Master PBL in 5 simple steps

hey everyone i want to welcome you to the webinar on how to create your first project-based learning experience how to master pbl in five easy steps um i'm gonna be your host kyle wagner uh please don't mind the the microphone here it's just to make my voice come in a little bit more clearly i want to introduce myself in person before we get a little bit more into creating kick butt projects with your students now uh first a couple of housekeeping items first questions are welcomed okay so questions are welcome so if you have a question you can hit the q a button on the left side of your screen hit that q a uh type in your question and i'll be happy to answer that question now just for the sake of the actual webinar i might not get to those questions till the end of this webinar but i will answer those questions for you so just hit the q a button and type your question in and i will try to answer those questions and make this an easy process for you um so questions are welcomed second please stick around until the end i know we have a lots going on uh we're all very busy people but this is going to take up one hour of your time and it's going to be a very well used hour of your time and i guarantee you by the end of this webinar you will feel much more confident to lead interdisciplinary learning and projects with your students okay so stick around to the end because then there's going to be some follow-up uh for you to continue your learning on interdisciplinary project based learning uh third don't worry if you miss anything okay if you're missing anything if you're trying to fill around and you can't figure out google hangouts i know there's a bit of a learning curve involved then please don't worry because i'm going to broadcast this whole session it's going to be live on youtube as well as on my personal webpage on www.transformschool.com so you can get the whole broadcast in case you miss anything so don't worry about that uh fourth keep an open mind okay uh we're all learning together i've been doing project-based learning for the last 12 years and i know some things but there's definitely a lot that i have left to learn and i think that applies to all of us as educators i know that you came on to this broadcast because you have an open mind so keep an open mind because that's going to help you to learn the most and will help us impact students finally have fun okay i'm hoping this is going to be very engaging for everybody you're not going to see me much this is just the beginning of the webinar where you'll see me the rest of it is going to be really engaging content so treat it like a learner and engage and have fun and then finally if you have that handout i sent a handout to everyone who's viewing this webinar via an email that will help guide you along uh you might want to fill that hand out as we go or take notes somewhere else because that'll help you interact with me as we go and with no further ado we are going to start this presentation now i'm going to screen share i'm going to say bye to everybody and we're going to get to the uh powerpoint that i have created and that is going to be how to create kick butt interdisciplinary projects with your students in five simple steps okay so um before we actually get into that while still covering the standards by the way i think most people will be happy to know that you will be able to cover standards and skills in a very rigorous fashion you're in the right place okay everybody here is in the right place and it doesn't matter your experience with project-based learning first you're in the right place if you've ran interdisciplinary projects with students in the past if you've run interdisciplinary projects with students in the past and you want to just improve this is the right place for you perhaps you've attempted to run interpreter projects but they went horribly wrong everybody's been in that boat i've been in that boat certainly and i think everybody who's viewing this knows what that's like to have a project have a great idea for something and it went horribly wrong and maybe you're here because you want to learn how to remedy that third maybe you've never run an interdisciplinary project but you want to try okay you've never run an inspiratory project but you want to try you heard project based learning can transform student learning and it's what the 21st century is all about and you want to try so fourth if you don't even know what an inner splayer project is that word for you is even hard to pronounce that's okay you're in the right place um because we're going to give you a brief background and overview of what an interdisciplinary project is before really launching in okay so let's get straight into it and first give you a little background about who i am who is this guy right here playing on the piano um my name again is kyle wagner i have 12 years experience with project based learning but i want to give you a little bit more of some detailed information about my experience okay so i've been an innovative educator for over 12 years in many different systems i have experience in myp ib project-based learning and common core so i have experience with lots of different curriculums and in all these curriculums using project-based learning as the main medium of delivery i'm a former project-based learning humanities teacher at the very very innovative one of the very first wall-to-wall project-based learning schools at high tech high okay you might have heard of high tech high and we'll talk a little bit more about high tech high later but it is very immersed in project-based learning in a front-runner finally a creator of futures academy at the international school of beijing this is again a wall-to-wall project-based learning environment that uses inner interdisciplinary projects excuse me as a main medium of delivery for students and teaching the standards and it's a school within a school designed to be the innovative wing and to really to do what the future of learning looks like at the international school of beijing finally i'm the author of power of simple we're going to talk a little bit later about that because really it's about making this as simple a process for you and i'm all about simplicity and i believe education has been something that's been complex for a long time but really in today's age we can simplify it and i i've authored a book that's got great reviews and got a lot of attention from educators around trying to make things simple for students okay so that's a little bit background of myself and more importantly really here's what you'll learn okay and it's probably why you came first why are interdisciplinary projects the number one way to transform student learning in your classroom