Ryan Steuer (00:08.514)
Welcome to the PBL simplified podcast where we break down the complex and bring clarity to your PBL journey. I'm your host Ryan Stoyer from magnify learning author of the book PBL simplified this podcast called PBL simplified for administrators. We've got a book called PBL simplified a YouTube series of the same name. We're trying to simplify the PBL process. We've been doing this for over a decade. So we're not watering it down quite the opposite. We're super geeky about the authenticity of our project-based learning. It needs to be real world. It needs to be authentic.
It needs to be bringing employability skills to your learners. But we do want to simplify it. It doesn't need to be murky. It doesn't need to be fuzzy. Even if you've never done PBL in the classroom as a leader, you can still lead a PBL movement. And today that's what we're doing. We're speaking directly to district leaders, principals, assistant superintendents. And here's our driving question for this episode. How do we use grant funds to build a project-based learning culture that outlives the grant itself?
So again, how do we use grant funds to build a project-based learning culture that outlives the grant itself? This isn't about buying shiny new programs that fizzle in a year. We know the rotating door of educational initiatives. We've all been a part of that and we hate it. So how do we avoid it? If you've got grant money for let's say three years or five years, how do you make sure that the work lasts to the fourth year or the sixth year and continues beyond that? It's possible.
We do it with districts. I want to lay it out for you. Before we get into it, if you know that this is your jam and you want to jump into it, put this on your calendar. If you go to pblmasterclass.com, pblmasterclass.com, we've got a webinar coming up and we're going to walk you through this process again live. So then you've got a Q and A. Obviously in the podcast, you don't really get to ask questions. So in the masterclass, you do get some Q and A and you can very specifically
ask your questions. always encourage you to be selfish with your questions. Ask those questions directly for your district. That's your job. That's your passion. So do it. So that's pblmasterclass.com. For right now, let's dive into what it looks like to have a grant funded PBL movement that lives well beyond the grant. The very first thing I want to talk about is programs to people. You've got to shift your mindset. So
Ryan Steuer (02:52.833)
Every district leader can have a grant funded initiative last longer than the grant with these three big ideas. The first idea is programs to people. This is about shifting our mindset because too often we see that grants are spent on things, right? Tech licenses, maybe one-to-one, prepackaged curriculum, one-off events. But where's the real change? Right, it doesn't come from things, it comes from people.
and investing in your people. So what if my people leave after I invest in them? First of all, that's a real thing that leaders, we address that, right? That happens. But what do do if you don't build up the skillset of your people and they stay? So we're gonna build up our people. When we invest in people, they stay beyond the things and the tech and the next initiative. So here's your mindset shift. Use your grant to build belief, not just buy stuff.
You're going to build belief in this PBL movement within your people, within your directors, within the district, within the coaches, within your lead teachers, within principals, right? So that you have belief built into your system and not just stuff that ends up on a shelf or in some storage cabinet somewhere. So you can start with a small intentional cohort. Depending on your funding, of course, you can fund a team of trailblazing teachers. You might have coaches.
that are ready to go, you may have one building, but someplace where you can start and show success. You're gonna give them coaching, you're gonna them planning time, you're gonna give them visibility, so that when they grow, they don't just teach PBL, they lead it. You've got a place within your district where you can show great PBL happening. They become your internal change agents. Because here's the deal, programs expire, culture sustains. So let that guide you through your spending decisions,
your programs are going to expire, your culture is going to sustain. The second big idea that allows any district leader to have their grant live well beyond the time period is these three pillars. So I'm going to take this second idea and I'm going to roll up three ideas into it. These are three buckets. So I might be cheating just a little bit, but I think they're important. go together. So number one is going to be similar. It's going be people. But here I'm talking about
Ryan Steuer (05:13.302)
specific coaches. We've got a large district, about 20,000 students, and they invested right off the bat in their grant funding in a PBL district coach. So as soon as we trained their teachers, our coaching with them, we'll talk about coaching in just a minute, why it's so important, we coached their district coach. That's a huge win because your district coach is from your district. They know the nuances, they know the schedules, they know the poli...
