Ryan Steuer (00:02.99)
Hey, PBL simplified listeners, welcome back to another episode where we break down project-based learning into simple, actionable steps. I'm your host Ryan Stoyer and today we're talking about something foundational in the PBL world. How to build a winning classroom culture using PBL. Culture is the current that takes our kids down towards this road of student engagement and student empowerment. It's the culture that allows, if a student comes in,
is brand new, already feel that something's different. Like day one, know something's different. And that's what helps us get our learners to the employability skills, to do these things and to be engaged, to think critically, to problem solve, to think a little bit differently and a little less passively than maybe you've seen before in a traditional classroom environment. It's a big deal. But before I get into my first metaphor and example, I want to tell you about what is pbl.com. If you go to what is pbl.com,
you can get a free download, a whole set of resources for you in your classroom, but you also get a webpage that gives you a ton of just explaining that exact question. What is PBL? Because you're have to explain it to maybe colleagues, your learners, parents, community partners, say what is PBL? And if you have a classroom website, you can actually just like link right to it. And suddenly you've got a video for me talking about what is PBL, you've got some graphics, you've got some language that you can use to explain project-based learning and what it looks like in your classroom.
it gives you instant credibility. So we want to give you that resource right off the bat. That's whatispbl.com. So metaphor number one for today, along with a few stories that we have lined up about classroom culture. I want you to think about it like this. I'm going to go back to my middle school days when I was coaching seventh grade basketball. And when you're coaching a basketball team, you do, you run the drills, but you don't just run drills and practice and run those guys like crazy and just hope for the best. You want to have a team culture where
every player knows their role, they support their teammates, and they play with a purpose. You know, all the great coaches that we know, it's about more than basketball. And when I was coaching basketball, it was about, we did want to win, right? I did want to get kids in shape. I did want them to be better basketball players, but I also wanted to be better people. So that was a part of our culture. And the same is in your classroom. PBL is our playbook. It's our instructional model. And what we're doing today is we're walking through like, how do you establish a strong classroom?
Ryan Steuer (02:25.262)
culture, just like I would on a basketball team, like we're gonna work hard, we're gonna care about each other, you're gonna be a better basketball player and a person after being on this basketball team. Like that was set from day one, you're gonna do the same thing in your classroom. So how do you create strong classroom values? How do you create real world purpose? How do you bring in accountability? How do you encourage risk taking and how do you celebrate wins? When you celebrate something, you celebrate those wins, you're telling everybody in your classroom, this is what's important to me.
on the basketball court, it was, am I gonna celebrate the win, even though we had poor effort? Or am gonna celebrate that fantastic effort even in a loss? Right, so it was always the effort that we celebrated, so people knew on my basketball team, it about working hard and working together. All right, let's get into it. That's our first metaphor. So what we're gonna do, number one, is we're gonna set the tone. So we're establishing core values. What is it that you think is important in a classroom? Because we know that great teams start with strong values. In PBL,
These values are built into the learning process. If you've read my book, PBL Simplified, you know Skyler's story. If you've ever heard me speak at your school or in your district or online, I like to tell Skyler's story because Skyler was disengaged. He was floating through school without any purpose, but we all knew he's a bright kid and he could do it, but he was choosing not to. He just didn't see the importance of it. But when he was given the opportunity to work in a real world environment with project-based learning where the learning
was connected to a why and connected to purpose, something different happened, like something happened in him. He started learning. He started putting his head up. He started caring about the people around him and making a difference, not only in the classroom, but outside of the classroom. And that carried into his work today. Today, he is a freelance photographer. He taught himself how to be a photographer. He taught himself how to grow his own business. And right now he's out in LA doing photo shoots. Actually, he just got a studio inside of his house. He's really fired up about it.
So he's got all these rappers that come in and they do photo shoots with him and he's absolutely crushing it doing the work that he loves. But that all started by a tone that was set in our classroom, these values of it's more than just a test, like yes, there's gonna be a test. And in a failing school, we actually had a B in standardized tests. So we were crushing it, but that wasn't the biggest thing. We were really looking to emphasize learning overall and he got that. So that's one story that I love to continue to tell when we talk about values.
