Welcome to the PBL Simplified podcast for teachers brought to you by Magnified Learning, your customized PBL partner. From over a decade of experience with you in the trenches, we are bringing you the top rated educational podcast designed for inspired classroom teachers seeking to transform their classrooms with project-based learning. Live your why, transform your classroom, teach inspired. Here's your host, Ryan Steuer. Hey Ryan, what is PBL anyway? I've been answering some form of that question for nearly a decade. At Magnified Learning, we've created this resource for you so that you can answer this question, too. As you get started on your PBL journey, go to whatispbl.com. That's whatispbl.com and you'll see a place to sign up specifically for teachers to get that set of resources. Now, if your administrators start to get on board, you can send them to the same link, whatisp.com. There's a sign in for administrators to get a separate set of resources to get them started on the journey along with you. Today, our episode title is the same as our freebie at the beginning. How exciting is that? What is PBL? We're talking what is projectbased learning. I claim that every teacher should be able to define PBL with these five audiences. And I want to help you do that, right? You can do that. You can walk your way through it. You can stumble your way through it. But I also think that you can passionately work your way through talking about what is is projectbased learning. So let's go through these five audiences. The very first audience is you. It's the classroom teacher. This whole podcast is designed for you. BBL Simplified for teachers, right? This is absolutely for you. So how do we define project-based learning for you, the classroom teacher? There's two specific ways I want to uh take a look at project-based learning. Number one, I call it the passionate definition of PBL. You don't want to know all the little intricacies. You probably don't want a paragraph long sentence that fully describes project-based learning. You want to know like why do people do it? Why are there entire schools devoted to this? Why are there teachers that will now teach no other way? Why are there teachers that say this is the way I've always wanted to teach? That's what project-based learning is about. Project-based learning is about getting to those PBL units, those outcomes for your kids that you can't seem to any other way on your evaluation. It's those things on the right side of the rubric where there's student empowerment and students are supposed to ask their own questions and they're solving these problems. It's like how in the world do you do that? That's PBL, right? PBL has the framework for that. It doesn't have to be this thing where you have to come up with all these different ideas, a whole framework and then just write it out hanging on with your nails for four to six weeks. It's like no, there's a process to it and we've codified it. We've put a ton of different resources around it over the last decade and We call it PBL. In fact, we call it authentic PBL because to get to the passionate work that you really want to do, that you've always wanted to do in your classroom, the reason you became a teacher, to provide new opportunities for your learners, to have light bulb moments go off in your classroom, you need to be solving real world problems. If you're grabbing uh PBL off of teachers pay teachers, or if somebody's talking about PBL and they're talking about scenarios, it's not really going to get you what you want. It's not going to get your learners the things that you want. them to have these employability skills, these experiences that they wouldn't have otherwise. The fun ride for PBL on the passionate side of things is in the authentic PBL where you've got your learners, maybe your high school learners are coming to you and say, "Hey, we need vape detectors in the bathroom." Okay, I could tell somebody or you could put it into a PBL. And then at the end of it, your your learners are going to present to the school board the best options for vape dete detection. in your high school and then the school board's going to make a decision based on what your school your learners did. These are all real examples, by the way. You're going to get the flag of your town, Lexington, changed because some middle schoolers presented to city council that they thought the flag should be changed because it was violating all the rules of of good flag making and then the flag actually got changed. You're going to rework your your district's digital policies like These are archaic. They don't work. How are we supposed to interact with AI when we can't get to it? How are we supposed to teach our learners about it cuz we're blocking it? What if it became a PBL? And now again, your learners are going to the schoolboard and talking about the amazing thoughts that they have about how they are going going to need AI in some form. And they know it could be dangerous. They know they might not learn certain ways, but they also know it could be used really positive ways that helps them have a better future. Or maybe you could discover a new mold. Are you geeky enough to get excited about that one. That happened, too. A mold that scientists in North America had never discovered in North America. Some