Inquiry in Project-Based Learning | E168

As Ryan Steuer, I warmly invite you to journey with me in remembering my mentor, Dan Miller, as we bring his inspiring question, "What does this make possible?" into the heart of educational reform. Through genuine reflections and strategies, we honor Dan's legacy by exploring the power of a shared vision, particularly our ambitious goal to see project-based learning  in over half of all schools by 2051. It's a conversation that stitches together the wisdom of Dan's "48 Days to the Work and Life You Love" with real-world applications,  leadership, unity, and educational innovation.

This episode isn't just a tribute; it's the beginning of a series on inquiry. Drawing from Trevor MacKenzie's "Inquiry Mindset," we unravel the progression from structured to free inquiry and how it intertwines with project-based learning to ignite student curiosity and research prowess. I'll share classroom stories that breathe life into these concepts—from a Florida PBL unit on home buying to senior capstone projects that leave lasting imprints on communities. Get ready to discover how we scaffold learning and craft authentic experiences that elevate our students from passive learners to proactive problem solvers, ready to dive headfirst into their PBL journey.


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Transcript

Ryan Steuer: 0:00

Welcome to the PBL Simplified Podcast. I'm your host, ryan Stoyer, and here in the podcast we believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can create a learning environment that is meaningful, purposeful and personal. And that's not an intro that I use very often, but it's actually a tribute to my friend and mentor, dan Miller. Dan was a mentor for me. He's also a New York Times best-selling author. He wrote the forward to my book, pbl Simplified. He makes the connection between work and education just beautifully because he's been doing it for decades. Well, he graduated to heaven this last month and just wanted to take a moment to give that tribute. He asked me a question years ago and he asked a lot of people this he said what does this make possible? I had some challenges that I was looking at and he just says, well, ryan, what does this make possible? Well, dan, you don't understand. There's all these problems and, yep, what does this make possible? And he would have asked you the same question when you got to COVID and you were leading a building. You say, wow, there's a lot of challenges there. And Dan would just say, well, what does this make possible? And some of you did it as I speak to leaders across the country. That was kind of a moment where I said, well, what does this make possible? Now that we're going to be virtual, we have to be what do we do? And you actually injected some inquiries, some project-based learning right then. Like you got Dan's spirit in that what does this make possible? And it was neat to see Dan, as he had a cancer diagnosis and so he knew that his time was short and he used his time very, very well. In the last month I actually found out and he had 48 days until he graduated and he wrote the book 48 Days to the Work he Loved. So 48 was kind of a number for Dan and it was neat to see all the people that just came out of the woodworks that said, gosh, dan completely changed my life. He completely changed my life. I was going this way, he had me go this way and my business erupted or whatever it was. Dan changed the lives of people and now it's his legacy and it made me think a lot about legacy and I just wanted to thank him and his family for the impact that had on me. So thank you for the opportunity. Go check out Dan's book 48 Days to the Work and Life that you love. It is worth the read. It's a game changer.

Ryan Steuer: 2:20

Let's jump back into the PBL simplified process here. We like to start with a need to know. We're big on need to know. As we come into February, we're going to be talking about inquiry for the entire month on the podcast, but also in the PBL movement online community. So if you're not in there yet, you need to be Check out in the show notes or in the description. If you're watching on YouTube, and jump in there.

Ryan Steuer: 2:44

There's all kinds of resources and we differentiate them. So if you're brand new to PBL, we have inquiry resources for you. If you're an innovator and you've been doing this for a while, we have resources for you. So I want everybody to have a place there because honestly, just like we talked about last month, we believe in collaboration. If we're going to get to 51% of schools using project-based learning by 2051, it's like that's only 37 years, so we've all got to work together to make this happen.

Ryan Steuer: 3:09

So all that to say that we love need to know is here's the one for today. It's from a leader who says how do I get my staff on board with my vision? And some of you might hear right away like well, should it be my vision or our vision? And I do believe that if you're the leader of the building and you're watching this, it is your job to bring the vision. You're supposed to have this bigger idea and, yes, you want to bring your people into it, for sure, but all of us want to be part of something bigger, right? That's why we're movement makers. On this podcast and everything we do at Magnify Learning, we talk about movement makers and we all want to be a part of something bigger, and your staff's exactly the same way. They want to hear from you. What's the vision? Where are we going to accomplish this larger goal? So the answer that I'm gonna give you here is how do I get my staff on board?

