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 two of 20. Why PBL is best for teachers, also known as how to love teaching. Again, my wife and I read through the Marie Condo book about loving our space and things by decluttering. And then I read Essentialism by Greg McKeown, and he says, "You should look at every shirt in your closet and ask, would you buy it again?" So, we're in the throes of decluttering our house as a family of seven, which meant we're in boxes and old stuff up to our knees. And I come across this old box from college. In it, amongst a bunch of other stuff that needed to be tossed, was an essay that I wrote called "Why I Want to Teach." One of those early essays, the beginning of your college courses. And it was me as a young naive pre-service teacher who'd never been in a faculty lounge yet. And I just wanted to help change the world through education. I believed that I could make a difference in the lives of kids. I really believed this. I believed that education was the key to helping kids fulfill their dreams. In the same way it helped my dad get out of rural poverty. I believe that I could help sort out just some of the madness in the world from my little, from Mr. Steuer's classroom. I believed, and I had big dreams. I have those beliefs and dreams still. And the whole idea is that you can too. I'm going to tell you that when I was teaching traditionally about half my teaching career, I was relational. I was loving on kids, and I was struggling every day to help them see the potential in themselves. They knew that it was, Mr. Steuer's classroom was a safe place to be. I enjoyed it. I had a ton of energy, but they still weren't grasping like the content knowledge I wanted them to have. They weren't able to speak to adults in the way that I knew that they needed to be. Like I was a former engineer, right, at a Fortune 50 company. So I knew that most of what you really need to succeed, it's not always the content standards. It's much more along the lines of, can you work with others? Uh, can you present yourself well? Can you problem-solve and think critically? Can you come up with ideas that others wouldn't have otherwise? Because then you're super valuable and you start to move up in a company.
That's what I saw in my career, and I wanted my learners to have that. And on the southwest side of Indianapolis at an urban school, I found out that many of them didn't have engineers in their first line of relationship. So I felt like I was trying to fill that void, but I was also in a traditional teaching setting that said, "Go in this book and go page by page and hope that it works out." And what I found is that it wasn't working out. Right? When one of my learners, uh, dropped out of high school the first semester of his freshman year, and I asked the other teachers, I'm like, "Is that even, is he allowed to do that?" Apparently, you were. And I was like, "That's not the outcomes that I'm looking for. That's not why I went from engineering to education. You know, I, I wanted to make a difference." And when I read this old paper that I'd written in college, it just stirred all this up in me. I was like, "That's the real change that I saw when I went from traditional teaching to project-based learning." I saw that I was teaching the way I always wanted to teach with passion and that that dream and that vigor. And I was seeing those things happen. I was seeing learners suddenly able to sit down and talk to a community partner, one group for 45 minutes in the largest children's museum in the world. They sat down and found a place [that] community partner, and they just talked. What an invaluable experience that cannot come from a textbook. It was awesome. And we just see that again and again and again with project-based learning. So what I believe is that every teacher can use PBL to, uh, teach again. And I have three ideas that will ignite or reignite your teaching passion. The first idea is we get to teach like we've always wanted to teach. And first comes that belief. But you have to know that that college essay that we all wrote about changing the lives of our learners, seeing light bulb moments and providing our learners with opportunities that they would not have had otherwise, those are real things, and they can happen. And I want you to push back on the cynicism that says that teaching is this really difficult profession.
You can't make any headway and state testing is against you and businesses are against you, and all these things are against you. What if that dream was still possible? What if you went to go visit a school that's doing project-based learning, and you saw that it wasn't suddenly easier, but the dreams were being realized, the passion was there, the energy, the vigor was there in the adults as well as the learners. They were living out their dream of teaching and changing the world. That can happen. And we are a growing movement of teachers who are living out their passionate why to change the world through education. Our big why right now is 51 by 51. And I say right now, it's going to be the same why for the next 37 years. We want 51% of schools using project-based learning by 2051. That's the goal. And that's why we're producing resources like this. We want you to have an outline of what project-based learning looks like. We want to introduce you to PBL so that you can love it like we do. There's definitely deeper ways to go, trainings, resources, all those pieces. But we want to reach out and say, "Hey, teaching is awesome and it's impactful and you can live out your why in this profession." Now, the second idea is growth. When we embody the practices that we expect students to use, we develop a deeper awareness of the nuances of these practices. As you're bringing PBL and these employability skills to your learners, you start to live them out. You have to teach transparently. You have to have this growth mindset in order to teach it. And it starts to change your life. My life's been changed by the intentionality of PBL. And so many other PBL educators, they say the same thing. Like Andrew Larson just published his book, A Life's a Project, and he would say the same thing. He taught traditionally for 15 years and then flipped the switch. And he said it was like, uh, just starting my career over again and I loved it. And all out of that comes this book. You just get to live, uh, all of Andrew's experiences of PBL and life at the same time because it didn't just change his classroom practice, it changed his whole life. This growth mindset, uh, permeates through all of our lives.
So the next time you see a PBL teacher, yes, you can ask about the nuts and bolts, uh, you know, how did you get started? But throw in this question, "Would you? How is PBL changed your life?" Every PBL teacher that I know has a great answer to that. Put it into when you go do a school tour, which I highly recommend. Go find a PBL school where they're doing amazing things and talk to the teachers. Throw that question in. "How has PBL changed your life?" The third idea is relationships. The third idea that's going to reignite your passion for education is relationships. Relationships develop that start to push our professionalism because you thought I was going to go right to relationship with kids, and for sure that's going to happen. But what about with community partners? You start interacting with bankers, government officials, doctors, nonprofit leaders, zoo outreach coordinators, all these different professions, and it starts to change your mindset as well as your kids. But your mindset starts to change, and you see the, the bigness of the world that your learners are going into, and it starts to change us. So, I would also throw into relationships the idea of the teachers that you're teaching with. Those relationships change as you start to change from teacher, sage on the stage to facilitator, guide on the side or sage on the side, however you'd like to say that if you don't want it to rhyme. It's really pretty powerful when PBL educators get together. Sometimes we're speaking a different language, and we're talking about entry events and need to knows, and we'll get into that in this binge PBL podcast later on. But there's also something a little bit different in the growth mindset and the expectations and the passion that we have in the classroom. PBL is great for teachers because we get to teach like we've always wanted to. We grow as humans, and our relationships become richer. This is why I think PBL is best for teachers. Remember aka how to love teaching. Again, you got into this profession for a reason. Maybe you had a great teacher, and you wanted to be that great teacher for others. Maybe you had a teacher that wasn't so great, and you want to be the opposite. You want to be that safe haven.
But somewhere along the line of your journey, you said, "I want to step into this arena where we go to help these kids see new opportunities they wouldn't see otherwise." And other people look into the arena and go, "You're crazy." And you're like, "Yes, I am." Keep the passion. Keep the fire lit and going. Your call to action today is I want you to go to ypbl.com, ypbl.com to hear why other teachers love PBL. I want you to roll right into the next episode Netflix style to define your values, to set goals, and grow in your passionate profession so you can teach inspired.
That's just what I needed to bring PBL to my learners. If that sounds like you, please consider rating and reviewing the show. Oh, it only takes two 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.