i know how most teachers are you want the buy-in you want to know this is going to transform student learning at the end of the day and that's what you're going to learn two how do you use interspersed projects to better engage your students in the real world you're going to learn how these projects will help your students connect with work that's important and serves value in the real world third how to use these projects as the number one way to teach content specific standards okay besides what you've heard in the past about standards exist and then project-based learning exist as a desert or as an appetizer for the more important learning those two actually go together we're going to teach you how to do your standards in a project-based setting and finally the five simple steps for starting these projects with your students my hope is that by after watching this webinar you will at least have the foundation to be able to start these projects with students at the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year okay so that's what you're going to learn now let's go back to what an interdisciplinary project is for some of you who don't even know what an interdisciplinary project is i've got a definition for you this is borrowed a little bit from edutopia and the definition is it's a project that uses real world problems or challenges and it helps students acquire deeper knowledge and skills across multiple subjects in other words it's really the learning method that's best suited for rapidly evolving and changing 21st century so instead of students having a math class a humanities class in a science class interdisciplinary learning is basically where students are learning all that content through a project and that's the way that they get at this content so that's what an instrumental project is and we're really going to be going into some examples of these so you can create these with your students yourself so let's go back to the beginning okay and this might be where you are now but this is where i was at 24 years old okay and maybe you can relate to this experience this is me in one of my first classrooms at high tech middle media arts as you can see there's a lot of color in the room a lot of color in my outfit a pretty colorful person and pretty optimistic and that's exactly how i felt when i started my uh teaching journey bushy tailed very idealistic a bit naive and we're going to get into that naivety in a second but i had this vision that at this particular school it's wall-to-wall project-based learning i was going to be a big hit and you know what i wasn't going to need a lot of training because i knew a little bit about teaching i'd been teaching before about two or three years before this experience so this is what i thought it was going to look like i thought every day i was going to have students high-fiving me as i exited the door not only were they going to be high-fiving me they're going to be thanking me for the amazing learning that i brought to them and for mastering this nebulous idea of what project-based learning is every student was going to be fulfilled well we all know that's not really what happens this is actually what a lot of the first years of teaching was me with my head in my hands thinking this is way too tough i am a failure i can't do this how many of you have been there yeah i can't see your hands but i'm sure many of you are raising your hands uh and saying you've probably been there too so this is where i was at for a lot of those first experiences but you know like many of you i was determined and committed so you know i was determined not to make learning this big intertangled mess but it was hard we had a lot of expectations we had to assess students and assess students in different ways we had to teach our standards right the california content standards is where we first started teaching and there's a lot of standards i had to teach we had to differentiate for students based on their individual needs it was hard for me to even create a lesson let alone differentiate and then also we were supposed to immerse students in real world experiences so it was a lot and this is kind of what it looked like in my first years of teaching it was a big jumbled mess yeah i did a little of this a little this a little this and a little this of experience but really it was a lot of a big mess so like many of you probably i tried i wanted to get better i observed master teachers i was at a wall-to-wall pbl school so i decided i was going to observe the people who did this best i observed not only did i observe it helped me with my planning i planned a lot more detailed lessons about how students were going to reach these goals i even got my master's degree in project-based learning from high tech high you think with a master's degree in project-based learning you have this stuff nailed i read books and guess what it helped some of it worked this is a student we led with a project we led with students where they shared their third culture identities a lot of these were international students and they shared these by creating their own ibooks really powerful but to be honest some of it worked but most of the time i still have my head buried in my hands and i thought to myself why is this happening i am learning i want to learn i'm excited about this i'm enthusiastic i believe it's the way to transform learning but most of the time i still have my head in my hands so i thought you know what i'm going to get a different environment maybe there's other things that are out there and other ways to teach interdisciplinary projects so i bought a one-way ticket and now you're probably thinking i bought a one-way ticket to the place where interdisciplinary learning is part of the mantra of that school i went to china right so probably not many of you thinking that's you'd find that in china but in fact i did i was part of a program that used interdisciplinary learning through the arts i have a music background as you probably saw from the beginning with me and the piano and so here's me leading music and leading me teaching english through music now this is connected to to drama to games to art to stories these chinese kids would put together performance in english a fully immersive experience by the end of the week and it was really powerful and we had some successes and so that got me thinking i thought at this point hey i got an idea i think i understand how interdisciplinary learning works i've been involved in multiple systems i've seen how interdisciplinary works and i've had some successes and had some failures and so i had an idea and i shared my idea with some very very influential people i shared my idea with one of the co-founders of high tech high this is rob reardon very