The politics, right, of every district, there's always some, they know those things. So we're coaching the coach and the coach is then coaching teachers. That's a big deal. So what do you do when, let's say you've got a five-year grant, what do you do when that time is up and you have a position there? It's giving you five years to fund that position. That's when you're gonna have to fund. All so you're gonna have to find a place for that because that's what's gonna sustain you beyond the five years.
If we partnered together for five years, we would do a bunch of the training very intensely with your teachers. But after that grant period, we want to hand that over and really in year four to where your coach is the one fully training your teachers. And we're in the sidelines. We're coaching behind that coach because you don't want to rely on consultants or companies for 10 years, right? You just can't do that because your grant money is going to run out. But if you've got an internal position, maybe they were an instructional coach to begin with.
but you're to move them over to be a specialized PBL coach in this case. The other way you invest in people in a grant is you write in release time. You write in PLCs, times for them to go visit schools, times for them to build out PBL units, times for them to in the PLCs get trained in PLCs that you have so you have excellent PLCs. Every one of our national PBL model schools is also highly effective in professional learning communities.
I don't think that's a coincidence. You want to build internal learning teams that will drive your capacity. So if you're a building leader, you want to have teams that are built in that your teachers are helping to move this work forward, not just you. So build that into the grant system. To begin with, make sure that when you're done with the grant cycle, you have teams built beyond that grant time. All right, second bucket.
Ryan Steuer (07:35.603)
is professional development and coaching. Coaching, what the research says. Without coaching around a large change initiative, your success rate is less than 15%. Less than 15%, that's crazy. So if you've got a vendor that says, we're gonna load you guys up and then you guys run with it, because we want it be customized, want you guys to do it, so we're not gonna coach you, or the coaching's superficial and doesn't get down into the weeds with you,
you're just not gonna be successful. It's not your fault. You've gotta have coaching. Your teachers need coaching because whatever the new change initiative is, by definition, it's new for them. They need coaching from an expert. Professional development, not just for your teachers. This is for you at the district level. You need to have district conversations around sustainable structures, around how you cast the vision to your leadership teams. So maybe you have, depending on the size of your district,
You might have an assistant superintendent or multiple assistant superintendents with directors underneath them, and then principals, and then APs. Every one of those levels needs to be affected by your professional development and by your vision. And a lot of times our assistant superintendents aren't used to getting that coaching, but it's so crucial. If you've got a growth mindset, you know you want it, and it's going to help you see how you bring project-based learning down to the building level, because it's a different model of what that principal's expected to do.
and you need to be able to demonstrate that for them. It's gonna be growth mindset. It's gonna be, you're gonna give them some learning and then they're gonna demonstrate that learning and come back and share best practices with other building principals in your district. They're gonna bring their leadership teams to those meetings, but you wanna make sure you're getting professional development at the leadership level. So that could be, if it gets a district, your assistant superintendents, directors, principals, coaches, and I would even love to see some lead teachers in that leadership team.
if it's a building initiative, principals, APs, coaches, and lead teachers. You want to get teachers in there to start building that grassroots movement. So then when you're casting that vision, it's not a top-down mandate. You have grassroots teachers saying, hey, this is awesome. It's working in my classroom. Come see. And you've got a whole group of teachers, probably about 30%, that early majority, that's going to convince them right there when it's working in teacher classrooms down the hallway.
Ryan Steuer (10:05.253)
That's about all they need. They're gonna start asking for more professional development. They're gonna step up. And we've even had some schools that say, I want my kids to have that. You have to send me to training this summer. Really? Okay, we'll do that. But what you're getting at here in bucket number two, professional development coaching, is you're looking at skills over curriculum. And here's my talk on skills over curriculum. When you buy new curriculum, well number one, if curriculum was gonna save us in education, it would've done it by now.
We've been making curriculum for 100 years, it hasn't saved us. My anecdotal story is when I was a young teacher, I got on the textbook adoption committee and I was super excited because I wanted to change the world. What I found out is all the English teachers brought their old books and then we compared the new books to make sure that our old stories were in there so that we wouldn't have to redo our lesson plans. I is Telltale Heart in there? Yeah, it is. Okay, that's a good one. Well, I also do a lesson on Harriet Tubman, so is Underground Railroad? Not in this one, but it is this one. Okay, well, I'm voting for that one.
