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. PBL prevents random acts of STEM. What's a random act of STEM, you might ask? That's a good question. We're going to talk about that today. This is the PBL Simplified podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Stoyer. We're going to jump right into this one. If you want to watch it with some visual slides, you go to pbwebinar.com, pbwebinar.com, and choose the one about STEM and PBL. I'm going to walk through some of the graphics that I'll use in in that presentation. Today, I'm just going to reference a couple You can get all of them for free. Um, you go to to do that, go to whatispbl.com. That's whatispbl.com. And we'll put these in the show notes in case you're running or or driving your car. But what's a random act of stem?
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We first came across this with a Harvard study that we were involved in. And it was a super complicated randomized study and there's this enormous rubric of of what does STEM mean? What's really great STEM look like? It was neat work and and we were geeky and and enjoyed it. So, we'd go into a STEM environment and we would watch some kids make oobleck and they're making this slime and there's all kinds of science involved with that, right? There's you're using words like non-Newtonian solids and those types of things. But what the rubric forced you to do, like yes, you could look at engagement in the STEM classroom, which was off the charts with oobleck. It always is. Kids get to take it home. It's fun. But then you also had to look at the level of questions they were asking. You had to look at the collaboration that they were using between themselves. You had to look at how they were mastering standards.
And in this really neat, engaging kind of humming classroom, you found out that most of those other things weren't happening. Nobody was asking good questions. No one was thinking critically. In fact, they were just going through this list almost like a recipe. It wasn't in a cookbook. It was in a lab book, but it might as well have been a cookbook. It was, you know, a third cup of this, you know, 12 is of this you and you mix it all together and you have this thing. Same thing happens with like elephant toothpaste and liquids that change color. It's like it's neat. It's engaging, but it wasn't connected to anything else. And learners weren't really diving into these higher order thinking skills. So, hence the term random max of STEM. And to be fair, there were also environments where kids made speakers out of, you know, styrofoam plates and they understood why and they asked deep questions and they learned a lot of things. It was awesome. Right?
So, there were both aspects of that, but in some ways both ended up random acts of STEM because they weren't connected to a larger purpose, which is one of the things that project-based learning brings to STEM. So whether you're a STEM school or a STEAM school or a stream school or maybe a streamy school, if you add yoga to that, which I haven't seen yet, but give me a call if you've heard of that. I'm sure it fits somewhere. What happens is you need some kind of an instructional model that fits the emphasis you have as a school or a classroom for that matter. You know, if you're a school, you need a an instructional model that works in your science class, but also your language arts class, right? You still have language arts. So, what do you do? Well, project-based learning works in both of those arenas, but let's go back to random access of STEM. How do you prevent that?
Well, here's an example of a PBL unit that I love to talk about is we're looking at genetics in an eighth grade classroom and we say we bring in Mike from the Hemophilia Society and say, "Hey kids, today a parent is going to find out that their child has a genetic disease." They immediately want to know two things. One, is my child going to be okay? Two, they want to know everything there is to know about that disease. Hey, eighth graders, can you help us with the second half of that? We need to help them know everything there is to know about that disease. PSAs, pamphlets, presentations, slide decks, we want to educate them. And all the eighth graders say yes.
Like even the ones that are disengaged with school are like yes I will help people right so it's set up well now we go into need to know like what are the things you need to know in order to help these parents and they're like well we probably need to know how to make a presentation that's right we'll do a workshop on that what about the pamphlets yep we need to know that how many people are in a group yep we'll cover that too uh take a look at your entry event letter hey Mr. Story what's a what's a what's a punit What's a punit square? Oh, a punet square. Great question. Do you know what that is? No, never heard of it. Would you like us to teach you that so that you can help these parents? Yes, I would. Right? And that's the flip. And you say, "Well, my kids wouldn't say that." But they would. They do. Right? I had the kids in my class that would get 20% for the entire nine weeks, right? They didn't turn anything in.
And then you give them something like this that's real world and they actually want to accomplish and they will ask those questions. They will say yes, teach me the punet square so I can get this work done. Now, does it get hard for them? Yes, it does. But there's actual engagement, true inquiry, and they will learn things. But that's the switch. That's when you know you have a student centered classroom when they ask a truly deep inquirybased question like that. Yes, I will learn the pun square. And they do and they go and present and they know that six weeks later they're going to present to doctors and nurses and the work that they create will actually go into a doctor's office and will actually end up in a parent's hand and it will actually educate them about a genetic disease.
Now there are if you go to teachers pay teachers you can see some punit square activities where you have these different hereditary genes and you know you've got the kind of four square thing there and you've got the carrier and the not a carrier and you create these weird looking animals right based on the punent square and right they have this character trait and this character trait and it creates this weird animal And it's fairly engaging for most kids, right? Like it's engaging, but it becomes a random act of STEM because it's not really connected to anything in the real world. And I I think this topic is so important because when you have these random acts of STEM, it's not just disconnected from learning. It's also really difficult to teach that way. You've got that really great teacher that's in your that's in your school who can make things blow up, who knows how to make, you know, different fluids interact and it changes colors.
But when they do that now, they have to do that every single time they bring engagement and that they kind of create this I don't want to say circus environment, but it's the random acts of stem to bring engagement, right? And it's just hard on the teacher because they're always trying to one up the the last activity. How do I know? Because at one point I was juggling tennis balls that were on fire with acetone because it burns at just a little bit higher rate or a little bit lower rate. So you're supposed to be able to catch them and juggle them. It kind of worked. It mostly hurt a little bit, but when you get to the point where you're like burning your hands to juggle and get kids engaged because they're so disengaged, they're so apathetic. Like, I get it. But now you have to re-up that every time and get better and better at it versus a six-week unit on genetics where everybody knows that we're doing this not for a grade. We'll get a grade, but that's not why we're doing it.
