(Introduction)
Welcome to the PBL Simplified podcast for administrators 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 this top rated educational podcast designed for visionary school administrators seeking to transform their schools with Project Based Learning. Launch your vision, live your why, and lead inspired. Here's your host, Ryan Steuer. If you are brand new and looking for PBL info, inspiration, and resources, you are in the right spot. Go to whatispbl.com to get a free set of PBL resources. That's whatispbl.com. There'll be a section for you as the administrator and then a section for your teachers as well. So, feel free to share that.
(Podcast Updates)
Now, if you're a regular listener to the podcast, you're going to notice a few changes from here. Now, what we've done is we've separated out some of our podcast content because we have a lot of audiences and we were kind of overlapping. We've also got some brand new offerings in the new year.
* Four Podcast Options:
* Binge PBL for Teachers: 20 episodes, each under 15 minutes long, to help teachers explore Project Based Learning.
* Binge PBL for Administrators: Same format as above, but with content geared toward administrators.
* PBL Simplified for Teachers: Ongoing podcast with teacher-focused topics and interviews with teachers about their PBL experiences.
* PBL Simplified for Administrators: Ongoing podcast (this one) that will feature topics and guests relevant to administrators.
So, we've got one got four different podcasts. One option is Binge PBL for teachers. Binge PBL for teachers. And the binge series is 20 episodes to help you explore Project Based Learning. All the episodes, there's not one that's over 15 minutes. So they're under 15 minutes. Most are under 10. 20 episodes. So it's bingeable, right? So there's a start and end to these episodes. There's only 20 of them. Your teachers could dive into this one. So it's bingeable. PBL for teachers. We also have Binge PBL for administrators. Same format, different content. You've got 20 episodes. All of them are less than 15 minutes. And it helps you as the administrator explore like what are the main topics that you need to bring Project Based Learning to your classroom. After that, we have two ongoing podcasts. So, we've got PBL Simplified for Teachers, which is going to be ongoing. So, we're going to bring teacher topics. We're going to bring teachers onto that podcast to talk about their journey in PBL because that's what your teachers want. want to hear about, right? They don't want to hear about some of the structural pieces for a school. They really want to know how does PBL work in my classroom. So, that's the topic of that ongoing PBL Simplified for teachers. And this podcast is PBL Simplified for administrators. So, every week we're going to have a different topic or guest that's going to talk directly to you, the administrator. Maybe you're a principal of a school, maybe you're a coach, maybe you're a central office, but you've got a little bit different slant of how you want to look at it. Like, yes, you want to have great PBL practices in your classroom, but your job and your role of responsibility looks different than classroom teacher. So, we're going to talk about those things. So, that's what we've got. We have four different options. P Binge PBL for teachers and binge PBL for administrators. 20 episodes, 15 minutes or less. Gives you an overview. Ongoing PBL Simplified for teachers, it's going to go every 2 weeks. Same thing with this podcast, PBL Simplified for Administrators. Every two weeks, audience is specifically you, the administrator.
There you go. That's our new offerings for the new year and we're really excited about it. Super fired up because I think we're going to be able to serve you in a a better and more intentional way.
(Gaining Momentum for Project Based Learning in 2025)
So, let's jump in. You know, welcome to 2025. You no flying cars yet, but your classroom should look different than when you were a kid. So, your car might be somewhat similar, but your classroom should look different. Your school should look different. And that might be the process you're on. I hope it is because we are going to jump right into talking about Project Based Learning. In fact, let's let's get to work. Today, we're talking about how to gain momentum for Project Based Learning in 2025. Every PBL leader can gain momentum for Project Based Learning in 2025 with these three practical strategies.
* Practical Strategy #1: Get Started Today
* Don't wait to begin exploring and implementing PBL.
* Suggested starting points: School visits, book studies, listening to the Binge PBL podcasts.
* School Visits:
* Bring other key stakeholders: Assistant principals, lead teachers, community partners, parents, school board members.
* Focus on how you would evaluate the classrooms and set up PBL in your own school.
* Ask questions about the rollout process, vision, and professional development.
* Don't feel pressured to have all the answers; utilize available resources (books, videos, podcasts, etc.).
* Seek advice and guidance from schools successfully implementing high-quality PBL.
