Ryan Steuer (00:00.108)
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. 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 Stoyer.
Welcome to PBL simplified for administrators podcast. I'm your host Ryan Stoyer. And here we talk about all things project-based learning specifically for administrators. So it could be a building leader. You might be a central office. If you're a teacher, we've actually got a different podcast for you. Or if you're an administrator for your teachers, we've got PBL simplified for teachers. So if you go to the Apple store, wherever you're downloading this podcast right now, go to PBL simplified for teachers and you'll see an ongoing podcast there. So.
Feel free to jump in there. Today we're talking about community partners. Again, from the building leader's side or from the really central office could do some of the same moves. I've got a few different ideas to share. Like we'll start with the role. We'll jump into how you bring in community partners. Who should you find? How do you build relationships? But I've got one tactic that I'm gonna give you at the end that is guaranteed to bring in more community partners to your school and your district. So it's a structure that you can put in.
to bring in community partners, it works every single time. But let's build up a little bit. First, we've got to talk about the role of community partners in PBO. Now there are multiples. So if you look at the why and the how, right? Community partners matter because they bring in the real world problems, right? They make the classroom work, the academics, they connect it to the real world for us. As soon as they walk in the door, inquiry is happening. Learners want to know.
What's up with this person? Why are they in here? Are they mean? Are they helpful? Are they rich? Are they stuck up? They want to know what's happening. So immediately inquiry jumps up. The real world applicability jumps up. We're creating future ready students. How does this happen? Because they're bringing in authenticity. If you have a scenario project, everybody knows where it's going to start and really everybody knows where it's going to end. We all know what's going to happen. All So if you're building tiny houses,
Ryan Steuer (02:23.566)
and you're building my cardboard, you know, the architect's going to come in and say, Hey, build these. We know we're going to build it. We're going to pretend like it's for somebody. And we're going to throw them away in the dumpster at the end of a couple of weeks. If a general contractor comes in and says, Hey, we're building actual tiny houses down the street. We're going to donate them to people in need. There's a whole bunch of inquiry and questions that come up. Like how in the world is this happening? What's our job? Am I going to have to use a hammer? Am I allowed to use a saw? Like, no, Billy, you are not allowed to use a saw brother. Sorry.
Remember what happened with the scissors? Copy that. So there's so many things that open up when a community partner comes in. It's such a big deal. I want to grab a section from my book, PBL Simplified. There's a whole chapter, chapter eight on community partners. And there's a couple of questions that you should ask. I'll give two and I'm going to actually add one. It's not in the book. The first question you ask when looking for the right community partner is who cares about these standards and my learners. So when you're helping your teachers figure out what community partners to bring in,
Cause it's not obvious for them, right? They're always thinking about standards. Traditionally, they've thought about standards, how to assess them. And that's it. They don't think about how it applies to someone out in the real world. The key is, and you should tell your teachers this, they are the best person to figure out who should come in because they know the content standards and they know how it could apply. Right? They're always thinking about how does this apply to the real world? Well, now who's doing that work? So who cares about these standards? And sometimes if you, if you just ask who cares,
Sometimes that doesn't really go over real well, I found out. But if you can explain yourself, it kind of jolts people like, who cares about this work that you're doing? Well, I do, says the teacher. That's great, but who else cares? Who else can help you? So you want to make sure you message that right. The second one, who is currently working with topics that apply to the standard? So who out in the real world is working with invasive species? So somebody from DNR would be a perfect person to bring in.
bringing somebody to Department of Natural Resources, there's like a local contact you can bring in, maybe somebody from the zoo, right? They're doing this work already and they can join you in this. And the third question that we've kind of added since publishing the book is who can we help? Who can we help? Which is, it's a little bit of a different frame. It has some of the ideas of those first two questions, but who can we help through this PBL unit? Like we're gonna learn this stuff. How can we apply it through a world? How can we help people? So,
Ryan Steuer (04:50.757)
That helps you start to brainstorm like the right community partners. And let me give you, I already promised, you know, this structure that's going to help you get community partners in. I'm going to add this one. It's not in our notes anywhere here, but when you're looking for the right community partner, you start local and you look for alignment. Like who are, who are community partners that want to help out the school already. Right. And a great department like, or like faculty meeting activity is to just brainstorm.
community partners and don't do it whole group, right? Like don't do it shout out, but like small groups of four to five and do three rounds. The first round, make it 10 minutes or so and put them on the clock and say, when you look at local businesses, who would be a great community partner? Really any business. And they just start writing it down. Well, the local pizza place, like I had Billy and his dad owns it, right? They'll help out, right? The tire shop, right?
and all the local businesses for 10 minutes and you'll see that whole giant piece of chart paper is going to fill up. The next round, you look at nonprofits. We're the nonprofits that we can connect with. That would be great community partners because they're mission driven. They've often got outreach coordinators already that will come in and talk to your students. So they're great opportunities. And a lot of your teachers are already connected to them. Boom, boom, boom, 10 minutes. You're going to fill up that chart paper. And then the third one is just who have we left out?
who would be a great community partner that would fit well for our school? And the reason that works as the third round, because you've already brainstormed businesses and nonprofits, you can't start with that round, because you won't get what you want. But as the third round, it works really well, we found out. And you can adjust the times as you'd like, but essentially three rounds, businesses, nonprofits, who else do we forget? And some of your teachers are so connected, you are gonna have a huge list. When we do this,
during on-site workshops that we do with schools when we partner, we find that you've got 50 plus suddenly on the list and you can prioritize some of those really quickly. Like this person's really close, they can come in next. And now your teachers feel way better about who can I connect to community partners to my PBL unit? Because at first they don't always get it. They don't always see the connection between to help them. And I've gotten this rebuttal from, you know,
Ryan Steuer (07:15.375)
If it's an urban school, say, well, all the community partners are already taken. There's too many schools, too many people. If it's a rural school, there's not enough people out here. There's nobody to connect to. And it's not like suburban schools suddenly have the Goldilocks of all this. It's where can you look for them? And then how can you connect with them? And a lot of times when you just do a reach out, warm connections are always the easiest. So like you find out that Bill's brother is an architect.
