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 6 of 20. Getting your students on board. Not board b o r e d on board b o a r d. Let's get them on board. Here's what it could look like. Okay class, today we're going to hear from an expert in the field of DNA. In order to learn more about the punnet square so that we can help parents who just found out their child has a genetic disease. Are there any questions before we start this awesome, amazing, life-changing PBL unit? Yes, Billy. What is your thought provoking, empowered, yet curious question, my young learner. Uh, can I go to the bathroom? Teacher size as all the passion and enthusiasm leaves her body. This could happen when you first start. But don't lose heart. Every passive student can become an empowered learner if we remember these three warnings. The first warning is around agency. Just because you are shifting doesn't mean that your kids are suddenly ready and they've made a shift already. They've been conditioned if they're in a traditional school environment to learn in a compliant receiving environment could be most of their lives, right? So, what do we do about that? Well, let's stay right here in this idea that number one, it's not all the child's fault, right? When they say you say again, let's use Billy. We'll pick on Billy who was one of my learners in eighth grade. by the way. Love you, Billy. He's been You've been given an assignment. Kids have been working for 15 minutes and you look over and Billy hasn't done a thing. You think, man, Billy's not doing his work again. Hey, Billy. What you need, man? How can How can I help you? I don't I don't have a pencil, Mr. steuer. I I need a pencil. So, just to clarify, Billy, you probably wouldn't say this. It's too sarcastic. You've been sitting there for 15 minutes while everyone is working and you don't have a pencil. So, you haven't done anything. You probably said that in your head, but really you're just going to go get Billy a pencil. But why didn't he go get a pencil? Like, that's what you're thinking. Like, why didn't he get up and solve that problem himself?
But you've got to understand that he's been told to sit in a row and then we say, "Good job." And then he takes the highlighted word and puts it on a worksheet and we say, "Good job." And he's been trained to be passive, to take those highlighted words and put them in the right place on a test. And he gets points and we say, "Yes, good job. So, we've been training him to be passive and to be compliant. So, even that high-flying, you know, honor student that gets all the points and knows how the game of school works, you ask them the week after the test and you say, you know, how do these atoms interact? And they say, well, what's an atom? What's a neutron? I don't even know what you're talking about. They have no idea. And we say, well, they're books smart, but you know, they're not practically smart. It's like, well, because we've told them that passive compliance is how to win. And so that's what they do. So as they come to you and you're ready to shift and you're all excited, I want you to remember asset based mindset, right? And the other mindset is that they we haven't taught them agency. So it's not fair to test them on agency yet, right? We haven't shown them what an empowered learner looks like yet. So we can't expect them to be there yet. So they're going to start that way. You're fired up. Your learners are going to take a little bit to get going, but once they do, it's a flywheel. Once we do, it's a flywheel. The other metaphor I use is like when I was in middle school, it's like hurting cats, right? You're just trying to get they're all wandering. And then you get some PBL learners now that have gone to engage and now they're empowered and now you're hurting tigers, right? They're still there's still middle schoolers that don't know a lot about the world, but they're fired up and moving and they want everybody to be engaged and it's awesome, but it does take a switch for them, too. So, the second warning is going to be ownership. Is that we want our learners to take ownership, but again, they've never been asked to do this before. So, as we're looking to change our passive student to empowered, we've got to remember that they've never had ownership over their classroom before.