The very first one is to get started today. At this point, there's really no reason to wait, right? So, what does that mean, though? It doesn't mean that you say, "Hey guys, tomorrow we're a Project Based Learning school." It means that you do a school visit or you jump into a book study or you go through the new podcast, the Binge PBL episode. oods for administrators. So, there's a lot of different ways to do it. You just want to make sure you get started, right? And hopefully you've done that. That's why you're listening, right? So, you're starting in some way. Um, I just want you to know that's the right step, right? Get started right away because what and when you do these school visits, I want you to be selfish around your ideas, your ide like your role, right? The same way we separate out this podcast, when you go through your school visit, don't go by yourself. Bring your AP, bring some lead teachers. If you're really if if you're at a point where you're like, "Yep, I want really want to run with this." Bring community partners. Like, bring some key parents. Bring some schoolboard members. Let them look with their eyes, but you look with your eyes. Like, how would you evaluate these classrooms, right? How would you set this up? What's the summer PD look like? What does the vision look like? Like, ask that principal. Ask the teachers like, "How did you guys roll out PBL in your school? How do you talk about it?" Cuz that's what you need to know. right? Because that's the part that you're going to be jumping into. Now, do your are your teachers going to have questions? Yes. You don't have to be able to answer all those though, right? There are a ton of resources. There's again, there's books, videos, podcasts, group contracts, planning forms, all those things are there. Send them to those podcasts, right? Let them be there and let them ask those questions. You ask your questions because it's a lot of work. It's it's not a small task to switch from a traditional school to a Project Based Learning school. school and you're going to want to make sure that you know that you dive into this.
* Key Point About Seeking Advice:
* Don't take PBL advice from people who aren't successfully implementing it at a high level.
* Magnify Learning can connect you with National Model Schools for guidance.
So, a school visit, start right away. School visits are my favorite because you can see it and you can't hide things, right? It's either a great school doing amazing things or they're pretending to or they're early on the journey, right? Like, we're not expecting anybody to be perfect, but when you take advice from people, you want to make sure that they've been where you want to go, right? So, I always say like people will ask about like financial advice and it's like here's my here's my big bullet point. Don't take financial advice from people that don't have money, right? You shouldn't take financial advice from people that don't have money. And you shouldn't ask about Project Based Learning advice from people that aren't doing PBL at a really high level. And if you need you need support with that, obviously, we can help. We have national model schools that are doing PBL at amazing levels across the country. So, reach out and we're happy to help.
* Practical Strategy #2: Create a Grassroots Movement
* Avoid a top-down mandate; foster teacher buy-in and ownership.
* Two Approaches:
* PBL Leadership Team:
* A select group (administrators, coaches, lead teachers, etc.) visits a PBL environment, receives training, and then begins implementing PBL in their school.
* This demonstrates PBL's effectiveness within the school's context using its own teachers, curriculum, and resources.
* PBL Learning Team:
* Similar to a leadership team, but with an emphasis on investigation and exploration.
* A team goes to learn about PBL, observe it in action, and determine its potential benefits for their school.
* Transparency is crucial; the team shares their findings and experiences with the rest of the staff.
The second practical strategy is to create a grassroots movement. A grassroots movement. So, you've got this idea of it could be a top- down mandate, right? Like you're going to say, "Hey, we're doing PBL go." Or grassroots where it's like growing from your teachers and they want Project Based Learning and you're probably asking a really good question like, well, how do I create a grassroots movement, right? Like, is that possible? And we found the answer is yes, right? So, if you know that PBL is the right direction to go, we highly recommend you don't do the top down mandate, right? Instead, and there's ways to do that. Like actually, it's fine. There's just a different move. We really like the grassroots movement piece. where the administration's meeting the teachers so that you've got a need coming from your teachers. And we like to do that through either a PBL learning team or a PBL leadership team. So the leadership team would be kind of what I described with a school visit where you're going to bring you're going to come, you're going to bring your APS, coaches, lead teachers, and they're going to come experience a PBL environment. They're going to get some training, and then they're going to start running PBL uh at your school because now you're starting to develop these real world world results and research from kids that are from your district and your school using teachers curriculum all schedules all these things from your school.
* Why a Grassroots Movement Is Effective:
* Teachers want to see evidence that PBL works in their classrooms, with their students, and within their context.
* Seeing positive results from colleagues and students within the school builds buy-in and excitement.