That's not ideal, but that happens for real. The other thing that happens with curriculum is that even if you're using it the best you can, it's great curriculum. You still have to look at the innovation curve. And I like to use Simon Sinek's talk on this around the innovation curve, but he used the iPhone example, right, that some people get it right away, some people are gonna wait, some people are gonna just wait till they can get it in the store, and some people are gonna be laggards. And that's a quick overview of that innovation curve, but Google it real quick. The same thing happens with curriculum is that your innovators
They're not gonna use the curriculum. They're gonna bounce off of it anyway and do their own thing. You've got your early majority that are gonna do some portion of your curriculum. The late majority are only gonna do what's in the curriculum. And the laggards are gonna ignore it completely and do whatever they want. Now if you look at skills-based training, you are increasing the skills of every person in there. So if your innovators are seven, they're going to an eight or a nine. Your early and late majority, they're gonna increase their skill set and even your laggards.
Even somebody that doesn't even want touch project-based learning, they can at least bring in a community partner or do knows and need to knows or bring likes and wonders as a reflection tool. There's some portion that they can do and will do. We see it each time. So I'm always going to advocate for skills over curriculum, especially in grant funding, because even if you love the curriculum, you're not going to have the funding to buy it again in three to five years. The skill set lives in your people. The third bucket, this mini idea is
Ryan Steuer (12:34.02)
to buy, to look at promotion, to look at promotion and see, what does that mean? This is the marketing that we do very poorly typically in education. We're doing amazing things in schools. You are doing amazing things in your school district and in your school, but nobody knows. So all that the public hears is what's written in the paper nationally or locally, and it's not usually good. So if you're not controlling your narrative, someone is. So budget, put that into the grant budget.
that you're going to have public showcases. You're going have money for those, that you're going to have money to bring in community partners, you're have community nights, and you're going to be able to have stipends for your teachers to come to those things. Write it into the grant to get those things started. School branding is another one. We've done some of that for schools. It's something we do often, but we do for some of our great partners. And it makes such a difference when your one-pager is professionally branded to your school. Your colors, your mascot.
You actually have somebody that does it, not just somebody who's kind of good at Canva. You might have some all-star Canvas and that's fine, like use them, love that, but put it into the grant. Give them some extra hours to do the real school branding and brand templates so that after the grants you have all of these different tools, right? Like your newsletters, your emails, your webs, everything's branded appropriately and professionally. And as you're doing this promotion, you're going to start to tell your PBL story. You're to get buy-in from every stakeholder.
And sometimes those things do take money. So you want to think about it and get it into the grant. What are the things that you can buy now during the grant time that you won't buy later? So buy some of those some of those posters that go on the wall or like the big ones that kind of pull up, right? That for each night say, hey, it's community night. Like buy all the banners that you can that you can use over and over again that go beyond the grant. Think about the promotion aspect of it. It's such a big deal. You can tell a huge difference when you walk into schools that understand this.
and those that don't. So this framework's gonna help you launch more than a program, the idea is we're building momentum that lasts. And when we're talking about grants, I've got one last idea that every district, actually I've got two ideas, keep adding them, but they're gonna be good. So the next idea is to speak the language of the grant. I call it grantees, but funders want results. More importantly, they want alignment.
Ryan Steuer (14:59.291)
So here's how to position PBL inside your grant narrative. Think about those things, especially as it's grant specific. Figure out what is their currency? What's most important to them? You're gonna label the outcome for all learners, right? PBL empowers all learners with voice and choice, opportunities to present, opportunities to meet community partners. Don't just talk about the honors kids. Don't just talk about the kids that are struggling. Everybody on your continuum. Talk about how...
there's outcomes for all learners. You want to look at workforce readiness, communication, collaboration, critical thinking. These are those employability skills that grantees want to see. These are the workforce development skills that all of us want our learners to have when they leave our K-12 systems. And the last one in this segment of speaking the language of the grant is sustainability.
grantors want to see that your plan outlasts the grant, which is what this whole episode's about. So you want to include leadership development, you want to include teacher development, you want to include internal systems and structures being built so that you don't have to rely on a vendor or a consultant after the time of this grant. Because now what the grantor sees is they say, hey, we're going to give them this grant for three years and it lives on for 10 years.
