices within your content area matter in the real world. And we want to make sure we apply them because that's why we should be learning them. All right. Your call to action this week is to follow us on Facebook or Instagram.
And you say, "Well, why?" Great question. Because we hold boot camps on Instagram and Facebook, right? So, we've got boot camps and we put out, you know, like a 30-day starter to the school year. We put out resources out there. So, we'd also love to see what you're doing in your classroom. Like, we'd love to magnify your work. So, if you tag us in Instagram or Facebook, we're happy to magnify those things. We want to see it. Um, and we've got a bunch of resources we want to get to you, right? So, again, don't do this alone. That's going to be a theme throughout all the episodes. So, where do you actually teach your content? That's a valid question, my friend. The episode outlines how workshops allow you to deliver just in time student centered inquirybased experiences. So, roll right to 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 Interview helps the next inspired classroom teacher just like you find their why and teach inspired.
