Ryan Steuer (00:00.096)
Welcome to the PBL Simplified Podcast for Teachers, 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 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 Stoyer.
Welcome to the PBL simplified for teachers podcast where we talk all things project-based learning for you specifically the classroom teacher. What are the, what are the moves that you need? What are the stories we need to tell? Cause there are a lot of amazing things happening in schools across the country that are using project-based learning. We've got schools in Lexington, Kentucky that were a D school and now they're an A in two years. It's a title one elementary went from D to an A in just two years.
the staff bought in the students bought in administrators bought in community bought in the project based learning and they saw learners become engaged. They leaned in, they solved local problems and test scores went up because kids were learning amazing things as well. It's super cool. There's a lot of things happening. We'd love to get you involved. You go to what is pbl.com to get some free resources to get started. That's what is pbl.com to get started today. Today we're talking about developing inquiry in a PBL classroom.
Inquiry is really like a foundational piece of project-based learning. We've got to get our learners interested, engaged. I like to say leaning in, right? So inquiry is more than, you know, a neat bell ringer. That's kind of a question, right? That you ask it, you talk about for a little bit. True inquiry, I think is where you have your learners learning in, leaning in and asking why, like why is that? And what can we do about it? Which is really why we have driving questions, I think.
I'm going to get to that in a second, but I'm going to read some right from from PBL simplified just to kind of show you the examples, the difference between inquiry and like an essential question, right? That just talks about your standard. So you might have a question. Why do we need slope intercept formulas, which is not inherently awesome. Like that's, doesn't have me leaning in. It has me. I have some questions. Like I might not know what slope intercept means. I might not know why we use it, but let's turn it into a driving question.
Ryan Steuer (02:26.552)
We say, how can we as economists help people understand the relationship between supply and demand so they can create the best business possible? Now as a learner, I'm leaning in. like, are we going to work with businesses? Are community partners coming in? Who's going to jump into this? What if I don't know how to interact with a business partner? I'm kind of freaking out. Like, what do I do? But it also sounds awesome because we're actually going be helping people make their business better. Another one. What are the causes of the civil war?
That you get right out of the textbook. It's likely highlighted, right? It's very standards-based, right? Might go up on a chalkboard somewhere. And then we're going to, we know we're going be looking at the Civil War, but very Googleable. We don't want our driving questions to be Googleable because then the inquiry stops as soon as it's a search result. What if we switch it? How do we, as political advisors, educate our community on how a divided country negatively or positively affects the future success of a nation so that citizens can take positive action?
We're gonna take action. We're gonna be doing something with the standards that we're addressing and engaging. We've got two more. Why is exercise important? Like every PE and health teacher has asked this question. Like Jordan mainly is trying to instill this in his people right now. Like, hey kids, exercise is important. But let's try to wrap it around a driving question that gets our learners engaged and develop some inquiry.
How do we as fitness experts create a customized training plan for busy professionals so they can achieve their best life? So now I'm going to be a fitness expert, right? I might be 13, but I'm going be a fitness expert and I'm going to be giving advice to adults on how they can be healthier. That's a great way to get kids involved in understanding exercise and health and get them to lean into the larger idea. One more. What are some ways perimeter is important? Okay.
Again, might be an essential question. It might show you what standard you're addressing, but not developing inherent curiosity or inquiry. What if we switch it to, how can our third grade nutritionalists help provide better food options to the senior center so that that senior center can have an improved quality of life? And you might say, well, Ryan, perimeter seems pretty hidden in that one. And that's fair, right? It is. But what the learners find out in that PBL unit,
Ryan Steuer (04:45.873)
because every one of these was used in a classroom, right? All of our resources are proven resources in the classroom. In this one, as they're looking at better food options for the local senior center, they end up building raised garden beds, right? And they figure out the perimeter of those raised garden beds. And they go out, they work with master gardeners, they're working with the local senior center to develop those. And right off the bat, this question starts to develop curiosity and inquiry. And then you bring in a community partner.
and you have more inquiry, like who is this person? Are they mean? Are they nice? Are they cool? Are they neat? Like there's all these questions that are coming up in your students' heads and that's inquiry. Can I really do this? Can we really solve some portion of this problem of the health of senior citizens? I don't know, right? Like let's find out and we'll get to some moves for you as the classroom teacher. Like what are some things you could start to say and do to create some more inquiry? So.