Ryan Steuer (04:50.862)
You also want to set the tone in your classroom. So one way to set the tone of a student centered classroom, like it's not going to be a passive sit and get in this classroom, is to create classroom norms with your learners. Instead of just handing out set of rules, go through a protocol where you talk about norms and the best ways that your learners learn. Just have that conversation and now you're starting to co-create things. Right off the bat, day one, it starts to tell your learners, this is a little different. Remember when I talked about
on the basketball team, like what you celebrate is a big deal. So what do you emphasize in your classroom? If you want kids to be collaborative and you want them to work together, then you need to emphasize that teamwork over the individual competition. So instead of always emphasizing that individual grade, like talk about, hey, this group worked really, really well together. Like showcase that, put it in front of the room, tell everybody it's important. Celebrate effort and growth, not just results. That's that idea of growth mindset versus fixed mindset.
Yes, we want to lead kids to the right answer. We want them to get right answers. But it's the effort and the growth, the growth mindset that we know that's what pays off in the long run. So we want to develop that growth mindset. So you want to find those little activities that do that throughout your day. again, from day one, like on your bulletin board, growth mindset all day, every day, right? Unless you're going to put the PBL process up there, right? We've got some posters we can help you with if you reach out. Happy to do that. But
some portion of, in this classroom, these are the values that are important to us, effort and growth, not just results. Because when your learners start to feel ownership over the classroom culture, they're more likely to buy in. Just like athletes who believe in their team's mission, they're ready to work a little bit harder if they were part of building it. All right, so number two of what I talked about is creating purpose. And this is the power of authentic PBL versus scenario PBLs or
walking through the steps or a traditional project. We want things to really be authentic. We want you to solve a real world problem. So I'm gonna ride my basketball analogy throughout this. So I hope that's all right with you. We ran a lot of seventh grade basketball. I had a lot of late nights there and loved it. But here's what I found out is that a lot of times your athletes will play with more intensity when the game matters, right? When things are on the line, like everybody's dialed in. When you're up by 20, it's harder to get those kids to dial in.
Ryan Steuer (07:15.298)
So the same way, your learners engage more deeply when the work has real world purpose. When you're solving a real problem, they start to tune in and dial in. When it's school like it's always been, it's a little easier to just kind of fade out to the background and just go through the motions. But when we know a community partner's coming in, it's a big deal. In the book, Life's a Project by Andrew Larson, great book, go to pblpress.com, we'll put it in the show notes. Life's a Project by Andrew Larson, he shares one of his stories.
He had a group of learners that designed accessibility solutions for people with disabilities. So they're empathetically reaching out to see people that have a different life than them maybe and figuring out how can they create different solutions. They met with people who were in wheelchairs, they tested their prototypes, they refined and designed their prototype based on real feedback from real people. You've gotta be zoned in on that. You cannot just dial that one in because you're right in front of people.
some of their creations were actually put to use in the community. That's such a big deal, right? Do you see the difference? And the power of authentic PBL versus a scenario or just a traditional project where we're just doing this for a grade, it helps us dial in. Like this is the fourth quarter, we're down by two, we have to make this happen, you've got to dial in. That's what a real world problem does to your classroom. It brings this level of purpose that is super important.
So when we're connecting our projects to real community needs, we're bringing in expert mentors, we're bringing in the community partners. We've got learners that are presenting their work to those authentic audiences. Again, everything's dialed in, we're making it tournament time, right, when it becomes presentation time. Because when their learners see that their work makes an impact, they start to develop that intrinsic motivation. And that's what you want on your basketball team, that's what you want in your classroom. You don't want to be the one that's always pulling your learners along.
You want them to have intrinsic motivation so you have to up the importance level of the work you're doing. All right, number three, building accountability. Now, accountability sometimes gets a bad rap, but here we're talking about peer feedback and reflection. And we don't want it be gotcha moments, right? Sometimes when we hear accountability, we're waiting, people have this gotcha mentality, like I'm gonna jump out and show you where you're wrong. That's not what we're trying to do, right? If we're reviewing film for a basketball game, we're not trying to do gotchas, we're trying to help people get better.