Sometimes there, well, I'll give you an example. There was a teacher that got to teach a passions course, right? That 20% time, that 20% genius time. And he asked these sophomores, you know, what do you want to do? This is a class where for nine weeks you can do whatever you want to do. And the most common Google search was what do I want to do with my life? Right? They just don't know. But again, I don't think we can blame them. We haven't asked them. So, we're inviting them in to a whole new world of engagement and empowerment where they actually get to own their space. They get to own their thoughts and their voice and they have power. It's never happened before, but we're going to invite them into that. We're going to say, you know what? Why don't you guys tell me how it is we should create this space so we have a place of collaboration and engagement and power and voice and choice, right? And you watch Sir Ken Robinson's video about is education killing creativity. It's a great fun RSA animate video. They watch that and say, "Okay, now redo our classroom." And what happens is they'll start to take ownership. You don't have to take every idea that they do, right? There doesn't have to be a water slide in the back and a water fountain that just does Kool-Aid. It But what if they say, "Hey, let's put the desks together instead of rows for when we collaborate and move them back to rows for when we're taking tests or we're studying independently. You think, well, that makes sense. So, you do that and now they're they say, "Oh, well, Mr. Story just took my idea and they start to take some ownership in your classroom and they start to own the learning. The shift is happening right now. Now, we're teaching them agency. We're giving them ownership. The third warning is failure. You're going to do these things and you will experience failure. It will happen. And you want to figure out how you use it to grow how to grow your learners, how to grow yourself, how to grow your practice.
You're going to have learners go up into a presentation and we'll talk about this, but they're going to go to presentation, they're going to say something that dumb that doesn't make any sense that might even be offensive to some of your community partners and you're going to try to hide and you can't and you can't say anything because it's like game time, right? You can't coach at that point, right? If you've ever coached third graders, like once they're out there, they're out there. They're going to do what they do. You can yell Well, but right, it's game time. You're going to have practice presentations. We'll talk about that. But my point is that there will be failures. You need to stay the course, right? You need to stay the course. You're learning, they're learning. You're going to teach them agency. You're going to teach them how to have effort and appreciate effort. You're going to teach them ownership. They're going to start to take ownership over their learning environment, their own learning, maybe even their appearance for some of your learners, right? They're going to take ownership over the pathway in front of them. going to start looking at the next step and start to own that. But it's going to take time and they're going to fail. When I was when we flipped um PBL in our school, we built a school within a school. So out of those thousand kids that were in the middle school, we took 25% of them, seventh and eighth grade, gave them project-based learning from day one to day 184 in their four core classes. Right? And with that, in a failing school, we would have been a B on standardized tests, we were a percent and a half higher in attendance, which is a big deal, by the way. With 25% of the kids, we only had 8% of the discipline, which means that kids were showing up and generally doing what they're supposed to be doing. They went from apathetic, like I had kids that would just get 20%, right? Like a lot of kids would just get 20% for the entire nine weeks. And suddenly the first three PBL units, everybody turned in everything for their final projects. It's like that never happened before. So they were doing what they're supposed to be doing. They were coming to school.
and they're doing a great job. We still had 8% of the discipline, right? They were still kids. There were still those conversations of but you've been doing so great. Like why would you make that decision? Tell me what happened. And what you'll find actually is they're better talking about it. Right? So are they going to make some bad decisions? Are there going to be failures? Yes. But now we're giving them language of agency and ownership to be able to work through those with you. And you'll do the same thing. So you're going to get your students on board. They're going to be less bored. Uh, but have a couple warnings, right? It's not going to be perfect. They'll get there. Today, I want you to look at Life's a Project, the six A's of Project-Based Learning. It's a new book by Andrew Larson, who is a PBL educator. Uh, he helped start one of the coolest PBL high schools that I've ever been to. It's one of our model schools in Columbus, Indiana. Would love to have you come visit. And Andrew puts down his journey of PBL. He started as as a traditional science teacher loved being a science teacher, did that for a long time, and then switched. And he says it was like his career was starting over again. And he gives you a master class in taking your PBL practice to a higher level. Uh he's a 25-y year vet veteran. He makes the deep PBL practices accessible for all educators because he's also a master storyteller. So, there's stories that go along with each PBL practice. I think you're going to love it. So, we've got some links in the show notes for that. We also have a free book study that goes along with that book as well so you can invite more people into your journey. Are you noticing a trend? We're going to do this with others. Once we have prepped ourselves to work with our students to help them gain agency, ownership, and we can fail forward, we're now ready to introduce our learners to the cornerstone of authentic PBL, real world problem solving. Tune in to the next episode to find out how to engage with the real world, but also not get completely overwhelmed.
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