high schoolers found it. Huh? No way. Yes way. Or maybe you could have kindergarteners, first graders publishing a book. That happened, too. When you look at some of the amazing things that are happening out in education today, there are awful lot of PBLers behind them. You start looking at the teacher of the year in a lot of different states, project-based learning is in their tool bag. And you can do it, too. You can do it. It's the way you've always wanted to teach. If you go go way back to college and if you could dust off that paper that you wrote about why do I want to teach that we all had to write, there's this passionate kid that really wanted to change the world through education. You can still do that. We've got an instructional model for that. We've got wording for that. That's the second part of the way that I describe PBL to teachers like yourself is there's a lot of technical pieces. You know, when we talk about voice and choice, entry events, need to knows, public presentations, authentic audience, all these different ideas. Uh, but those are easy to talk about. Those are the easy things. That's skill set vocabulary. You can learn all that. In fact, we actually have a separate podcast for that. It's called Binge PBL for Teachers. Binge PBL for Teachers. You can get on Apple Play uh podcast wherever you download your downloaded this podcast. You can get it, too. There's 20 episodes, though, in that one. So, it it actually ends, right? There's a start and a finish to that one. It's going to give you all the nuts and bolts of PBL, right? So, that's super learnable. We can teach you that. That part's easy. I want you to get fired up about teaching the way you've always wanted to teach. That's where I want you to go and the rest of it we can take care of. So, that's how I explain PBL to teachers. I get pretty fired up about it. Uh, you know, we've devoted more than a decade of our lives here at Magnify Learning to to spreading the word about PBL, specifically authentic PBL. You're going to love it. The second audience, though, as you start to get into PBL, the second audience that you're going to want to bring on board is students. Students are going to say, Well, why should I learn about project-based learning? Why should I be doing PBL? And it's a great question to ask, right? Because there is a difference between PBL and traditional teaching. You're going to have different students interact differently. You're going to have your point getters, your high ability kids that know how to win the game of school. They know how to get the points and they can see it all and they can memorize the thing, get the points, forget the things, right, and get new points. Uh, suddenly it's they're not real sure how to get their points. They have to like solve a real world problem. How to what? Huh? I have to apply what I just learned. That's correct. So, they get a little wobbly. Like, their legs get wobbly. Um, you know, your C students and some of your struggling learners actually don't have much problem with PBL. They're like, oh, we're going to change school. Cool. Let's do that. Because they're the ones that are asking why, like, why do I have to learn this? And that's what PBL does. It gives you the why. Why do we have to learn the punet square? Well, because there are parents that are going to find out that their child has a genetic disease, and they want to know two things. Number one, is my child going to be okay. Number two, they want to know everything there is to know about that genetic disease. Hey, eighth graders, will you help us inform them? Yeah, I'll I'll do that. Yeah, right. And they have to learn a whole bunch of standardsbased pieces in order to do that. Right. But your students want to know why are we changing this? Why are things why are things going to be different? And we've got to let them know that the world has changed that as they go into college, as they go into the workforce, that things do look differently. There is AI is a real thing. It's going to continue to grow. So, they need to know how to use it. They know when to use it, when not to use it, where do they have advantages over AI and when do they not, right? What are the jobs that they're looking at? What are the majors they're going to go into? They need to be uh thinking about these things. They need to develop critical thinking skills, problem solving, collaboration. They need to know agency for them for themselves, right? As they show up to work on time and do the work. And when you look at the top five things that industry partners want, if you look at the top 10, those five are always in there. In fact, if you look at any list, just think how many of those are in PBL and you're going to find at least half every single time and they're not things that we always teach in traditional classroom. So your students definitely need something different. What we like to do in for our students in project based learning is we're bringing the why closer to them. So the why for the opponent square example like you're going to need to know this in college, right? And it's like well that's years away and I don't care about that at all. Like yes, you're right Mr. Storyer. I should learn learn that it's on the test that's coming up, you know, that will decide my future, but it turns out I'm a