The Art of Collaboration in the Project-Based Learning Classroom | E167

Unlock the potential of your classroom with the transformative power of collaboration. As we weave through the pillars of Project-Based Learning, you'll discover not only the value of teamwork but how it can revolutionize your teaching practice. We share personal insights and success stories that bring to life the importance of creating a collaborative culture, and I offer you practical steps to bridge subjects, align standards, and prepare students for the interconnected challenges of the real world. This episode is a goldmine for educators eager to save time and ignite a spark of cooperative learning among their students.

Step into the world of collaborative education where we revisit the four keys to building an environment where everyone works better together. From recognizing the importance of making collaboration a core classroom value to understanding the personality styles that make up your team, these insights are pivotal. We'll discuss why it's essential to model teamwork among teachers and provide explicit instruction on collaborative skills to students. Join us as we delve into the stories and strategies that can help prevent common classroom pitfalls and share this knowledge with your peers. By the end of our talk, you’ll be armed with the tools to foster a thriving PBL community both in the classroom and online.


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Transcript

Ryan Steuer: 0:00

Hey, movement makers, welcome to the PBL Simplified Podcast, where we talk about leading with integrity, vision and inspiration so you can create a PBL movement worth fighting for. When I created a PBL school, there was no roadmap, so Magnifying Learning spent the last decade creating that PBL movement roadmap for you to start your PBL movement today. Today, in this episode of the PBL Simplified Podcast, we are talking about the last two keys to collaboration, because every movement maker can create a culture of collaboration which creates a solid foundation for your PBL movement by navigating these four keys to collaboration. Now, if I grab my keys, the first one was the key fob of my truck, because this is the one that makes things move. This is priority. Collaboration has to be a priority for your classroom and your school. It creates a safe culture, your SEL style, and also creates a collaborative environment where you're creating better outcomes than you would for learners by themselves and your staff, by the way. So the first key is making collaboration a priority. The second key is the house key. This is the one where you have to know you. You have to know yourself to work with others, and that goes for adults and it goes for kids, when kids know more about themselves and their personality. They understand the world a little better when they can then look outside of themselves and see the personality of their classmates. They can now work better together and they see the world a little differently. Huge, huge benefits to that right, like you see. But you have to talk through that with yourself and with your learners so you see the benefit, because collaboration takes more time, or at least it seems to. I would say that things actually move a little quicker once your learners know how to collaborate and they're good at it. When you get towards the second half of the second semester and they're like hey, mr Stoyer, is it okay if we run a tuning protocol real quick? Yeah, let's do it, and they can actually run it on their own. It's a big deal. So now we are to the third and fourth keys that every movement maker can know to create a great collaborative culture. The third key is getting classrooms that collaborate. Classrooms that collaborate. So you've made it a priority. You've done some personality work, you understand yourself, your learners understand themselves, but you need to walk the walk. So how do you get classrooms to collaborate? Let me give you an example.

Ryan Steuer: 2:25

When I was teaching eighth grade English, I was teaching parallelism Because it was one of our standards. Of course, everything we do is standards-based. So here I am teaching parallelism and I'm doing it through the Declaration of Independence. There are sections in the Declaration of Independence that are parallel Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da da. And you can see that. Now.

Ryan Steuer: 2:43

To do that, to give my learners context, I tried to teach the Declaration of Independence. I'm not a history guy, like I didn't go study history. It's not like the thing that I jumped to. I love the leadership books that I read that bring context of history into some of these leadership terms that we look at and use. But that wasn't my. It wasn't my jam, if you will.

Ryan Steuer: 3:05

So I'm doing this for a couple of years and then finally one of my learners says oh hey, mr Stoyer, yeah, the Declaration of Independence, like Mr Phipps just taught that last week. Oh cool, I bet he did a really good job. Did I do? Did I do all right? Yeah, and I easily could have taught something wrong, although I tried really hard. But what I found out is Mr Phipps is literally next door to me, right, literally the classroom next door. Wouldn't it have been great for our learners. If he had taught the Declaration of Independence in his expertise and then I would have taught my parallelism in conjunction with that, we could have saved a lot of time with Mr Stoyer teaching history either slowly, incorrectly or vaguely right and allowed Mr Phipps to teach with passion and accuracy the history of the Declaration of Independence, and then I could have tied my standards in.