Ryan Steuer: 3:57

As first, you have to write it down. As a leader, you have to know what it is Like. You need to take some time and this is not like putting out fire time, so it often gets neglected but set some time aside and write down the vision. I like to use big pieces of chart paper. You might use a dry erase board and just get all the thoughts out and see where they connect. Where are the gifts and talents of your staff, your community. So you have to write it down and then you might want to write this down or just remember this phrase share it small before you share it big. Share it small before you share it big, but share it. So maybe it's a leadership team, maybe it's a mastermind, maybe you're a part of Better Leaders, better Schools, with Danny Bauer and some of the masterminds that he has Like they're doing amazing work because you've got principles. Talking to principles, about the tough things. We'll go share your vision there. So share it small before you share it big.

Ryan Steuer: 4:50

Once you share it big and your vision is out there, talk about it all the time. Like all the time, you hear me say 51 by 51, all the time. My kids are tired of it. My staff aren't tired of it because they love it, like they're into it, because we're super excited and passionate about this, but I'm 51 by 51 all the time. Talk about your vision until you're tired and sick and tired of telling about that vision. That's where you're getting close. You're still gonna talk about it. So write it down, share it small before you share it big, and then talk about your vision all the time and your staff is gonna be on board. If you've got a win with this, I want you to go to pblsharecom. You can either get your need to know on the podcast. I'll reply via email to you and we'll put it on the podcast if you wanna need to know. Or if you've got a win, like we're gonna share next week, you can go to pblsharecom and share it there.

Ryan Steuer: 5:40

Let's jump into this introduction to inquiry. We're going to peg our ideas around inquiry, around this book called Inquiry Mindset from Trevor McKenzie. It's a fantastic book. When I wrote a review for it and you should write reviews for the authors that you really appreciate because it really helps out and when I wrote the review I think I actually used the word delightful. It is, it's just a delightful read. It's research-based. He's got a ton of best practices in there that you can use in your classroom. You can give your teachers these ideas right away, but he writes it in just a touch of whimsy that he has in his classroom and you can just tell gosh, this guy really likes being a teacher. He really enjoys being with the kids and helping them be curious.

Ryan Steuer: 6:26

Let's get a couple of bigger quotes. So this one's from Albert Einstein, which means you don't totally know if it's from Albert Einstein, because he gets quoted with a lot of things. But it says the mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size. So as we talk about inquiry, we want to open up our learners' minds to something just a little bit bigger than what they've seen before. Nora Zeal-Hurston says research is formalized, curiosity is poking and prying with a purpose, and one of the things I love about inquiry mindset is that he talks about research and the importance of really good research, because it's a skill set that our learners need and as we're bringing these provocations or these ideas to them, this inquiry, we want them to go do their own research, and we'll talk about that here in just a little bit. We'll look at a graphic, we'll put it up on the screen so that you can see the four types of inquiry that Trevor McKenzie talks about, but I like that it's the research portion that he really looks at and some portion of his book. It's like we want our learners to be able to research and I think about my life, like as soon as I think of something, I immediately go to Google and start researching and then I start using all of these tips, tricks and tools that are in my head of? Is this a valid source? Does this person know what they're talking about? Well, this fit my situation and I think sometimes we take that for granted that our learners are going to have these same tools with them, so we need to be able to teach them these types of tools. So take a look at the screen of this graphic.

Ryan Steuer: 7:59

There's four different types of inquiry that Trevor's going to talk about, and he's got this great analogy, as you can see, that our learners are in the pool and there's different levels of this pool. Right, there's like the three foot area where you can touch, and then there's the deep area where there's like a diving board and you can kind of do whatever you'd like, and that's how he lays out these four ideas of inquiry. So the four types of student inquiry that Trevor uses are structured inquiry, and here's how he defines it. Let me look at my notes. Students follow the lead of a teacher as the entire class engages in one inquiry together. So in there the class is being guided. So the students follow the lead of the teacher. The entire class is engaging in inquiry together. So they're asking questions, they're diving deep into something. They're doing it together.

