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 5 of 20, how to build a winning classroom culture. Sure. In my eighth grade class, we had an advisory class at the very beginning of the day and you'd actually kind of start with seventh graders. They would loop with you to eighth grade. It was that like superl course where you were going to, you know, in 20 minutes build relationships with kids because we were in a middle school of a thousand kids, seventh and eighth grades. It's a lot of kids. And you want every learner to be known well by somebody, right? And it worked if you really did it well. Like I loved connecting with these kids. I'd have with teachers, homework, family stuff, whatever it was, like we could dive into it, right? And we did this protocol every morning on Monday called connections. Connections is three rounds. The first round is you just get to share something, right? You just popcorn out. And then for us, because it was Monday, the second round was always, you know, how was your weekend? And then the third round is the connections round where you connect with what somebody else would say. So you'd say, oh Travis, I did that, too. And you can connect and we're practic icing speaking and we're practicing listening because you only got to speak once per round and you just got to popcorn out. We had to share the time because each round was only two minutes. So it was really difficult for some of our learners, right? Extroverted learners would jump right away and then they had to suddenly listen. Introverted learners would jump in like when they felt safe, right? And we developed a safe process. It was we were super consistent every Monday we ran this. You did not have to speak. We didn't go around the circle and have that pressure of like am I supposed to speak or not, you could just popcorn in when you were ready. Well, Maria wasn't ready for the entire first semester. And I had her in class and we had a great relationship. She talked to other kids, but she did not speak during connections for the entire semester. And somewhere in second semester in that third nine weeks area, we're talking about our weekends and she jumps in with, you know, my family went for ice cream.
We had a really great time and our entire circle just went and I was like play it cool like play it cool don't ruin this everybody and so we just kept going and rolling and then at the end like we all just like smiled and Maria smiled cuz she realized what had happened too like hey I spoke in this thing and she felt comfortable and we all just celebrated that everybody was super comfortable speaking and the fact that we could be so safe for everybody that was okay that Maria never spoke first semester and that When she was ready, we were ready. It was such an amazing moment. It was so much fun. I think that every teacher can create a winning classroom culture with these three mindset shifts. The first mindset shift is transparency. Students have the right to know what's happening, what you're doing to their brains, right? We are trying to ignite their brains and their passion and we're trying to get them to think differently. We don't want them to be passive. We want them to be engaged and then empowered and we've got this kind of idea that we want for them to do and we need to let them know we want to be transparent with that. You think about the other episodes we've been through also like you're in a a learning mindset as well. You want to be transparent with hey we're going to learn the research is there. I went to go visit a really cool school that was super awesome. I listened to these 20 podcast episodes about PBL and I think it makes a lot of sense. I want to bring it to you guys because I think it's great for you. Right? But I'm learning. Be transparent. with that. So then when things go ary, you can just be transparent of like, yep, we're learning, right? Doctors get to practice, lawyers have a practice, everybody's practicing. Why don't we get to practice in the classroom? Why does it all have to be like so controlled and perfect? Because it's never fully controlled and perfect. And if it is, we're probably not achieving the goals we really want. You're not really teaching the way you always wanted to teach. So let's learn. Let's be transparent in the process. Because as we're living that out, your learners get to be transparent. say, "You know what? I don't understand complex sentences at all.