Ryan Steuer: 4:00

That's how classrooms can collaborate Like we need to do that as adults. We need to bring in some natural connections to our classrooms and our learners can start to see the value of collaboration. So that, my friends, is key number three. Number three is how do we get classrooms to collaborate? So how do you do that practically now, movement maker, that's a question you should always be asking. How do I actually use this?

Ryan Steuer: 4:25

And when you look at your classroom situation, maybe you're on a team. If you're teaming, there are a ton of ways for you to do that. One of my favorites is as a team. You take your team time and you put your power standards up on a giant dry erase board or a chalkboard whatever that looks like for you and you start to see where you can make connections right, like this big standard here ties into this standard and social studies, and boom, you can see those and draw those out. But not every's in a teaming situation, and even if you are, it doesn't mean everybody's bought in yet. So I like to start with a win-win situation.

Ryan Steuer: 4:58

What does a win-win situation look like in this case? Well, let's take my example. If the history teacher's next door, he's likely going to be teaching something where he wants an essay written, so he's going to have to in some form teach how to write an essay, or he's going to get awful essays. So why doesn't he just come next door and say hey, mr Stoyer, when are you teaching essays? Second nine weeks, great, I'm going to assign an essay at the second nine weeks. Right, as you're teaching that, we'll do it in conjunction. And now Mr Phipps is benefiting from our collaboration, so he's more likely to jump in. He's like oh great, I don't have to teach essays, fantastic, and if he's really good, he'll even come into creating them. Oh, mr Phipps, well done, sir.

Ryan Steuer: 5:43

So the point is, though where can you find win-win? If you're the movement maker, you're trying to bring more people into collaborating, and they're not used to it yet because we're not used to it Even as adults we have to learn. Find some win-win scenarios where you can bring people in and it just makes sense for them to collaborate with you. If you're in a movement maker community where you're innovating, then make this a systematic piece where you're collaborating. So maybe nobody does a PBL unit until it hits a tuning protocol with adults. So you have to find some kind of team time somewhere or faculty meeting to roll out this PBL unit idea that you have and get feedback. Great way to collaborate. Now more of the school knows what you're doing. They can pour into your work and you get better ideas. So there are a lot of ways.

Ryan Steuer: 6:29

But you want to start with classrooms collaborating Because as the adults are bringing classrooms together, the learners see that. They're like oh yeah, that's right. This makes so much more sense because these two classes I call it some built-in authenticity. There's some authenticity in the learner's mind because they just went from second period to third period and things make sense. They see that and they're like oh, collaboration is a good thing. So that's the third key to collaboration. So what's the fourth key? The fourth key is that kids need to collaborate. So how do you get your kids to collaborate Once you've made it a priority. You have brought it home with your personality, your learner's personalities, so they can understand each other. You've got classrooms collaborating. The fourth key to collaboration that will create a fantastic culture for your PBL movement is that kids collaborate.

Ryan Steuer: 7:21

If putting kids in the same space created collaboration, then lunchrooms across the country will be solving the world's problems. And as it turns out, that's not happening. Mostly tater tots are getting tossed around. So just putting kids in the same space does not do it. You've probably figured out by now that you're like oh, pbl, I'll put kids in groups and great things will happen. Not necessarily, like just putting kids together doesn't make great things happen, so there has to be more to it.

Ryan Steuer: 7:48

So how do you do this? You need to teach collaboration. You can do that through a fishbowl. So in a fishbowl protocol you're gonna bring in a group that's ideally probably collaborating pretty well, or you can do a non-example as well, either way. But the rest of the class is like looking around as if this group is in the fishbowl. So they're here in the fishbowl and you give them. They're gonna say, hey, can you guys walk through your morning meeting routine Like, how do you do that? And they do that. And then the fishbowl, the rest of the class says, okay, well, they were watching Billy. What did Billy do? Well, well, billy was organized, he had the agenda and he asked good questions. Great, how did Emily do? Emily did pretty well. She probably could have asked some follow up questions, ta-da-da-da-da-da.