Ryan Steuer: 8:53

The second one is controlled inquiry. The teacher chooses topics and identifies the resources that students will use to answer these questions. So, controlled inquiry, maybe you still do this, but and Trevor talks about using librarians, as you know, one of your greatest assets. But when I used to do a PBL unit, if it was in this controlled inquiry arena, I would have the librarian pull all the books off the shelf for these particular topics I knew we were going to dive into. So I'm getting some of the resources for the learners and in some of those days and some of you might be in this I get to go check out the computer lab and some of those things. Right, if you weren't one to one, you know what do you do when you don't have the computer lab in the middle of PBL unit. Well, you go ask a librarian to save you, right, so, and she does right, so she gets all these things. At least that's what happened for me, mrs Dowling. We get all these together and then we would go in as more controlled inquiry because I knew where the resources were in. The students said to.

Ryan Steuer: 9:49

The third one is guided inquiry, where the teacher chooses topics and questions and students design the product or the solution. So you can see, as we're going deeper to the pool, your learners have more and more voice and choice. They've got more empowerment to be doing this work on their own, or kind of that gradual release of responsibility. The last one is free inquiry. Students choose their topics without reference to any prescribed outcome. They're going to go fix something in the world, right, and this is where our beginning PBLers are. Beginning movement makers kind of freak out because we talk about project based learning, where you talk about inquiry and immediately our brains go to these PBL units where the learners went out into the community, solved things on their own, they created a website and a business and all those things are real and they can happen. But you don't have to start there. When you're learning to swim, you probably don't just dive off the diving board into the deep end, right? Trevor gives us a really great kind of outline of how you can go through these steps and how he does it. He's gonna talk just like in his classroom, where he starts and where they end up and a lot of the things in between. So if you look at this first section of the pool, this structured inquiry.

Ryan Steuer: 11:07

I would have loved this book when I was in the classroom, because my I was originally an engineer, right, and then I decided that my favorite two days of being an engineer were actually the two days when we were working with United Way. And then after school program, it's like huh. I really enjoy working with these kids. I Enjoyed doing the technical aspect of moving packages around 1.5 million packages a day but it turns out that my heart was really more towards helping kids. So, instead of helping a billion dollar company earn millions of dollars, I jumped ship and started teaching 8th grade English. I'm like I am gonna save the world. I'm so excited, right, fired up, and what we did is we did the service learning project. I'm like every learner needs to do this and I would have called them students at the time. To, every student needs to do a service learning project. So that's what we did. Everybody's gonna gonna make one of these.

Ryan Steuer: 12:01

Well, I was in 8th grade, so secondary side, so I had 125 kids. You probably see that what's wrong with that right now? But I didn't because I was fired up. So we were all planning these right. So you know, some kids want to take these canned goods and ship them to Africa. Other kids are looking to save the water table, other kids are trying to save giraffes and rhinos. It was nuts and you would think that since I came from UPS, I could see that like Shipping canned goods to Africa like there's an expense there that's just gonna be astronomical, which is true, but I'm like just go for it, we're gonna do this. Right now I was being super encouraging. This is my first super big fail because I should have used structured inquiry and I didn't. I was using free inquiry With learners that weren't ready and as a as a teacher, I was not ready to do this. So eventually I had to just Time out everybody. I messed up. This isn't gonna work. What would have been great is if I would have done some structured inquiry. One of the service learning Products that we were doing was phenomenal.

Ryan Steuer: 13:06

So Dakota had this connection with the sheriff's office and Some and you guys know this like crazy sad things happen every day. So if both parents get have to be taken in for questioning by the sheriff's department, what happens to those kids when it's 2 am, right and there's and an incident has happened? Well, those kids come with and Now they're at the sheriff's office and their parents are in different rooms being questioned and what do the kids do? Dakota said what if we made these tie blankets for these kids that are coming in the sheriff's office at 2 am? And I need something, they need some comfort? I was like I don't know, dakota, I think you're gonna make me cry, like that's amazing. And so she just started doing it. We supported her. Like what if I would have taken the stuck, the structured inquiry approach and said, hey, everybody, dakota is doing this thing, let's all figure out how we can help in this thing and help guide them down, that it would have been Super successful. I think Dakota was super successful anyway because we supported it and she's amazing. So she made it happen. But that was my first super big fail.