Hey Bill, would you mind calling your brother and see if they could connect to my class? Yeah, sure, right? That's the easiest one. If you're do a cold contact, I like large museums or zoos because they typically have an educational outreach person already, right? Or large, like Haemophilia Society has an outreach person that will come and do a talk, right? So, finding those places that already have an educational outreach, great place to start. I would probably not cold call Apple, right? Like, I don't know, this doesn't typically work.
By the time you actually got to somebody, it's so much work, it probably wasn't worth it. So once you have those relationships, you really want to cultivate them. So you as a building leader, you want to think through, when a community partner comes in, like even at the front desk, like how are they treated? You know, are they treated as an angry parent? What do you need? Or, welcome to our school. And some of you feel that more than others. Like there are some places you can go into and you don't get this friendly vibe, right? So kind of working with that front office staff of,
you know, who's coming in and then how do they, how do you get that community partner down to that classroom is actually really important because they probably haven't been in a school in 20 years. And if you say, Hey, just go down to room 132 and then goodness gracious, if it happens during a passing period, people think people that are not school people, like think that there's a lion loose or you know, there's a giant fight and you're thinking, this looks pretty good. Most people are on the right. This looks pretty right.
But they haven't been to school before, they probably need to be walked down. You need to have some students that are trained as tour guides that can bring people in and can have that conversation. That's really powerful. And those are all really good tips, by the way. Those work in our schools across the country. That stuff works all the time. Because now you've got community partners like Dr. Bush. So Dr. Bush analyzed DNA for the locals, not for local, but for state police department. She's the one that analyzes the DNA. It's like, wow.
Ryan Steuer (09:39.141)
That's super neat. Just happened to like be really close to the school and she was a great community partner. She brilliant and loves talking to kids and had her talk at a community partner breakfast. And this is the structure that I was promising you. This works to get community partners in and to build those relationships. So she's talking to me, partner breakfast, other potential community partners are in the audience and she's just laying down. Like this is how I interacted. This is why it's important and this is why you should get involved.
And we just gave her the mic. We didn't tell her what to do, but she's like, it is your duty to get into these classrooms and help raise up the next set of leaders for our community. Get in here, sign up right now. And now there was this other voice that was advocating for community partners to come into our classroom. It wasn't just the administrator, which is fine for you to give that call, you should. But when a community partner is talking to community partners, there's just an extra strength there, right? So how do you organize a community partner breakfast?
though it's really pretty simple. You need some donuts, some bagels, some eggs, whatever your local catering does. And a Friday, at eight or nine AM and you set up a time once a quarter and you invite in all the community partners that you you put in that list. You say, Hey, we're doing project-based learning. It's a little bit different. We'd love to show you what we're doing and get your feedback. So you bring them all into the room. You've got business leaders in there. You've got nonprofit leaders and
You bring in some students, some of your learners that are doing PBL, you share some amazing PBL units. Some of the things they're doing because your community does not know what's happening, right? They don't know what's happening out there. So you're going to tell them and really the kids are going to tell them. And now all these community partners are leaving this breakfast with this new idea of what's happening in your school. Right. And that's the story they're telling a chamber. That's the story they're telling at rotary. That's the story they're telling at the Friday night lights. Right. And
you're starting to build this new reputation, but you're also building advocates because now they're seeing the things are happening and then you're going to say, where can you get plugged in? If you want to be a part of the next authentic audience to hear some of these presentations, if you have a gift that you could share with the classroom, would you put your name, number, email on this pad of paper? And now you've got a list of community partners that all said, please contact me. So now when authentic need comes up,
Ryan Steuer (12:07.267)
you know who to contact and you can send it out. We've got presentations happening on March 13th at 1 p.m. could you make it? We've got five spots and some will be able to make it, some won't. You'll see some community partners are super strong and faithful and some won't know how to get there yet and that's okay. Right, you just continue to have the breakfast, continue to invite people in, continue to share the good things that are happening and you can even ask during one of those community partner breakfasts
Who else should be here that isn't? Who do you know that would be a great community partner that can come in? And now you got community partners, inviting community partners to be community partners, right? Do you see how the flywheel starts to happen here? If you're having trouble finding community partners, this is the way to do it, right? It's going to cost you, you know, 50 bucks for breakfast or whatever it is, right? And you do it on a Friday morning because then those business leaders can say, Hey boss, I'm going to be just a little bit late. I'm going to go into the schools.
to help volunteer there and then I'll be in. So then kind of come in on that Friday, which is typically kind of a casual day and they'll give you some time. We found that that's really a sweet spot for people. You're not taking prime time, family time at like 6.30, 7.30, but on their way to work, they can stop in, get breakfast and hear the amazing things you're doing. Breakfast, it is a home run. So hopefully we've convinced you the role of CUNY partners is super important in PBL, but also giving you
some of the how and the what, like how do you make this happen? And for the administrator, like this is your job. You wanna create this ecosystem where community partners are important, they're a part of the process and your teachers buy in and then your job is to help them get them in there, connect it to your academics. Now this is super fun. All right, that'll do it for today. So this is PBL simplified podcast for administrators, specifically for you. Go ahead and subscribe so that you can tune in to.
These solo episodes, or we also have guest episodes, which will be the next episode. Go out and lead inspired.
Ryan Steuer (14:29.002)
Find their why and lead inspired.