Ryan Steuer: 8:26

But you're now teaching collaboration to the class. You're not just expecting them to know that collaboration is cool and know how to do it, because, at the end of the day, one of my theses is that most adults don't really know how to collaborate well, so expecting kids to do this without help or teaching is just crazy. So, but you still need some practical ideas, right? Movement maker? You're like okay, I get it, I need to teach it, but how? So? Group norms great way to do that. Like what are the norms for collaboration? And set those up as a class. Like, what are the things in this class in period seven that need to happen for collaboration to happen? Well, well, we don't laugh at people's ideas. Great, that's a good one. We take everybody's ideas when we're brainstorming Great. If we have conflict, we address it within 24 hours. Love the 24 hour rule. If we can't address it on our own. We'll go to Mr Storey Awesome, and you kind of create these norms that people can feel safe within while they're acting in groups and they're collaborating.

Ryan Steuer: 9:23

Group contracts huge win, almost an immediate win, if you don't do anything else with collaboration with kids. In this fourth key, bring in group contracts. They don't have to be perfect. We've got some that we can link into this podcast. I'm sure If you come into the PBL movement online community, we've got a whole course on creating group contracts. So you should definitely jump into the online community and you can ask a bunch of questions Like who has a great group contract that they like?

Ryan Steuer: 9:49

But the idea of a group contract is now you're laying out what are the steps you're expecting your learners to take when they're in groups, both when things are going well and when there's some conflict. But there needs to be some structure so that let's take group roles. For example, you come into a group maybe this never happened to you, maybe it was just me. You come into the group and say hey, how are things going Well? Devon's just looking up pictures on Google Images and Devon goes well. I thought that was my job. Okay, is that Devon's job? No, we wanted him to be the recorder. Oh, you guys never told me that.

Ryan Steuer: 10:22

And if there's no group contract, it just kind of goes around in this nebulous circle of fogginess and nonsense. But there's a group contract. At the very beginning we're assigning roles. So then it's like, hey, devon's just looking up Google Images. Well, devon, what's your role? I'm supposed to be the recorder, oh, but I thought I should do some Google image stuff. And okay, devon, but you're the recorder, so let's do the things that the recorder does. And they look at the three bullet points and that's what Devon should do. Right, so once you have some structure now, and probably not before now you can really hold learners accountable.

Ryan Steuer: 10:54

But mostly what happens in the group contract is that things are so clear that they tend to hold themselves accountable, and not so much that there's the group leader like telling people what to do, but Devon knows what he's supposed to do. Like it's really clear, like that's what helps make groups, I usually say, less awful. You want groups to be less awful and eventually you want them to be excellent. There's always gonna be some conflict and group mediation is a great place to teach how to do groups and how to collaborate. Remember, that's our goal.

Ryan Steuer: 11:20

It's a priority for us, right, as movement makers, is that collaboration is part of what we do as adults, is part of what we're teaching our learners, because it's such a valuable skill. When you ask industry partners what they want from our learners, from our graduates, it's in the top five every single time, right Problem solving, agency collaboration or teamwork In some way. They say collaboration, and if we haven't taught our learners, we're doing them a disservice. I understand that it's maybe not one of your power standards, it might not be an academic standard for you at all, but if you do an ideal graduate protocol of like what do we want our learners to know, say and think before they leave our school system, collaboration will always be one of those. So you have to take time to teach this, and group mediation is a great way to do that. In fact, if you go into my book PBL Simplified, there's a whole chapter where I actually walk through a group mediation with you and I actually give you the dialogue that I had with Dante and his group, because when you get into group situations, you know again, kids just haven't been taught how to do it. So like, well, we wanna fire somebody because they haven't shown up but it's like, well, he had mono. Like you can't fire somebody for having mono, right, so and that's a real situation, by the way so you can grab it in the book, you can grab it in the PBL movement online community. You've got a ton of resources for this, but collaboration needs to be a priority, because every movement maker can create a culture of collaboration which creates the solid foundation for your PBL movement.

