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. Welcome back to the PBL Simplified for Administrators podcast. The go-to podcast for K12 leaders driving meaningful educational change. We are trying to start a movement here. Movement makers. Today's focus is going to be why is PBL good for kids. It's good for a lot of lot of your stakeholders, but we want to specifically talk about kids. Want to emphasize the importance of grounding PBL in your core purpose, and that is benefiting students. Now, we know you're not going to go into a classroom and say, "Hey, the the uh teaching style isn't really great here. Let me show you how to do this. And maybe you do that. I'm not sure the size of your school, but for the most part, you're working through coaches. You're working through your teachers to improve best practice at the classroom level to boost student outcomes. So, you still have to have this in mind like why is it best for kids? If you're looking at project-based learning as your instructional model, you are looking to change the way education is done at your school and it's a big deal. So, you need to have these driving motivators. So, we're going to talk about that today. Today, we're going to give you uh the three key areas that every principle is focused on right now and how PBL moves the needle. But if it's your first time here, I want you to go to whatisp.com. That's whatispbl.com and you can put your login information in there and your teachers can too actually. And you get a whole set of resources to move you on your PBL journey. It's also a page where you can get a lot of background information on PBL. So you might want to use it just as a tag off your home homepage so that you can say, "Hey, this is what PBL looks like. Uh there's a lot of different explanations.
It could be for parents possibly or for your teachers or your students to say, "Hey, why are we doing PBL?" We want to help you with that. We want to help you develop your why. You have a why for why you're in education. You want to provide greater opportunities for kids. You want to lead in ways that maybe you haven't been led before. Or maybe you've had some great mentors and great leaders and you want to lead just like them. But that leadership capability that's in you, we want to rise that up. And I think PBL is a vehicle to do that. But let's get back to kids. When we talk about kids, The first key area that every principal is focused on right now is academic benefits. Like what are the academic benefits of PBL? Well, we use examples like our PBL model schools like Dixie Elementary that went from a D in their t their state test score to an A using project-based learning or Southport Elementary which was actually an A already brought in project-based learning to bring employability skills to their learners that were high socioeconomic and ELLL learners really high population. And they said We need our kids to have these skill sets. Well, they also had the highest growth on their state standardized test in the entire state. So, it's working on the academic side, right? Southside did the same thing. So, if you're a title one elementary, all those examples are title one elementaryaries. This is a no-brainer. Like, we have the process to raise your academic score. Now, we do the same thing in the secondary side. We know that the equation in several states at least for middle school and high school are a little bit trickier, especially middle school.
So, you know what that looks like, but the academic benefits are there especially is when you look at the middle school area that's where I taught taught 8th grade English and just moving kids from apathetic to engaged and engaged to empowered raises test scores we started a school within a school at a large comprehensive middle school we had a thousand kids seventh and eighth grade 25% of them got PBL and those 25% in a failing school would have been a B if you could have taken the state test scores out that's a big deal now how do you get that well they were coming to school, the attendance rate for our small learning community was a percent and a half higher. Now, if you're tracking your attendance as a leader, which of course you are, you that's a really big deal to be a percent and a half higher like globally like over the entire year, not just like cherrypicking one day. And then with 25% of the kids, we had 8% of the the discipline. And yes, we were demographically balanced. It was a stratified lottery. So, our 25% of kids looked just like the other 75% of the building. But things changed. What was the difference? It was project-based learning. Right? Kids were coming to school more and they were generally doing what they were supposed to be doing. Remember, we still had the 8% of discipline. So, kids were still middle schoolers, but they were doing what they're supposed to be doing and they were learning things. They were engaged. They understood why they were there. So, there's some immediate benefit to bringing project-based learning to your school. Even just the apathetic to engaged portion right there is going to ramp up your test scores. You also get the opportunity for a lot of cross-disciplinary connections when you're looking at the academic side of things. So, Whether you've got teaming or by grade level or by subject area, if you can find ways to get the schedule to work, right? That's part of your job as the administrator. How do you get the schedule to work to where you can have these cross-disciplinary projects? PBL is a great vehicle for that. And now you have this kind of internal authenticity of that what I'm doing in social studies also relates to language arts, right?