innovative forward thinking educator who started up high tech high and he helped me with my vision also this is one of my former directors his name is azul tirones a very very powerful educator who's been involved in many systems and helps people realize their visions of education and so they helped me out and then i tried to find a school that would endorse this way of learning to endorse interdisciplinary learning in this simple method and i found one the international school of beijing so i packed up my stuff i was in the south of china and moved over to beijing where i was going to run a school within a school and develop this future model of learning that used interdisciplinary projects as the number one way to deliver learning and so we started a program called futures academy futures academy again is a school within a school that uses interdisciplinary projects as a main medium of instruction where three facilitators all with different subject specific expertise would work together to deliver this integrated project-based learning these are students creating their own aquaponic systems as a response to the food crisis that was imminent in beijing this is a student created a line following robot in an exploration of what artificial intelligence might look like in the future and showing it off to his friend this is a student who built her own bamboo bicycle in response to the pollution problem in beijing and worked with a master craftsman and finally this is a student who designed and created her own lipstick to help limit the toxic dyes that are found in most lipsticks from polluting the water needless to say the program was very successful and here's some of the successes that we experienced in a very short time after the first year of its implementation we started it with only 24 students it tripled in size after the first year there was a waiting list to get in and again it revolves solely around three subject facilitators teaching around a project and all able to offer their expertise and work with kids and producing things of value in the real world but i know what most of you are thinking you're thinking okay just because it increased in size there's a waiting list get in as a teacher i'm held to standards if it increases in size that's great but how do we know this learning is working international school leaders from all the world came to learn daily maybe that helps you out but i'm sure what you want to see is where is the data that this type of learning is working and here's the data after the first year if some of you are familiar with a map test it's an internal measurement that schools use international schools use to measure the growth of students and help ensure that they're on the right track sixty percent of students if they achieve growth that's about the average in the first year a hundred percent every one of our students experience growth in their map test on their skills in mathematics in english and language arts and guess what we used interdisciplinary learning solely as a method of delivery and that's what helped me to come up with these ideas the power of simple really if we can break things down in very simple terms in very simple processes as educators we can really transform learning and that is what i want to share with you today okay so now we're going to get into it how do we do this how do you do this with your students how do you transform student learning how do you do what you know works as an educator but have either felt there's not enough time maybe you're too afraid you're afraid that you might fail you have too many students you don't have the resources what can we do to transform student learning i'll warn you ignore your own risk if you miss the first 25 slides is i see there's more viewers now okay that's okay that was a background into myself into why i know this stuff works but ignore the rest at your own risk because i'm giving you value valuable insights and info on how to transform learning at your school through interdisciplinary projects i've worked over 12 years on developing these simple concepts i've tested it on over 500 students and it's transformed learning at some of the most innovative schools in the world so let's get to those five simple concepts if you have that uh guide this would be a good time now as you probably see the uh the guide that you are given on email and it asks what the five steps are probably time to take that out but you're going to be getting some notes um to help you with transforming learning at your school okay so let's get at it without any further ado here are the five simple steps to creating kick butt projects with your students all right so here they are pick an engaging topic find collaborators create a driving question that engages students around that topic envision a final product of what students are going to create and then finally align your content according to the project those are the five simple steps okay so i'll give you some time to maybe write those down and we're going to be going into detail as to how to do each of these steps don't worry we'll go step by step if you haven't written this down you'll be able to write it down as we go step one pick a topic now this might have been where you where did the inspirations for good topics come from and i'll tell you the best projects come from three sources of inspiration source number one the perfect topic starts with something that exists in the real world is this a challenge or a problem in the real world perhaps it's the water quality perhaps it's immigrant rights if you live close to the border uh perhaps it's economics perhaps there's uh there's economics that are keeping people um from making enough money to survive um perhaps it's the degradation of the ocean because you live near the ocean okay but what's a real world uh challenge that exists in your area second is curriculum okay you have your standards and skills to cover uh you might be working with the common core standards you might be working with myp standards you might be working with more distinct standards that exist outside those two systems the ngss standards whatever standards you have is a good source third what are you passionate about what are kids passionate about is this something that's really going to engage students so the best projects are the ones that interact these three it gets into students passion and teacher passion it's connected to the curriculum and it's a real world challenge or problem next after you think you have an idea do some checking with it so i'll give you an example we did the global food crisis we live in beijing and actually there's a lot of people who have moved um from the rural areas into the urban areas and there's a real crisis in terms of how much food