Ryan Steuer: 12:45

By investigating those four keys, remember what they are. The first one, then, what the driver is priority. Collaboration has to be a priority for you. You have to believe that it's important so that your learners believe it's important. The second key brings it home. You need to do your personality style your learners. You know their personality styles, so they can see outside of themselves and see that people are different than them, and then they can collaborate. The third key is that classrooms need to collaborate. You need to collaborate with the other second grade teachers on your teams or your grade levels. You need to collaborate with your STEM partner, your humanities partner, whoever that is, and as you're collaborating, your learners get it. The fourth key is that, eventually, your learners need to collaborate, and remember space doesn't create collaboration or lunchrooms wouldn't be throwing so many tater tots, would be figuring out world peace. So you have to teach that collaboration for your kids. But once you do that, you will have a culture of collaboration that accelerates everything else that you're trying to do. You're gonna have to correct less You're gonna have to.

Ryan Steuer: 13:48

Have you ever gotten to? This is totally off script, or what are we planning to talk about? Have you ever gotten? Like a final paper turned in and it was just totally off topic, like what are the causes of the revolutionary war? And they wrote about their, about a camel, right, their favorite animal at the zoo. And it's like how did this happen? Like we've been doing this for four weeks, like one. Obviously I had some poor benchmarks and assessments throughout, but like how did you not know that we were talking about? I've been teaching for weeks. Remember everybody else presented. Like how, how did that happen?

Ryan Steuer: 14:19

When you have a collaborative environment, you have 30 other people in the room that can tell Johnny that he's wrong. Hey, johnny, remember we're not talking about camels anymore, we're talking about the revolutionary war. It starts to compound when you have this culture of collaborativeness and there are so many wins that come out of it, so worth your time. If you missed the first two points of this collaboration talk, you need to go back to episode 165, two episodes ago, and I'll hit those first two points in detail. If you know somebody on your team that needs to hear more about collaboration and they need this episode, send it to them, because we've got to collaborate To get to 51% of schools using PBL by 2051,.

Ryan Steuer: 15:02

We'll need to collaborate, like no doubt Like to create a nationwide place for collaboration at MagnaFile Learning. We knew it had to be there. We didn't really see what we envisioned, so we created the PBL movement online community just for you. It's got a project library, it's got on-demand courses, but again, the real deal, the game changer for your career, will be that you get to interact with other movement makers just like you, and I can say that confidently because we've built in challenges and helps and rooms and webinars and interactions for builders, if you're just getting started.

Ryan Steuer: 15:38

Launchers, if you've been doing this for a bit, and innovators, if you're a veteran and an expert. They're all in this community. So, whether you're brand new to PBL or a veteran, you have a place to collaborate. You have a place to ask those questions where you're like you're not sure where to ask and your entry events like in two days, right, what do you do? You've got a place for them.

Ryan Steuer: 15:57

So remember, if you want to go fast, you can go alone, but if you want to go far, if you really want to make that difference that you really want to make and teach the way you've always wanted to teach, you got to go together. Because you're on a journey and your best teaching is going to be happening 10 years out from now. You're getting better every day, right? So it just makes sense, logically, that your best teaching is going to happen 10 years from now. You're going to be a better teacher, but we need you to be here still. You can't leave the profession.

Ryan Steuer: 16:23

Your learners, this PBL movement that you're a part of, needs you to be in the game 10 years from now, because you're going to be awesome. You're awesome now, but if you're getting better every day, you know you're going to be more awesome. So I want you to be thinking about far. You've got to be going with someone. You need to be together with someone, and that's why we created the PBL movement online community. So jump in today you can see a link down in the show notes and then I'll see you in the community. See you, movement makers.

Ryan Steuer: 17:21

And they can find their way into the PBL journey. Thank you so much for leaving a review. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate you.