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 four of 23 steps to starting your PBL journey. When I was a kid, I would go visit my mom's side of the family in Ohio and they had a pretty small yard. I don't know, biggish, middle somewhere in there. It was enough that I got the nickname Runnin' Ryan. All I would do when I was there is I would just run and run and run. And then because embarrassing family stories work like this, uh my nickname just evolved to eventually Cryin' Ryan. So then I'm pretty sure I was running, would fall and just cry and a lot of crying happened apparently. So enough that the nickname Cryin' Ryan stuck and thankfully we kept going because then eventually it went back to Runnin' Ryan and then eventually that one stuck even more. Eventually ran a bunch in high school and all those types of things but it definitely went from Runnin' Ryan to Cryin' Ryan back to Runnin' Ryan. The point is that there's a place to start with this PBL jney, journey, you're going to crawl, you're going to walk, then you're going to run. So, if you go visit a school, which again we highly recommend, you're going to see people that are running. Uh, but don't forget, at some point they were crawling, some point they were walking, and now they're running. So, it's worth going to see them. Make sure you ask them about their whole story so you don't just think you've got to start running. I believe that every educator can start their PBL journey by following the same steps a toddler takes. Big idea for this episode, give yourself grace. Nobody starts out running. Even if you've been teaching for 15 years, it's a different flow. There's some different moves. We're going to mess up. We're going to fall. We're going to scratch our knee. Cryin' Ryan's going to come out, right? It's going to happen. Give yourself grace. Give your learners grace. They're not always going to know what to do in these different situations. So, when you're crawling, strength, exploration, stability. You're navigating new surroundings. So, you want to come in knowing that you're going to be crawling. Remember in the last episode, it wasn't just, you know, go from 45 minutes of your total control to suddenly zero minutes and kids come in, do whatever you want kids. Like, that will not work. You will have skinned knees. So, you want to crawl, right? Start with a protocol that you've done in a faculty meeting or maybe you did at a PBL training or you saw in the online community and then take that protocol you've seen other people do and then you run it in your classroom. Run a connections protocol, run a tuning protocol and start with that crawling so that you can get used to the, the new process, the new way of learning and your students can get used to a new way of learning as well. So, you're going to start with crawling. You're going to have some exploration. You're trying to get your sea legs here, right? And then you're going to start to walk. You're going to walk with structures, resources, and other PBL educators for support. The great thing about this walking stage now is that we have a bunch of resources, right? In the early days, you know, we're just up till midnight, you know, making group contracts and trying it out, hoping it would work, refining and and making it better. But now you have these proven resources that have been molded, refined, forged in classrooms just like yours wherever you're at, whether it's rural, urban, suburban, title one, private, charter, I don't care where you're at. These resources have been created in a classroom just like yours. Right? Our whole existence at Magnify Learning, we were just teachers teaching teachers at the very beginning. Super grassroots right off the bat. So now you've got the structures. We've got the six steps of PBL to use in your classroom. Uh you're going to get in the next episode, you'll get a free ebook of my book PBL Simplified. That's exactly what it is. It's the six steps that you walk through. And in fact, in fact, I give you a win, a fail story, and a place to start in every chapter because again, Cryin' Ryan is going to be a part of this process. You're going to fall. You're going to scrape your knees. There's going to be fails, but you want to fail forward. As John Maxwell would say, you're trying to fail forward. Learn from that. Be transparent, right? Even with your learners, just, "Hey, we were trying this protocol. How do you guys think it went? Awful? I think so too. How do you think we can make it better?" Right? Like that's a totally legitimate outcome. That will make your classroom better and it lets your learners know this is a safe place. That's super important. So, you're going to walk, but you've got a lot of supports because babies only crawl for a year or so and they run pretty quickly once, once they're bipeds, right? They get going. There's that little stage where like they'll sit up like with the couch and like they'll have that structure to hold on to that additional help and then they start running, but there's definitely going to be this crawl, walk, and pretty soon you're going to be running. So, let's keep the run in sight. What does it look like to run? Same thing. You're going to try. You're going to fall. You're going to fail forward. You're going to get up. You're going to celebrate. You're going to do it again. You're going to invite others. Once you get used to this, then that's what running is, right? You go from walking to running. There's kind of some falling that happens in between where we're going to fail forward. And once you realize you're okay and in fact you're better off because now you have this growth mindset permeating your classroom and your learners are trying to get better on their own. And it may seem impossible possible right now, but it will happen. Not because you talk about it, not because you have a billboard or a bulletin board that says growth mindset and has some neat stuff on it, not because the research is true. It is, but that's not what'll change. What'll change your classroom is when you grow and walk through these stages. Crawl, walk, and run. And once you're running, it's still not, I'm not going to tell you, you're not going to skin your knee. You're just going to know it's okay, and you're going to fail forward faster, and you're going to get better, better and you'll be running. And now these protocols suddenly make sense. You know that if things aren't quite going well, you know exactly what protocol to jump into. "Oh, let's do roses, thorns, and buds. That'll be perfect right here. Uh let's stop and do a pro protocol, guys. Whoa, there seems to be some tension. Let's run connections." Right? If you're just going to have these things in your back pocket and if you've again, if you've gone to a school to watch this, you're seeing our our PBLers that are running, you're seeing them do these things, and it seems natural. And it is natural now. But don't forget to give yourself grace. You're going to crawl. You're going to walk. You're going to run. All right. If you are on your legs and you're ready to run right now, join us in the PBL movement online community. If you're serious about getting the next level of your PBL journey, you realize you can't do it alone. And even if you could, the question is, would you really want to? So, join the PBL movement online community to learn from people who've been doing PBL for the last decade. Learn, collaborate, grow. Check out the link in the show notes for a free download to help you convince your principal to put you in the online community. I'll give you a quick hint. It's the cost of a one-day conference. Instead of going to a one day conference, you can have a full year of on-demand courses and support and a community that believes like you believe. And then you can teach inspired. What's the next episode? Once you're walking or may maybe as a support while you're crawling to help you get your legs under you is the idea of starting to build a classroom culture that supports the PBL necessities. How do you build a winning classroom culture? 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. 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