So, as an eighth grader just kind of sitting in my world, there's some authenticity between the class I'm in now and the class I go to next period. And that makes a big difference. Not to mention the collaboration that happens amongst your teachers. I think that elevates the level as well and then spills into the kids. We're really talking about the kids. So there's a ton of research around this. The latest research is not just done in 2021 by the Lucas Foundation. Uh is super solid. It's super solid. Let me give you some of that. So in the studies that they did, they were randomized tests. It was a really solid research study. Uh we're going to hit all different grade levels on this. When you bring project based learning into AP courses. A lot of times we're told that, hey, I I don't have enough time in my AP course to bring project-based learning in. Our PBL teachers that are leading PBL course that are leading AP courses would say, I don't have an opportunity to not use PBL and AP courses if I really want my kids to do well on that final test. We want them to score well. The studies, the findings showed that there's at least an 8% point increase in the students earning a score of three or higher on their AP exams after just one year of implementation. So once you get to multiple years, like some of our model schools, you can really be crushing it. It was the estimated uh rise for two years was to be 10% higher. And that's a big deal. Like if you start doing some math as an AP course using project-based learning in elementary school, uh we saw uh the findings were that PBL brought up skills. We're going to talk about that again in just just a minute because that's actually my second bullet point. That's a little bit of a spoiler alert. And then they also had literacy uh scores went up. uh 63% gain in social studies, 23% informational reading equating to an additional five to six months of learning respectively. So what what this showed is that our learners from diverse backgrounds if again if you're a title one elementary this is a no-brainer like the research is there and it's relating directly to your kids in this elementary portion.
Middle school also had some some excellent results that came out of this study. Students participating in PBL outperformed their peers. in science and other core subjects. Additionally, English language learners in PBLO classrooms showed better performance on language proficiency tests compared to those in traditional settings. PBL is meeting the needs of your learners. And don't wait for your learners to have the basic skills to get them into PBL. It's a common misnomer. It's a myth. What these studies are really showing, if you get geeky into them, and we'll put them in the show notes so you can is when you dive deep into this research, what it shows is that those learners that are struggling that have not typically done really well in school, they need the additional context that PBL gives in order to hit those basic literacy and numeracy skills instead of the skill and drill which does not work because our kids don't have context for that. Right? So, you're just pounding pounding pounding and then they get to a a word problem of some kind and they have no idea what to do because it doesn't look like the things we pounded into them versus them actually learning and mastering these skill sets. It's such a big deal. The research is there. The academic side is there. And I know like I said at the very beginning, these are three key areas that every principle is focused on right now. Like you have to be focused on the academic benefits for your kids. That's what we do here. Right now, how do we get there? And so the second thing that you are likely focusing on in some form is SEAL. Like where the social emotional learning, where does that happening in in project-based learning? And there's decidedly some huge connections. We're using PBL as the vehicle to bring your school towards a really solid SEAL foundation. If you look at the SEAL competencies from Castle, which you're likely connected to those, if you're not, do a quick Google search. Um, but they've got these five competencies. So, self-awareness is one of those. What do we do in PBL? We encourage students to take ownership of their learning by making choices about their projects throughout. Like we have voice and choice is a huge deal.
The autonomy helps your students identify their own interests, their strengths, and enhances their self-awareness. The second competency is self-management. Again, when we're in this inquirybased environment like project-based learning and project-based learning really gives you the instructional model and the processes for your teachers to be able to bring inquiry into the classroom and to bring SEAL into your classroom, right? So, PBL is this vehicle. And what I love about PBL is that there's a national model that that we agree on, right? So, when you look at my book, you get the six steps and you get the wording, the vocabulary. In the PBL world, we're all using the same same wording. You don't have the same thing for STEM or service learning or design thinking does, but it's harder to apply to a classroom. So PBL is really that vehicle that lets you bring in these ideas. So when you look at self-management within the world, you know, you've got students, you want them to set goals, manage time, persist through challenges, and it strengthens those self-management skills, right? Having a group contract that they have to fill out and group meetings that they're part of this is where we're building self-management skills, but also not just assessing them like we're teaching them, right? So, if if we're going to assess them, which we do, right, in project based learning, we need to be able to teach them. So, it gives us a chance to teach SEAL in a true environment where they actually need to apply these skills. Social awareness would be the third one. And PPL often involves addressing real world issues. Like that is our sticking point that we think you need to have realworld uh problems that you are solving because when you do that. There are a whole bunch of whole bunch of uh benefits to that uh the employability skills. But when you start talking about SEAL, we're talking about fostering empathy, a deeper understanding of diverse perspectives and just enhances your learners social awareness because now they're looking at things outside of themselves, outside of their classroom, outside of the things that they normally see every day. The fourth would be relationship skills.