can be grown and they say by year 2030 based off the current rate of consumption food that we run out of food this is certainly a real world challenge it's certainly something that's really relevant to students and it really is well connected to the curriculum okay so this might be a topic that you choose we chose the global food crisis as a team of three facilitators okay now you might be working on this project alone or you might work with the team your school's fortunate enough or you're fortunate enough to be working with the team it really works well with the team to do this learning because everyone has their own subject specific expertise second you've picked your topic you're excited about this topic you know students are excited about this topic you know it fits in your curriculum but before you start planning find out who knows about this stuff in the real world because if you go straight to your planning documents chances are you're going to have a hard time connecting students to the real world this needs to be brought about right at the beginning who knows about this stuff so i'll give an example we want to know who knew about food who knew about how to grow food so we connected with two food experts in the area who'd used hydroponics and aquaponic systems to grow most of the food that they eat and knowing that this might be the way of food growth in the future we had them come in and work with students on creating their own food production systems but first find those collaborators and ask hey what do people do in the real world to solve this challenge what are you doing now we found that the best collaborators okay fall into three categories here are the three categories there are people who do this work in the real world they're gonna give you the authentic connections okay they've done this work they're experts in this field they're the ones who are going to really connect students to work that truly matters second to have these people work with students in the past we found in a lot of our planning that the presenters the experts the collaborators that know best are the ones who can work with students who have experience work with them in the past but you know what maybe they don't fall into that category maybe they do this work in the real world but they haven't really worked with students and they don't feel comfortable and that's okay because they might know people okay people like these people are well connected now later on we can get into how to actually find these collaborators but i found networking events are great there's always networking events in the community and this is a chance to meet people who have different expertise in different areas okay so you've found your collaborators you're excited about you've got your topic you've got your collaborators you've got the people in the real world who do this stuff now it's time to create your driving question this is actually the hardest thing to do but guess what it's easier if you've done step one or two because you have people in the real world who've done this you have your topic you know it's well connected to the curriculum your driving question should be a little bit easier how do you create a driving question okay the best driving questions that you can ask that are going to help students directed to the learning that they're going to need and here they are one of the questions people in the real world are trying to answer regarding this topic in relation to the global food crisis what are people trying to find out what's the best way to grow food what's most sustainable what has the best yield what's easiest on the soil okay these are type of questions that you might be thinking depending on your topic do they inspire students so some of us as teachers we think of these great questions that really connect to the curriculum but do they inspire students this is very important are they simple enough to understand but complex enough to allow for deep inquiry-based learning so when you write this question does it allow for a lots of deep learning and is it simple enough for students to understand so to challenge them to know something they don't already know but also at the same time gives them a foundation and can be answered by a clear final product does this question direct students towards producing something that will answer this driving question now you might be thinking yourself okay this is all out there because i need to see an example so i'm gonna give you an example when we looked at ours we talked to enough experts to find out that this is the question people are trying to ask and answer as members of a new society how will you feed your population and we chose members of a new society because constantly they're natural disasters they're constantly people moving from the the rural ways into the urban areas in the cities so new communities are forming all the time and the number one question they have to answer in relation to the food crisis how will they feed their population so students became members of a new society and had to figure out how they would feed their population does it inspire students yes it directs really relates to them they have to find out how to feed their population they're members of a new society it's all about them is it complex yes what are members of a new society what are the needs members of a new society have what are ways to grow food where the climate in beijing okay so this this is a question that will drive the learning now once you have your question you're not finished yet because you've got to envision how our students can answer this question okay if you have very students they need this direction how might they answer this question if you have middle-aged students they'll need some direction and obviously some independence in answering this if you have high school students you can really set them loose and there could be multiple ways to answer this question but for our super businesses since most of you this might be new for you i'm going to give you a simple concrete way to help you envision a final product what will students create to answer the driving question so our question was how do you feed your society and this is what students would create a they would create a method for food production are they going to farm are they going to use aquaponics are they going to use hydroponics are they going to use a combination of the two how are they going to grow food two what is a persuasive proposal that they will write to persuade their government that this is the best model for food production okay simple you've got to think simple when you're thinking of what students will create the temptation is to do this the temptation is to think they're going to create a model for food