teenager. I'm not so sure. So, when we bring in parents that have a child that has genetic diseases and like the parent comes into the classroom and the doctors come into the classroom and they say, "This is really important." The why went from a couple years away to the why is like right in front of them. It's like four weeks from now you're going to present this and someone in the real world is going to use this to make decisions about their family. So, the why gets boom moved up. up and now they understand why they need to learn this and it's a gamecher. So, how do we explain PBL to our students? The third audience that we need to describe it to is your administrators. As I mentioned, we have a podcast called PBL Simplified for Administrators that's ongoing. We also have that binge PBL for administrators, those 20 episodes, but they're specifically for administrators. So, if you're on board with PBL, but your uh administrator is trying to get there and you're trying to help him or her out, we've got some resources there, too. And You have to think about your administrator. What's the currency? What is it that they're looking for? Uh, and as they look to improve the school, they're looking at test scores, right? We know that that's a piece that's always in the background. Um, so we always start every PBL is standardsbased, right? We're going to have really tight assessments practices so that we know that our learners are learning things. It's not just fluff. Move way way way from fluff. Uh, it's a much more structured instructional model than you might think because the structure allows for creativity. Right? Just like a canvas allows an artist to be creative, you need some structure for creativity. So test scores are a big deal. And we see schools like Dixie Magnet uh Elementary in Lexington or Southport in Indianapolis. These elementary schools that are scoring the highest growth scores in their state or they're moving from a D to an A on their standardized test scores because their learners are engaged, because their teachers are engaged, because there's assessment practice. that are tight and things are transparent so we know what's working, what's not working. It moves test scores. The second thing is community perception. Your administrator needs to have a school that is perceived well in the community, right? I've seen a lot of those pieces go south when it's just it's really just a bad marketing job that happened. It wasn't something awful that happened at the school. Somebody just started saying things. What if people around your community started saying all the amazing things that they were seeing in your classroom? Right? They saw learners talking in professional ways they didn't know the kids did. Because what happens with PBL is now we're inviting community partners in. Well, guess what? They then go out and tell those stories at the soccer game, at the Rotary meeting, at the Chamber of Commerce. They're talking about the amazing things happening at your school and community perception changes. The fourth audience you want to keep in mind is parents. Parents, because PBL is different. They were in school and maybe it went well, maybe it didn't, but either way, it's likely different. They were used to being in rows doing what they're supposed to do, not liking school, just getting through it. And you're flipping the script on that with project-based learning. Now, we're engaged. We're empowered. We're Why are we doing homework over Christmas break? And you're like, I didn't assign any homework. Why are we doing stuff over Christmas break? Well, cuz I want to do a really good job when we get back. That's right. Like, your learners are pushing that work, not you. It's going to look different. But ultimately, what does every parent want? They want a future ready kid. Parents are scared of a I they're scared of what it's going to look like in the future. They don't know if their child's prepared. They don't know if they're prepared, but they want future ready kids. If you're going to be future ready, you're going to be able to problem solve, think critically. You're going to be able to work with anybody, right? You're going to know what your options are. You're going to be able to empower yourself to be able to improve and get best possible scenarios. They want future ready kids. So, we have to be able to talk about how PBL is fulfilling that in a way that traditional schooling might not. The fifth audience is going to be community partners. Who are you going to bring in? your classroom. There's a lot of different people that you can, you know, you might be thinking like globally and nationally, but I love to bring us back to think locally. Who are the local community partners that care about the school, that care about your town, care about your area? Bring them into the school. Give them an invitation. That's not career day. Career day, they come in and talk about what they do and they they rotate through a whole bunch of kids. It doesn't matter who's there because they don't know them in any way. Now, in a different way, you're going to invite them into a PBL unit that might around their expertise, right? You're going to bring a a banker into a finance PBL. You're going to bring somebody from DNR into your biology lesson. You're going to bring the the fireman