Obviously you can grab PBL simplified to get some more on those driving questions. You can also join the PMOC, the PBL movement online community. It's a one year access for 275 bucks. get on demand courses. You actually get a driving question course that walks you through how to look at at risk driving questions, how to improve yours, how to make them awesome. And you get the same thing for community partners, entry events, end products. We actually walk you through that and you can do it all in your own time.
or you can interact with the live community or even better yet, you can actually get a live in-person workshop, a three day PBL jumpstart over the summer. And you get to join our facilitators in a culture that makes PBL come alive and thrive. So check that out. I just go to our website and there's a, there's a button on the far right that will tell you about the PMOC and how you can get involved. We'd love to see you in there. Great way to get connected.
and move your PBL journey like super fast because you get all of our resources too. So you get all the planning forms, group contracts, rubrics, all the things, you just get them all, right? So if you know this is your journey, or I guess maybe if you're figuring it out, like we're gonna give you all the stuff, right? To equip you on that journey. We'd love to see you there. So let's jump into, I've got four ideas around inquiry in a project-based learning classroom. The first one, I've kind of already mentioned it, but...
Ryan Steuer (07:09.625)
Inquiry is really, foundational in PBL. If we all know what's going to happen, like we kind of, this is why at Magnify Learning, we really emphasize authentic PBL versus scenario projects, right? In a scenario project, we all kind of know what's going to loop around and happen. Like we're going to pretend to be an architect. We're going to build some things out of cardboard. And we all kind of know that we're going to present those. Like we know what the end product is, but if we're going to actually build a tiny house, then there's a lot of unknowns there, right? Like there's a builder, there's a
Uh, contractors that are involved, there are people that are going to be buying this house or they're going to be gifted this house. There are a whole lot of unknowns that happen, you know, kind of a wicked problem that has a whole bunch of, uh, variables that gets us thinking and develops inquiry and has your learners ask questions. They just wouldn't ask otherwise. And there's such a difference between those two and authentic PBL unit. were solving a real world problem with community partners versus a scenario project where we know where it's going to end up.
the employability skills, the future ready skills, the inquiry, questions that your kids are asking, it just skyrockets. So if we go back to the driving questions, like what's the purpose of a driving question? The purpose is you really want to spark curiosity. It's like, can we really do this? Like it's such a neat thing, right? Like what are the causes of the civil war? It's like, well, I know I can do that. If I open this book and I go to page 136 and I take the highlighted things or the bulleted points and I put them in there and try to put in my own words, I can do that.
Like we all know that the kids know that right off the bat, they're going to do it so they can get a grade or they're not going to do it because they don't care about the grade. But if we develop inquiry and there's this idea of, I don't know if we can really do that. Like that's a, that's a whole different mindset that your kids are coming to all of your workshops from that they're coming to your class. There's this idea of curiosity and wonder and adventure. And that's a whole different idea. A good driving question requires research, right? And some problem solving. You also want to be relevant to your students.
Right? So that's why we advocate for local PBL. We don't have a full like public PBL project library that you just grab from. We used to. And people would grab it and go do PBL, but it wasn't great PBL because if there's a really great PBL unit that's planned out well, and let's say it's centered around a community partner that has, that's a bank CEO and you have a great relationship with this bank CEO and they come in and they do a great job.
Ryan Steuer (09:36.507)
Well, if you grab that same PBL unit and go try it in your town, but you don't have a CEO that's a great community partner that has a really specific need, you'll lose a lot of that momentum. You'll lose the inquiry and you miss out. So finding something that's local and relevant to your kids is a big deal. We like it to have a lot of different solutions so kids can come up with different solutions to this problem that you're trying to solve. And one really quick check to see if
your driving question is in the right space, is it Googleable or is it chat GPTable? Even if it's chat GPTable, AI can solve all problems, but not really. If you're looking at how do you build raised garden beds for the local senior center, there's a ton of local knowledge that AI's not gonna know. So when you develop these problems, the right driving question is gonna avoid some of these traps that we're trying to figure out. Where does AI fit in our classrooms?