So then the next group of teachers is like oh this does work here because is it eventually you're going to ask me like hey Ryan do you have research around PBL it's like yes we do we have a lot it's robust like they're really strong research studies but your teachers don't care right your teachers care and that's not because they're not educated they're obviously educated. They don't care because they want to know, does it work in my classroom? That's what they want to know. I get that it works there, but does it work for me? And that's a totally legitimate response and stance. I totally get it. And that's what a leadership team does. A leadership team is like been established and they're going to implement PBL and show that it works. A learning team is just about the same thing. It's just a little bit of a quarter twist. We have some principles that will say, "Hey, I think PBL is the right direction to go. I've seen some amazing ecos let's go learn if it'll work at our school. They say, "We're going to investigate PBL." And same thing, you're going to take some teachers, you're going to take your coaches, APs, get some parents on board. We're going to go investigate what PBL could do for our kids. And you're going to get them some training. You're going to go see it. You're going to answer their need to know. You're going to empower them with resources and tools. And they're going to implement. And the whole time, the whole process is super transparent. Here's what I found. Come check out this entry event. Look at what Victor did. Like, Victor's never done anything in my classroom, but now he's doing this and he's speaking to adults and he's g handshakes and giving eye contact, right? And you're learning about PBL. And then what happens is after that first year or first half a year, depending on how you run it, the other staff that's not involved in the PBL movement says, "Well, I want those experiences for my kids. How come my kids didn't get talk to talk to the Colts management and the Colts uh mascot? That was awesome." Well, they It was part of a PBL. How come the fire department didn't come in and talk to my kids? How come that bank CEO didn't come talk to my kids?
* Magnify Learning's Design Days:
* Supports schools in creating PBL leadership or learning teams.
* Takes teams to a PBL model school.
* Provides training and facilitates a 2-day process for teams to develop a customized 3-year PBL implementation plan.
* Offers ongoing coaching throughout the year to ensure successful implementation.
Well, it was part of a PBL that they set up. Would you like to learn about that? Yeah. And in fact, you've got to tell my kids deserve this, too. And now they're demanding that they do PD over the summer, right? That they get coaching throughout the year. How cool is that, right? You're not trying to force people to go there. They want to go. And that's where it's really a grass movement that's being created. Super exciting. So, it can be created. We use design days to do that. So, whether it's a leadership team or learning team, some of that semantics, but some of it depends on your culture. We're happy to to walk you through that idea, but then we take you to one of our PBL model schools and you build out a three-year plan over two days while school is in session. So, it might be a fall semester, spring semester, but things are happening and your team goes out into the classrooms to see these things, to talk to kids and facilitators, and you get to talk to the admin like during a live school day. And then you come back to your home base and you build your own three-year plan like this. this is how we will implement. And then you go back out and you come back. It's kind of accordion style, right? Accordion out, accordion in, and you're building your plan. And you leave with a three-year plan specifically customized for you. And we facilitate that whole process. And then we coach you throughout the year so that you implement well with success. It's really exciting. It works and it helps you understand that your vision's here and it is part of your job to launch the vision, but you don't want to just top down mandate like, hey, this is what we have to do versus What if they kind of met in the middle, right? What if you had grassroots coming and you were ready for it? That's our that's our philosophy and we've been doing this for over a decade. So, we've done it a lot of different ways and this is the way that we really see builds a lot of buyin for your staff and it's because you're creating grassroots inquiry within your staff and you're living the process with groups groups norms and processes. So then your staff knows how to bring those to their classroom because they've lived them out.
* Practical Strategy #3: Training
* Essential for successful PBL implementation; avoid inadequate training.
* Key Training Characteristics:
* Intensity: At least 3 days of immersive training.
* Follow-Up Coaching: Ongoing support is critical for teachers to transfer their learning into practice.
* Authenticity: The training should model authentic PBL practices and help teachers design projects that address real-world problems.
* Veteran Teacher Considerations:
* Reassure veteran teachers that they don't have to throw everything out, but that a shift to best practices is needed.
* Help them identify and repackage existing best practices to align with PBL.