And collaboration is again one of those cornerstones of project-based learning. We want our kids working in groups, but they don't have to be in groups to collaborate. They could be doing tuning protocols. Uh they could be collaborating with community partners. But in some ways, we want them to be working effectively in teams. We want them to communicate clearly. We want them to resolve conflicts. And this directly builds relationship skills. I've got a whole chapter in my book PBL Simplified around grouping and actually walk through a group mediation. And as we're going through these group mediations and we're teaching collaboration to our learners, we're building these relationship skills that we want them to have like That's why we're driving towards SEO. The last one that you'll see with Castle is uh responsible decision-making and reflection. And again, if you look at any of our graphics of like what is PBL, we're going to have reflection on there. It's the sixth step in my book PBL Simplified, which I seem to be hammering today, but it's the basics, right? So, the basis of PBL are these six steps. And there's there's deeper places we can go and get into the six A's. We've got a book for that called Life's a Project. But reflection is a part of that, right? Reflection and feedback. We're prompting students to evaluate their own decisions and then a lot of times we're considering the empathy or the ethical implications of the work that they're doing. And it's such a big deal. So, we're bringing about decision-m in context of a real world problem. And I think that's really important. That's so much so different than, hey kids, it's SEAL time, so we're going to learn about ourselves, right? Which again has a place like it's a great workshop within a PBL unit, right? Because again, you want it to you want your learners to have handles for these things where it's actually happening in the real world and they know they're going to continue to use it. So, when we look at, we look at PBL, we see PBL as a vehicle to to you achieving your SEAL goals. You want your kids to be self-aware. You want them to self-management.
You want them to have social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-m like those things are built into what we do in project-based learning. The third aspect that I know that you're looking for in your school is to bring in future ready students. You want your learners to be future ready. And it's like, well, what does future ready mean, Ryan? Like, that sounds heavy. Well, it is because we don't know what the future's going to look like. Whether it's AI or political environments or jobs that are changing very rapidly, when we ask our industry partners, what do they want? You can ask top five or top 10, whatever it is, it's going to be collaboration, critical thinking, self-management, all these skills we just talked about that we're driving through PBL. It helps our learners be future ready, not just ready for a test and that's part of it. That's the system that we're in. We're going to learn the content, but we want them to be future ready. We want them to have opportunities that they wouldn't have otherwise. So, they're going to need 21st century skills. We're going to focus on critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration, and other things that don't begin with C, right? Problem solving, inquiry. Whatever your list is, if you have a profile of a graduate, you've got your top five. five or so. Like those are the things that we're trying to grade, we're trying to teach, we're trying to instill, and master with our learners through project-based learning. There's also a whole segment of career prep that our learners are getting when they're involved in project-based learning because they're interacting with community partners. They're interacting with problems that people are are working with in the real world, right? So, it's not a scenario that we've made up. We have this opportunity to engage with professionals And you can start to explore real world problems. And as they do that, they can say, "Yeah, I think I do want to be an attorney. No, I definitely don't want to work at a bank. I don't want to be a pharmacist." Right?
Like they need to to grapple with these things because most of our kids don't have, you know, these 10 different professionals in their everyday lives to be able to ask them or to see what it looks like, right? So, they have this narrow view of what might be great for them, but they haven't tested it out. Why not let them test it out through in their K12 education? and in college like through project-based learning they get to taste those things. They get to see where their interests really are and now they can dive into them. It's a big deal. So those are the three things that I think every principal is really really wrestling with to get the best opportunities for their learners. I think you're always looking academic benefits, right? And the research is there. You're you're likely looking at SEAL in some form. You're trying to create a safe environment, a safe culture for your learners and your teachers to do great work. in and then you want your learners to be future ready. So what are you going to do as an administrator to support these things? Like one, you want to communicate the why, right? So you understand the benefits of PBL and what it does for kids. You can use some of this work or the the research that we're going to put in the show notes, right? You're going to develop your why specifically around PBL. You're going to start to communicate that to your different stakeholders, teachers, parents, students. You'll need a couple different talks, but you want to communicate why are you moving to PBL? What's the big deal? I like to say why people and why now you can answer that those two questions well you'll be well on your way you are going to need to encourage some of your teachers to take risk you're going have to make some space for them to get together to collaborate to try some things that are a little bit different and then have supports for them whether they fail or whether they win if they win you want to celebrate those successes hey you brought in a community partner it went super well you got in the newspaper congratulations let's do more of that right so celebrate those wins So with that, I think you can start running, right?
So grab some books, go to a school visit, start developing your vision and your why, and you're going to be doing some great things for your kids. I know that that's why you're in your position. It's not because it's easier, that's for sure. It's because you wanted to affect more kids in a positive way. I hope this episode help you help you kind of think through what your why is and how PPL can be good for kids in your environment. In the next episode, we've actually got a leadership guest coming up and we're going to be talking about the neuroscience behind great learning. That sounds pretty geeky. I geek out in that one and start talking about attunement and some psychological uh terms that I actually learn on the podcast. But it started to develop some of my vision and some of my talk around why PBL is so important and why it's so important for it to be authentic. If you're saying, "Hey, scenario projects might be just fine versus authentic PBL." I'm going to tell you authentic PBL is totally different. And I think you really get to find out in next episode. So, make sure that you subscribe to the podcast so that you get the next updated episode. In the meantime, go out and lead inspire.
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