We're doing it to help these parents understand how to interact with their kids. and somebody from the Riley Foundation comes to our school and kids that have been to Riley, the local children's hospital, come in and say, like even the kids that are in the school say, "Look, I was there. This is a real thing." Like people need help with this. That's six weeks of engagement. And yep, you're going to have to come up with after that, but it's not every single day. You have this internal inquiry and internal engagement that happens in a PBL unit when it's authentic and when you're solving real world problems. How do we continue this process? How do you get STEM to last six weeks? One of the difficulties with STEM is there is no nationally accepted instructional model connected to STEM, right? It doesn't happen. It's not doesn't exist. You can do um you know different aspects. You can do design thinking, but there nothing's fundamentally accepted across the board.
Project-based learning has a set structure that allows for creativity and student voice and choice and school culture to come into it and it breeds engagement. You start with engagement and there there are inputs of engagement all throughout leading up to the presentation all leading towards engagement. So we have this six-step process that you can go see my book PBL Simplified wherever books are sold. You're going to see it's a lot like the scientific method. There's not a whole lot of secret sauce to the six steps. The secret sauce is that there are six steps that we agree on. There is a vocabulary that we agree on so that everybody in your school can be on the same page and use the same words which builds school culture. The other aspect and structure that we need to talk about is PBL versus a project. PBL versus a project lays out the difference between a traditional project and what a PBL unit looks like. If you want that graphic, you go to what ispbl.com. What is pbl.com?
There's a video explaining it, uh, some text and you can actually download the the graphic if you'd like. Um, again, you can also go to pbwebinar.com if you want to watch me walk through that. All the URLs are going to be in the show notes, but there's a difference between doing projects and doing PBL. And when you get that, now you've got STEM within projectbased learning. You have an instructional model, you've got a process, and you've got true inquiry for six straight weeks. That's exciting. Like, if you're a teacher, like that's exciting. that you don't have to come in every day and light things on fire just to get kids to put their head up. Like they're engaged. The last thing that I'll say about project- based learning in STEM in this episode is that you bring community partners in and not just any community partners. Now, you're going to bring in engineers, you're going to bring in scientists, you're going to bring in somebody who analyzes DNA for the state police.
And what you're doing is you're exposing your learners to careers that they might not have thought out of otherwise. And there's STEM research out there that I love to lean on because it's so important that when our learners interact with someone that's in a STEM field, they can now see themselves in that position. Which means when they don't interact with those people in those STEM those STEM positions, they don't see themselves in that role and they're limiting their options. I'm not saying that everybody should be an engineer, but I'm saying everybody should have the option of being an engineer. They should see that as a possibility or going into technology field or going into science or going into the math field. You should see that as an option. And for some of our learners, the only way they're going to get there is by interacting with these roles at school. I became an engineer because my dad was an engineer. He was a first generation college student.
He grew up in country poverty. You know, my grandpa worked three jobs just to make things work. He went to Purdue. My dad went to Purdue, became an engineer. That worked. That got him out of poverty. So, what do you think I did? He said, "Boys, my brother and I, boys, you're going to Purdue. You're going to be engineers because that's how you stay out of poverty." That's all we knew. I didn't even know what an engineer did. They might as well have driven a train. I had no idea that there were different disciplines. U I had no idea, honestly, what they did. People said I was good at math and science. Ryan, you should be an engineer. Had no idea. Now, it worked out for me. Now, in in some regard, it did because I went and got a well-paying job, but I wasn't doing what I wanted to do. I didn't have any other real options. I didn't know what else was out there. That's what PBL does for our learners.
It shows them the options and the opportunities that are out there that they might not see otherwise. If you write down your why or the why of your teachers, I guarantee you, you will find that in there somewhere, that your learners have better opportunities than if they hadn't been in your classroom. It comes up every time we do a training. We want to see light bulb moments. We want them opportunities that they wouldn't have otherwise. And there's always somebody that's like, "My teacher in high school is awful and I don't want anybody to have that teacher." That's a separate topic. But what the the community partner aspect is so important because you have learners that don't have engineers in their top five relationships, don't have scientists or anybody in the technology field that comes to Thanksgiving, which is fine, but we have the opportunity to introduce them to people and say, "Here's Ryan. He's an engineer at a Fortune50 company. He's pretty cool. He's all right.
He's not mean. Uh he's doing work that you could do. He used to be in your seat. Here's the steps he took. And now learners sitting in your seats can say, "Oh, I could take those steps. I could take more math and science. I could apply to Purdue. I can go get those jobs." That is a huge difference. Random acts of STEM will not get you that. But when you bring project-based learning into STEM, you now have purpose. You've got an instructional model and you're bringing community partners that make a huge difference. Man, this is exciting. So, STEM and PBL, they go together super well. Uh there's a very specific way to to implement these things. Again, we've got ton of resources for those. Reach out if you need them. Uh this is a a fun episode. Honestly, I I love talking STEM and PBL because it fits so well together. PBL can go in any direction. We use it in all different classrooms. K12, uh STEM, I think specific specifically needs PBL in order to be super effective.
And what we see is we've got uh STEM schools in our network, our partners that are using project-based learning and they're doing amazing amazing things. If you'd like to visit those, reach out and we'll definitely hook you up and get you a visit. All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Tune in next week and in in the meantime, go lead inspired.
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