or the K9 unit into your first responders lesson in unit, right? You're you're giving them a reason to come in. The community wants to help us in education. They're just not sure how. Right? The engineer, the architect can't just show up to the front desk and say, "Hi, I'd like to help." They need somebody to translate or something to translate and that's PBL. PBL starts to translate our standards to the real world and community partners can see where they can fit. Once you get community partners in your classroom, you're going to love them. You're going to realize you need them. The engagement is all over the place. The opportunities for your kids are huge and you get to show off the amazing things that they're doing. You're going to love Community Partners. Those are the five audiences that I want you to think through when you're looking at project-based learning as you're going through the podcast. or maybe you'll go through some of the other resources that we have. Think through how are you going to talk about PBL because you need to be able to talk about it a little bit differently with each one of these audiences. Like if you're loving PBL and you're like I'm in, I'm going to learn. I'm going to get there because we're all learners. You're going to find very few people in our network. They're going to say, "I'm a PBL expert." Even though they've been doing it for decades, they've created schools. They've created units. They've created classrooms that are amazing from the outside. You know, we we would call them PBL experts. s, but they're still students. They're learners. They're still learning something new. How do we get PBL to connect to SEAL? That's our current that's the current conversation we're noodling. How do we get PLC's to connect to PBL? We're always learning, right? And so, if you're in, that's great. Like, we're in with you, right? 100% we're with you. And we want you to be able to talk about this thing that you love in different ways to have it be received well. So, community partners, they're going to get it because they want our learners to come out of high school with the skills, these skill sets. Parents will get it once you explain it to them. They won't at first, but they want their kids to be future ready. Future ready. Isn't that a neat term? So, use that term. It's a good one. We want them to be future ready, and that's exactly what we're doing. Administrators, they see a lot of things come across their desk and their their windshield of education. There's a lot of initiatives out there. How is PBL different? And how does it help them specifically in their role? Students, your all of your students are different, right? Right? So, they're going to they're going to need a little bit different tweak on their talk maybe when you're defining PBL because that high ability learner might need a different talk than somebody who doesn't always win at school. And then you you're our most important audience here at Magnified Learning. I want you to understand PBL in a way that is like it's just visceral. You're like, I love it. That's when we know you're in. And it's okay if you're going to start hesitantly, right? Like we what I want you to know is that there's a decade of resources and processes. It's an instructional model. It's not willy-nilly. There's no mess in the middle. The assessment practices are tight and your kids are learning at a deep rigorous level while they're developing these employability skills to become future ready. It is the way that you've always wanted to teach and I'm excited to be on the journey with you. So, I hope this answers, you know, this question of what is PBL? Remember, you can go to what ispbl.com. What is PBL.com and we've got a whole set of resources to kind of walk you through these beginning parts of your journey. This podcast is going to continue twice a month. We're going to bring on uh some guests so that you can hear kind of what their classroom sounds like. In fact, next week uh we're going to explore PBL and high school learners. There can be some challenges with a high school schedule and sometimes we get some academic silos that can happen. But more often than not, our older learners are producing amazing results with PBL. The way that they can speak to professionals. The way that they can interact with community partners is just amazing. And not to mention, our high school learners need these experiences before they head off to the workforce or to college. So, make sure you tune in next week when we talk to a teacher in the classroom about how PBL has completely changed his practice. This is exciting, isn't it? So, now you're on the journey. Stick with us. Find these episodes where we're gonna kind of bounce back and forth between some solo episodes with me where We're going to give you a bunch of information and resources to run with and hopefully some inspiration with some live guests that come in either from the classroom or from outside of the classroom to again equip and inspire you cuz that's what we want you to do. We want you to use PBL to teach like you've always wanted to teach. Let's go out and teach inspired. That's just what I needed to bring PBL to my classroom. If that sounds like you, please consider rating and reviewing the show. 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