Where does a Google search fit? So you find the great, a great driving question that builds inquiry. Your learners are leaning in and they're going have to do some research to figure this out. It's going to take a couple of days. It might take a couple of weeks, right? If it's a problem-based unit versus a project-based unit, right? So there's no hard and fast rule of how much time a PBL unit takes. You be careful when I say some of those words, I give, I give actual numbers, right? Cause it could be a four week unit, could be a two week unit.
I don't care, right? But I want there to be inquiry. I want it to be authentic. I want your learners to be engaged, involved. I want them to present to an authentic audience. And then I want them to reflect because we learn a lot in reflection. Wow. That was okay. If that was too quick, like PBL simplified, that's what it does. Like it takes you through those six steps that I just talked you through, but we still have three more pieces of inquiry we need to get to. So number two is how do we teach our learners to ask better questions?
and we know that we can give too much information. Great PBL teachers don't just provide information, we teach our students how to ask great questions. We've all been there where somebody gave too much information, right, when they're trying to help somebody, they just basically gave them the answer, and we know that kids aren't learning. So how do we help them develop this ability to ask great questions? Which is really helpful, right? There's really no job in the real world where you go and look into this manual, pick out,
Ryan Steuer (12:01.349)
you know, the answer and give it back to your boss and somehow you're rewarded for that. It's really when you're asking good questions, like, Hey, I'm looking at this data and there's a blip here. I wonder why that is. That's a good question. So how do we teach our learners when it's baked into the PBL process, right? So need to knows if you're, we just love the need to know process. We've got a few friends that are dropping need to knows in their PBL process and gosh, we just don't know how you could do without it. Right? So you present this big idea, right? Like we're going to look at
supply and demand, and we're gonna look at a slope intercept formula to help business owners. There's a whole bunch of questions that should come out of that for your learners, as they're being curious, and we wanna cultivate that. We want them to ask questions. So when they ask a question, go, yes, that's a great question. Do we have any more? And you keep them coming, and that's teaching your learners that asking questions is important, and we want them to do that. A couple other tangible.
of responses, need to know is certainly tangible. You can do that in every PBL unit. You can do that before you do in PBL. You could do that in a traditional classroom actually. Number two, the five whys method. I love this method personally, but most of the time kids or adults just don't have the patience for it where you ask why five different times. So even if I'm coaching like principals or people at central office, by the time you get to why number three or four, they're like, okay, I get it. But if you can walk through it,
It's such a good exercise. Okay, we think that we should help the seniors at the local senior center with nutrition. Well, why? Well, because we want them to be healthy and live a good life. Why? So they can interact with their grandkids. Why? Well, because when they interact with their grandkids, they can pass down wisdom and they can help build them up. Why is that important? Well, because those kids are gonna be the future leaders of our society and they're gonna help build our culture and be great citizens.
Well, that's a really neat reason why we should build raised garden beds because we're actually formulating like the next group of leaders in our society and we're creating great citizens. That makes a lot of sense. I can get behind that. So if you can walk through that, it'll take some crafting and some art to do that in a classroom or again, even adults get a little tired of it, but it's such a good exercise. So find a way to do the five wise method. Another one, if you're on board with this and you are 100 % geeky in inquiry,
Ryan Steuer (14:24.322)
Like you wanna get Trevor McKenzie's book, Inquiry Mindset, we highly recommend that. I've talked about it on the podcast before. We really like Trevor's work. You can also add inquiry journals, where now you're encouraging your learners to document their questions. So as they're doing need to knows, they might do that individually, but also throughout the process, like I've got a question, where do I put it? And we're teaching our learners to ask good questions. And then also, and some of you love this already, the Socratic Seminar Method, and there are enough resources about that you can go jump on.
that if you'd like. Number three for bringing inquiry into the PBL classroom is encouraging your learners to embrace uncertainty. Encouraging your learners to embrace uncertainty. It's talking about letting go of some control. So we have to be comfortable with not having all the answers and that helps our learners embrace uncertainty. So this, this one might be a tough one for you because
you have to lead the way in this, right? You have to model embracing uncertainty. So let me give you some tangible ideas. Cause really we're looking at growth mindset, right? So we want to, we want to keep growing. It's okay to not know. It's good to not know. We're going to grow and know more as we get better. So you're going to model curiosity. You know, if you get a question and maybe if you do know the answer, maybe you don't know the answer, you know, especially if you don't, say, well, I don't know. How could we find out about that?