production they're going to create an essay they're going to create a podcast they're going to create a psa they're going to create a newspaper article and what you have is about 10 different activities but that's not project based learning project-based learning is revolving all the learning around a simple idea of what students will create in a driving question that gets them there remember it's about the poor simple here so to start think of a simple prop that students will create to show that they learned all these things they need to know okay so if this is confusing a little bit i'm i'm hoping to make it as simple as possible uh uh this this will become a lot more clear once you see how it all works together okay so you've got your driving question you've got your product that students will produce you've got your topic you've got your collaborators and now the fifth step this is what ties these things together and i'm sure it's something you've all wanted to hear that's great kyle but how is this going to connect to my standards i've got stuff to teach and here's how remember when you pick that content okay sorry remember when you picked that topic it was aligned to your curriculum now here's the time within the project to align your content if you see this gap this is the gap of the student in the journey that they're taking this is the beginning of the project looking on the left side they're launching off of that cliff and trying to get to the final product that's the other side of the cliff they cannot make that jump alone they need a lot of help so that gap there are all the content skills and standards that you've got to teach to get them there so what do students need to know to answer the question in our case we said how do you feed your population as a new society how do you feed your population okay so here's what we had identified in the curriculum that we would be able to cover in this project okay so this is the question you're going to ask sir so what will students need to create this method for food production in the persuasive proposal i want to emphasize interdisciplinary projects are rigorous and you're going to see why in a second there's a lot of words okay but i'll take you through it if students are going to create their own food production model here's all the deep level content that they will have to understand they're going to create own food production model they're going to certainly have to know how food is rearranged they're going to certainly need to know how to construct a scientific explanation based on evidence of photosynthesis so this is an opportunity to teach about growth about plant growth and food growth based on photosynthesis they're certainly going to need to know how to conduct an investigation to provide evidence that living things are made of cells okay so this is an opportunity for you to lead them in that investigation early on and finally there definitely need to know how to analyze data and to form design solutions to create a solution that meets the criteria for success if they're going to actually build these food production models they're definitely going to have to hit this standard okay so that was your first thing you're asking them to create was a food production model okay so think of what that first product is what you envision students creating whether that's going to be a newspaper article for the local paper whether that's going to be a new website whether that's going to be a proposal whether it's going to be a speech whether that's going to be a psa whatever that final thing is that you ask students create what do they need to know to get there the second thing we asked students create was the argument of writing proposal now i'm sure all you english teachers will love this because the common core standards have been written in a way that allows you to be really flexible with how you teach things and this is very rich in ela if they're gonna have to write an argumentative proposal they're gonna need to know how to do all of these things okay and we even have math involved for some of you have a real hard time how do we incorporate math and i will attest and agree with you it is hard to put math into a project but what you do is you put the math into the project that makes sense and then you're still able to teach math on the side but this is the math that made most sense in this project we incorporated about three subjects into this project and it fit naturally what we ask students to produce and finally a little bit of inspiration for you these are the 21st century skills not only are you going to teach your standards and your skills as part of your subject but you can teach students 21st century skills of global thinking innovation communication collaboration certainly they're going to have to communicate this solution and create a proposal they're definitely gonna have to collaborate and work with others on what food production model they choose they're gonna have to think globally about how is this gonna affect other people and definitely have to be innovative because they've got to solve this crisis in an innovative way and here's the inspiration i wanted to get at you once they're finished with this you're thinking okay how are they going to present this i've done the five simple steps i've planned the project out what are students going to do at the end and i want to emphasize that interspending projects are rigorous at the end students presented to a professional panel that involved engineers other teachers and people who are connected to the actual local government who could actually make this change so it was authentic so again let's review it's 11 35 and i wanted to get to people's questions and thank you for sticking around to those but here are the five simple steps to create kick butt interdisciplinary projects with your students pick a topic find collaborators create a driving question envision your final product and finally align your content and standards to help students get there that's it those are the simple steps now we're going to try this in terms of q a and i'm going to start the q a session if you have a question please feel free to type that question into the question and answer box and hopefully i will have an opportunity to answer those questions that you have regarding indispensary projects so i'll give about a minute for those for questions and answers and if nobody has any questions we will move on you

Channel: Kyle Wagner

Views: 12,206

Rating: 4.6785712 out of 5

Keywords: #hangoutsonair, Hangouts On Air, #hoa, project-based learning, PBL, 21st Century Skills, edinnovation, educational consulting, consulting

Id: RVd8TguMq0w

Length: 35min 38sec (2138 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2016