So that's the second practical strategy is to create a grassroots movement. The third is simply training. If if you just if you're trying to get your teachers to do PPL but not giving them training, it's a recipe for failure. And we see this and I understand that there's a lot of different constraints in education. So you train half your staff and then the other staff like buddies up and then they're supposed to learn that. It's like well like our trainings are three days. They're super intense and you create this thing like you're always creating for your classroom. So those teachers are super engaged and involved. And then they're going to present at the end, right? So, they have this authentic need throughout. And then when you say to these teachers that don't have this 3-day experience, hey, I want you to do a great job. They just don't have the same motivators. They don't have the same culture. They could be great teachers, but they just haven't had the same training and they don't have the same supports. So, training is is it is a big piece because Project Based Learning is different. It's a different classroom move than traditional teaching. Like, traditional teaching, you know, we can add a few tweaks here and there because we went through traditional classroom likely, right? We've went through college and did well and was taught very traditionally. So, we can do that. We can make some extra tweaks and be fun and relational and do those different things. But now, project based learning comes along and it it feels real different because it is. Now, they're not throwing everything out, right? Like there's a we've got some great downloads like PBL versus a project. We'll put a link in the show notes. U but we've got a great YouTube video where I describe that. Uh and it shows your teachers that they're not completely throwing everything out. So, if you've got some veteran teachers 10, 15, 20 years, and you're saying, "Hey, we're going to move to Project Based Learning." It's really helpful to say, "Hey, it doesn't mean you're throwing everything out, but it is different. We're going to repackage some of those things, and we're going to make sure they're all best practice, right? If you're talking for 48 minutes at kids and then asking them to regurgitate, like that's that's not my problem." Like, that's that's a bad practice. And yes, we are going to change that and it might be a good time to do that. But if you've got some best practices that you're using in a traditional classroom, we're not throwing those out, right? And and those are the things that your teachers need to hear. here and they need to hear from teachers that are in the classroom. So, finding a training that is intense, like it needs to be at least 3 days and it has follow-up coaching. If you look at standard Stanford did some research and they say you need like 50 hours of PD to really change practice and you're just not going to get that in a one day off, you know, off PBL. Like, so people actually ask us, hey, can you do one day PBL starter and get us going? It's like, no, not really because you'll end up with bad PBL. So, you need an you need an intense workshop. You need coaching that's that follows up. You have to have that or your teachers are not going to buy in because they're not supported.
* Authentic PBL and Real-World Action
* Authentic PBL involves students solving real-world problems.
* This leads to the development of essential employability skills.
* Both teachers and students can sense the difference between contrived scenarios and authentic PBL experiences.
* Seek training programs that emphasize authentic project design.
And the other piece is that it needs to be authentic. So, we're actually coining this term authentic PBL where your kids are actually solving real world problems. And the importance there is that one, that's how you get to the employability skills that we really want our kids to have. But two, everybody in the classroom knows if it's a scenario project or authentic PBLO. Like from the teacher to the learner, from day one, we can all feel it. In psychology, it's called attunement. You can just feel that energy that you give off. Are we really uh going to work with bankers to, you know, implement these these business plans or are we just going to fake that? Are there going to be real entrepreneurs that run these things? Are we creating logos for the for nonprofits that they're actually going to use or are we just pretending to do it? Right? Are we making fake websites or is somebody going to use this website? And are we really going to just go out in the field and discover a new mold that's never been found in North America or are we just going to go outside and and prounce around.
(Recap of the 3 Practical Strategies)
1. Start Now: Educate yourself and begin exploring PBL implementation.
2. Create a Grassroots Movement: Foster teacher ownership and excitement for PBL.
3. Provide Robust Training: Ensure teachers have the knowledge, skills, and support to implement high-quality, authentic PBL.
And from the very beginning, adults know the difference and kids know the difference. So when you're looking at trainings, you make sure that their version of PBL is super authentic and drives towards real world action. Makes a big difference. So if you're going to get started with Project Based Learning uh in 2025, which I highly recommend, I've got three practical strategies are to start now. Get started now. Educate yourself. You don't have to have done PBLO in the classroom, right? Common myth. You do not have to have done PBLO in the classroom, but You do need to know some structural pieces specifically for administrators. Two, you want to create a grassroots movement. You don't want it to just be you pulling people along, right? You want your staff to be with you. You want them to be pushing the work, not just you. And number three is to make sure that that training is robust and that it goes throughout the year and that you're really looking at authentic PBL in a way that is super strong. And if you're doing those things, I think I think you're going to crush it.
(Next Episode Preview and Call to Action)
And what we've got in the next episode is actually a guest episode for you. So, we got a leadership guest. Ashley Green's going to come on and she talks about using PBL as a turnaround vehicle and how she uses that with schools and classrooms. And I think you're going to like the episode a lot. Ashley's got a ton of energy. She's super well prepared. So, make sure you tune in for that. Remember, our conversation is going to be specifically for administrators, right? So, we've got those other podcasts where you can send your teachers. There's an ongoing teacher PBL simple ified for teachers podcast and then we have those two binge episodes. So if you need to binge PBL, there's a binge PBL for administrators and you can go wherever it is that you subscribe to this podcast, just put it right into the search. Binge PBL for administrators, binge PBL for teachers and you we'll be off and running. So I want you to start small uh today, but I want you to start. You have time to get momentum even this semester. So get your team trained for this summer like but get your head around this idea. before you jump in. Make sure it's really gonna fit. Make sure it's the right time. A lot of different ways to implement. You can do this. Let's go lead inspired.
(Rating and Review Request)
That's just what I needed to bring PBL to my school. 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 leader. Just like you find their why and lead inspired.