Ryan Steuer (09:36.588)
So what did you do really well? Where is something that you could change to get better? In PBL, our learners are engaging in ongoing reflection and feedback all the time. Just all the time, right? We wanna have tuning protocols. We wanna have places where we're giving feedback, getting feedback, being empathetic. And there's a few rules to this that I think are important to mention. Like you want the feedback to be useful. You want it to be kind. You want it to be timely.
So if it's not any of those three, there's a few more that you can tag in there. Get your own, get those norms for you, but you want them to have rules. You don't want it to just be friendly and kind, where it's like, great job. We've seen that. That's not helpful though. So it's gonna be kind and helpful, and it's gonna be timely. And these will be before that presentation so that they can make some adjustments. So as we're giving feedback and reflection, we do need to teach that through a workshop to show
how we're going to give feedback and reflection. I like to use Ron Berger's butterfly video. If you just go into YouTube and search that, I think you'll find it. Ron Berger from Expeditionary Learning has a great video called Austin's Butterfly. And he just walks you through the reflection process and how it can be kind, how it can be helpful, how it can be timely. So you wanna have those times of structured feedback. A tuning protocol is a great way to do that.
We've got that in the PBL movement online community. We've got a whole course on how to give protocols and actually a few videos where I walk you through those. But the difference between just an open source peer feedback, like give somebody some feedback and a tuning protocol is night and day. So a tuning protocol is gonna be very structured. It takes about eight minutes a lot of times. So someone's going to present for two minutes their idea and then the other half of the group is gonna give likes and wonders for a certain time period.
And during that, like if I'm presenting, I don't get to talk. I just have to wait and listen. And at the end, I'll get the last word. But when you bring in these protocols and there's a certain time limit, it takes off some of the personal of getting and receiving feedback. So we're talking about the project, not the person. And as you teach this, you'll see reflection and that accountability piece really ramp up in your classroom. So try some of the protocols. We'll put some links in the show notes.
Ryan Steuer (11:57.694)
So you can take a look and I think you'll see it change your classroom culture. Number four, we want to encourage risk taking because we want to learn from failure. This is a big deal. So when you think about, again, a basketball team, if go back to this analogy, you cannot fear failure. If you are afraid to miss that free throw, we're going to bet that you're going to miss that free throw. You want to be confident. You want to practice it before. Three dribbles. Take a deep breath. Hit the free throw. You want to have that. And if you miss it,
We just get back on defense and try again. So we have to give our kids an opportunity to take risks and fail. Now we don't want them to fail a class and we don't want them to fail the interview when they're out of school. We don't want them to fail in an authentic audience situation. We want them to practice before them. So we need to create these smaller places where they can fail and it's okay, it's safe. They're with us. So when you have a classroom culture that allows people to be wrong, because we have a growth mindset, it allows kids to take chances.
And that's a big deal. If I give you another example from Life's a Project, same book from Andrew Larson, he had a group of engineering students that tried to build a solar powered water filtration system. This is heavy stuff. Andrew was teaching high school sciences at the time, several AP courses as well, and using project-based learning to do it. So in this case, they're building a solar powered water filtration system, and their first model failed. And their second model failed.
it took them five iterations before they had a working prototype. That means they failed four times. And in Andrew's classroom culture, it was like, cool, great, there's four ways that don't work. Let's try number five. Well, five, I've worked. So what's the key? The key is that failure wasn't the end. It's just part of the learning process. When that's a part of your culture, now it's okay for kids to fail. Now it's okay for them to step up.
Sometimes our kids are more passive because they don't want to mess up, right? They don't want to mess up. They don't want to be wrong. They don't want to fail. And what does fail mean, right? It's just your first attempt in learning. Your first attempt in learning, right? Fail. And if you can build that culture, like put that on your wall, right? Just let kids know. And now you start to see kids at that intrinsic motivation. They start to step up. That's the norm in your classroom culture. You're starting to build that in. You're going to normalize failure in your classroom.