Like, would you help me? I don't get it. I don't know where the commas go. I don't really know what a conjunction is. Can you help me?" That only happens in a classroom that's safe and where the adults are showing transparency so that the kids can can show transparency. The second mindset shift is to go to assetbased classroom development. Where are the things that are really working well in your classroom? Where are the things that you're learners are doing things in amazing ways even though there's definitely some deficits and some places where they need help. Right? I remember one time in the teachers lounge, this teacher had finally had it and she said, "These kids, they never know compound sentences. They've never known them. I've been here for 23 years. They just don't know compound sentences." And I'm thinking, isn't that one of the standards we're supposed to teach? I think we're supposed to teach that to them, actually. Like, I think it's on purpose they don't know them. That's our job. And I didn't say it out loud. because that's not wellreceived in a teacher's lounge, right? I don't I didn't usually go to the teachers lounge. So, but I was there and that's what I heard and I was like, "Yeah, that's true. They don't know." But what do they know, right? Do they know how to write a full sentence? Because if they can write a complete sentence, in fact, they can write two complete sentences. They're really close to a compound sense, right? We just need a comma, a conjunction, like we can make this happen. So, it's instead of looking at what these kids can't do, what can these kids do? They can make a complete sentence. In fact, they can make two. Hey, let's join them. Right? Maybe your class is way too talkative and that's a negative, but maybe their group work is going to be really strong because they're super collaborative. Maybe your presentations are going to be super strong. Wow, you guys are really talkative third period. I don't know how that happens because it's still early, but you guys are super talkative. You're going to love the presentations that we're going to be doing. In fact, let's run a protocol right now to run some short presentations. And they should be all over that, right?
Like focus on the assets, speak them into the truth that will be true, right? Like speak them into their future selves that are filled with these great employability skills that are doing amazing things instead of constantly focusing on the things they're not doing. The deficitbased approach. We want to take an assetbased approach. The third mindset shift, how to be in relationship. We talked about that as one of our big pieces in an earlier episode, but we don't know how to do relationships really as adults. We're still awkward. We still don't fully get it. We don't we're not transparent. We hide, we assume. Well, guess what? Teenagers, elementary school kids, they don't know how to do it either, right? So, we're going to teach them how to do that. How do we do that? We're going to use some things like agreements and norms and even that core value worksheet that we did, you know, some personality tests like compass points, some of those protocols to start to build relationships and show our learners how it's supposed to happen, how you can have a reasonable, rational conversation with other human beings. that you don't know really well, right? We're going to use protocols for that. We're going to have structures and rules for that to teach our learners how to do this. We're going to practice handshakes so when community partners come in, we know how to give a good firm handshake and we don't give the dead fish handshake, right? Or the awkward too long handshake. And we're going to talk about eye contact with our community partner and how we're going to speak loudly and slowly so they can understand us. And we're going to start setting the tone for how we build relationships in your classroom. And it's going to be a big deal. So those are the three mindset shifts you need to make. Transparency, being assetbased. What are the things that you're going well that you can build on? Because you can't build on something that's not there. Does that make sense? You got to build on the assets. The deficit's not there. You can't build on that. The third mindset shift is to look at relationships as that currency for excellence. So you're now 25% of the way through this binge PBL series. Congratulations.
You're binging this thing just like Netflix. Honestly, not every makes it this far. But then again, you aren't everyone. You're passionate and inspired about transforming education. So maybe you're ready for a book. Are you ready for a book? You're a teacher. We love books. I've got so many books. I love books. So in the show notes, you're going to see uh a free PBL Simplified book study. So you can grab that book study. Uh if you're looking to gain momentum for your PBL work, you can invite other inspired teachers into the book study. It's a great way to just say, "Hey, I'm learning about this thing. I'm not an expert. Do you want to learn it with me? Like it'd be super helpful for me if you would help me understand some of these things and we can try them out and see what works. So you can learn together even though you're already in. Like you can give them this podcast, right? And you guys can be on the same page, but let the book study bring up some of the hard questions. So it's not you that has to bring them up. Just say, "Well, Ryan said this. Do we agree with that? Do we aspire to that? Do we argue that?" You don't have to agree with everything, right? But you'll get these really good conversations and everybody that you've invited can start to create solutions for your school. So, it's a great way to start with a book study. There's a link in the description of the show notes to get you started with that book study. There's also a free link to the ebook of PBL Simplified. So, you can get a free copy of that, put on your Kindle, iPad, however it is that you consume those books. So, hopefully you're fired up and you're ready to start learning more about PBL. But what about your students? Are they fired up? In the next episode, we'll start prepping your students to become learners. 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.