It's one of my favorites, right? And then maybe if you've got time, just do a quick rabbit trail and say, hey, can you three go research that and come back to the class and let us know? Right? It's okay to not know all the answers. Some of you might need to take a quick break and realize that's true. It's okay to not know all the answers. Even if you do know the answers, you can still say some of the same things. You can just say, well, how could you find out about that? Right? You don't have to answer that question right away. Another way is to celebrate mistakes, Frame failure as a step forward.
and deeper learning. Like failure is not a bad thing. And we want our kids to be able to practice failure with us and we need to model some of that. So if something doesn't work out in class, just transparently be like, wow, that sure didn't work, it? Let's try something different or let's try again tomorrow. It's okay to make mistakes. And it's actually super positive for you to point out that you've made a mistake. One, it's pretty freeing for you as a teacher because you can't be perfect. So trying to be is just
Ryan Steuer (16:50.69)
creates a ton of anxiety. But just knowing that when we do show that failure's okay and that we're making mistakes, it's positive for our kids. It releases some anxiety for them. Like, hey, it's okay to be wrong. It's okay to not know this. We're gonna grow and learn together. Now the last one I'll give you is just to provide real world connections. So when you bring in a community partner, there's an awful lot of uncertainty for you, right? As a teacher bringing somebody in from the outside.
You want to bring in good community partners, you've vetted them, you know they're good folks, but you still don't know exactly what they're going to say. Right? And it's okay to coach them. There's nothing wrong with that. But there's some uncertainty there. And when you bring in a community partner, there's also uncertainty for your learners. They don't know this person. It's not a teacher. Are they going to be, are they cool? Are they rich? Are they mean? Are they going to be stuck up? Right? There's just all these different questions that our kids have. And what happens most of the time is they're like, wow.
Jim's a really neat lawyer. Maybe I could be a lawyer, right? Or Susan's an optometrist. Maybe I could be an optometrist. And those are the experiences we really want them to have. There's a little bit of uncertainty that happens first that builds this inquiry. All these questions come up. So you want to invite community partners in. You know that's one of our staples at Magnify Learning is you need to have community partners in because that's what brings the real world authenticity. And I guess today we're just getting into the, like the geekiness of it. Like why are community partners important?
because it develops this inquiry, because it develops a curiosity and just a hunger for learning and to know other things, like super neat. So those are the four. So quick recap, because that's what we do on podcasts is inquiry as it's a foundational piece of PBL. So anytime you can pick up like a book from Trevor McKenzie that's gonna talk about inquiry, like know that that works right into your PBL classroom. It's a great book to get. Not inherently PBL, right? Like I've heard Trevor talk about like he loves all types of instructional models.
And inquiry can be the foundation of those different instruction models, but PBL is certainly one of them. How do we teach our students to ask better questions? A great skill. We've all gotten bad questions from students, but how do we teach them to ask good ones? You want to encourage your learners to embrace uncertainty, which means we need to embrace uncertainty and say that there are things we don't know. And then taking that inquiry beyond the classroom and inviting community partners in. There are just so many benefits to community partners that
Ryan Steuer (19:15.388)
sometimes we might overlook it. You how community partners are important, but sometimes it's helpful to stop, but just get geeky about it say, well, why are they so important? And inquiry is definitely one of those. gets your kids curious. It gets them leaning in. All right. So inquiry, again, one of the foundations, I this podcast was helpful to give you a few stories and a few ideas around how you can bring inquiry right into your classroom and get your learners leaning in. All right. Go out and teach inspired.
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