Ryan Steuer (14:24.11)
So you're use fail stories. My first book, PBL Stories and Structures, Wins, Fails, and Where to Start was the subtitle, and gave you fail stories throughout. It's not gonna be a perfect journey when you're doing project-based learning and you're changing the way you do your classroom. There's gonna be fail stories and we're gonna learn from them. And if we can do that as adults, then our learners can do that too. So you wanna have, if you're gonna bring this failure piece in your classroom, you want your learners to document those failures.
Maybe you don't even call them failures. Maybe you call them iterations or hypotheses. They're trying to try something and then celebrate the progress rather than perfection. If they do have a failure, you celebrate that. Wow, that's fantastic. You guys tried really hard, it didn't work out. What did you learn from this? You're helping your kids ask that question themselves the next time. What did I learn from this? And have them write that down in a process journal where they can say, this is what I learned from here.
Because when learners see a failure as a step towards success, they develop resiliency, perseverance, skills that we need them to have, and ultimately, they start to see growth. All right, last one. Celebrating wins. This is the power of recognition. Like in seventh grade basketball, we really did it at the end of the year, but now as I do this podcast episode, I'm like, we should have done it in the middle to celebrate the great things that were happening. We usually did it at the end, though. But what if you did it in the middle? said, wow, Brody had a
It was awesome on defense. really appreciated that. Rebounding was fantastic. And you're celebrating all these things that are not just scoring points, right? Because you're showing everybody on your team what's important. You want to do the same thing in your classroom. You want to celebrate the things that are important. We just talked about celebrating failures. So how do you do that? Maybe you have a failure board. There's one teacher in our network that has a failure board. And kids get to put up and adults get to put up. Some teachers will stop in the classroom and put their failure up on the board, right? There's a failure board just showing
We all do it, we all fail. How cool is that? You wanna create maybe a classroom hall of fame to highlight achievements as well. When learners feel valued, they stay motivated, just like our athletes in the big game. If one of your learners knocks it out of the park with their presentation and normally they don't, maybe you put that up on the hall of fame board and maybe somebody crashes and burns in a presentation. Just let it go up on the failure board and celebrate that too. That is
Ryan Steuer (16:47.982)
in your classroom, because you're setting the tone, you're setting the culture. It's what is it that you are bringing to your learners' attention. So there's five tips that you can use to start building a classroom culture. We'll put those in the show notes to give you those five. But what we really want you to do is we want you to join the PBL movement if you haven't already. If you're just stepping in, again, what is pbl.com, great place to start, great place to just link that website to yours so that you've got that and you can tell people this is what you're doing in your classroom, it's different.
But we want you to be in the movement. It's growing, right? It's growing. The PMOC is growing every day. Schools are jumping in, individual teachers are jumping in. Because you get courses, you get all the resources, the rubrics, the planning forms, and product presentations, and you get a private Facebook group to ask any of your questions. It's a big deal. And even outside of the PMOC, you can feel the momentum in the PBL world right now. It's a great time to join. And you start with this idea of a winning class.
classroom culture, because it's not overnight. It's going to take you time to figure out what is it that you truly want to celebrate. You know, but you just have to pull it out. Maybe we should create a GPT around this, around your classroom norms and what your core values are. We should do that. But what you're going to do is you're going to craft this culture in your classroom with intentionality. You're going to do it with trust. want trust between your learners and you. And you're do it with purpose. And as you do those things, you're going to start to see the intrinsic motivation.
bump up in your classroom. And you're gonna see that PBL is not as hard because your learners are coming with you. It can take some momentum to make the shift, for sure. I don't think it's the easiest way to teach using project-based learning. But I do see the most impact. And when teachers move over to PBL, they're teaching the way they've always wanted to teach. That's the term that keeps coming back and that makes people smile. like, yeah, that's it. You get to teach the way you've always wanted to teach.
That's it for today's episode. If you found this valuable, share it with a fellow educator, leave a review. All those things help out a ton. Keep doing what you do best. Engage your learners, create meaningful experiences, make learning unforgettable. We'll see you next time on PBL Simplified for teachers.