Well, that's a good deal, right? That's where you would want to invest your money, which is really what grantors are doing. They're investing their money in places where it's going to change education. You want to make sure that you are that person. So you might add a line like this into your grant application. You'll get more complicated in this, but you want something along the lines of this investment in our school will build internal systems that sustain PBL long after the funding window ends. That's what grantors want to hear.
You're going to build that out and show them the systems and three-year plan of what that looks like. That one sense, that one idea can set your whole proposal apart and allow grantors to say yes really quickly. All so this is the last one. And that's to track what matters. You've got to have some data. So before you get started, as you're writing the grant period, what are the things that you're going to track? You've got standardized test scores, of course. They're always a part of the picture.
Ryan Steuer (17:17.948)
but we also know they're not the whole story and grantors know it's not the whole story. So what do you track to show funders and really yourself that PBL is working? Like you wanna know that project-based learning is making a difference in your school. So student engagement surveys, those count. Like teacher confidence surveys, that counts. Community partners, like do the surveys, do them systematically. We've got a whole set of Google forms. If you go to pblshare.com, that's pblshare.com.
You can get our whole set of Google forms or we can do the needs assessment for you. But the whole point is that that data, sometimes it doesn't feel super data driven or quantitative enough to count, but it does for these grants. So you wanna have some learner reflections in there. You wanna have public product rubrics. Like put those things in there and then track them over time. Because yes, you want the quantitative data.
We're usually pretty good at that. So you'll take the formative assessment, maybe you've got NWA, whatever that formative assessment is for you, like track that data, but also don't forget the stories, right? The learner who just crushed their showcase, right? The teacher who found their why again, like those that are getting it, the parent stories, those testimonials, and you've got to keep them on your phone because sometimes you're going to get them in like an impromptu comment and like somebody's just going to say, this was amazing.
I didn't know that schools did this today. And you've got to stop and say, hey, do you mind if I record that and use that testimonial in a grant or in one of my newsletters? Because that's amazing. My teachers need to hear that. Every time we ask that to somebody, it's flattering for that person. And they say, yes, 98 % of the time. So track what matters. Decide ahead of time what it is you're going to track. Set up those systems so it's easy to track them. Because grantors do want numbers.
They also want the stories.
Ryan Steuer (19:17.733)
So now that you know that every district leader, every building leader can use grant funds to outlast that grant time and build a PBL culture that lasts, here's your challenge. Don't let this grant be a moment, make it a movement. Build belief, build systems, build culture, invest in your people because that's what lasts. Use this funding window
to do work that lasts. Look at it as what it is. It's an opportunity to do something that lasts. And if you're wondering where to start, you're writing a grant, you're just trying to figure out where to get started, like I mentioned at the very beginning, we've got a webinar coming up. So if you go to pblmasterclass.com, pblmasterclass.com, I'm gonna walk you through the three-year process that we use to train both leadership and teachers, so at the end of those three years, you're fully sustainable PBL system.
It's exactly what I would write in a grant, right? And we've done this with multiple schools through a grant, of course. So it works, we know it works, and grantors love it because at the end of it, their money is living on. They've invested well. So whether you're a district of 2,000 or 20,000 learners, you can build sustainable, scalable PBL, and you don't have to figure out a loan. So again, pblmasterclass.com. Would love to see you there. Again, you get to ask your questions if you're live. Of course, you can sign up and get the replay.
and then watch me on like two times speed, which is totally fine, I get it. But if you wanna ask the questions, be there live, be there for the Q and A, right? Ask your very selfish questions, that's what you're there to do. We appreciate that. Thanks for joining me on the PBL Simplified Podcast for administrators. Keep changing lives, one relationship at a time. Lead inspired.