Ryan Steuer: 14:10

I was doing free inquiry, wasn't ready for it, should have been doing structured inquiry, so the next one would be controlled inquiry. Now your teacher chooses the topic and identifies the resources students will use to answer the question. So here it could have been pretty similar, where I would have maybe chosen the tie blanket project with Dakota, we would have brought out some resources and everybody could have found different ways to support the Sheriff's Office to raise money for supplies, for the tie blankets, and then we all could have had this great big tie thing and we make a visit to the Sheriff's Office and it would be controlled inquiry. Because I'm bringing in, I choose the topic, I'm going to identify resources and stair step my learners into appropriate inquiry based on where they're at and, honestly, I think, where I would be at right, even as a as the teacher in the classroom, you can't go beyond what you know, which is why getting inquiry mindset is so important, because it starts you on this journey.

Ryan Steuer: 15:10

The third section of inquiry is guided inquiry. So now the teacher chooses the topics and the questions, but the students design the product or the solution. So here someone in the community needs our help. Like, how do you learners think that you can help them? So we've got a group down in Florida and in the math classroom they're going to do a PBL unit on how you buy a house and what they're doing is the kids have chosen their dream home right, which is something we've done before. Like that's not super authentic, but here's what happens. They choose the home and the locations, they start to calculate the payments based on their salary, floor plans, they research payment assistant. Suddenly they're talking about equity, they're talking about mortgage payments. How do you calculate these things? Which is a fantastic skill for learners to engage in and have in their back pocket. I would have liked to have had that when I started thinking I should buy my first house, because I probably shouldn't have. And not only are they learning it, but now they're going to go teach to the community. So they're going to have this open community night now where people can come in and start to get some basic mortgage advice Like how you buy houses from these learners, because they can actually explain these things, which, again, as a first time home buyer, I did not understand a lot of this work.

Ryan Steuer: 16:33

So the problem was brought from the community by the teacher. The students are going to jump in and they're going to create differentiated individual assignments or outcomes to this PBL unit. How do you solve it? So some are going to have like a PSA, some might have, you know, just to sit down, like tell me what you've got and we'll help you with your individual piece. Some might have a calculator they're going to bring out, so it'll be like a Google Slides presentation. You can put it in there and you can figure out the stuff on your own and they're all going to help solve this.

Ryan Steuer: 17:06

One main problem that the teacher brought in and this is one that I end up encouraging a lot of teachers and a lot of schools and a lot of principals on this it's okay for the teacher to bring in the problem that you're solving from your project-based learning unit, right? So this is the third type of inquiry with Trevor, but in PBL it's a similar idea. You don't have to just jump into the deep end. There's still voice and choice in this house buying PBL, and we brought the problem and we're going to bring in people that the students can help with solutions. But the students are going to be creating these different solutions. So that's where their voice and choice is at. That's where the empowerment is. A lot of the engagement is coming from the authenticity of bringing people in. Right, if we're just going to turn it in and throw it away, engagement might not be there, but they know from day one that they're going to be helping people out with their mortgages and we have people that are in a place where they need help and these learners are going to be the experts. So what's the deep end of the pool? Look like the deep end of the pool is free inquiry. So in this one I'll give you Trevor's example, or his definition Students choose their topics without reference to any pre-prescribed outcome.

Ryan Steuer: 18:18

So here it might be a genius hour sometimes. You're still going to have a structure to this process and Trevor would agree with that. He's gotten a great process that you go through. So as the facilitator or the principal, you know kind of what's coming, because you don't want to just say, okay, everybody do whatever you want, and in six weeks we're going to check in. That's a recipe for failure.

Ryan Steuer: 18:40

Let me give you an example at one of our model schools in Columbus, indiana. Their senior capstone projects are phenomenal. The learners have been in a PBL environment for four years, maybe more, because they have a K-12 track. So they understand PBL, they understand the process, they understand the real world engagement, they understand what it takes to start by defining a problem, all the way through the six steps to solving the problem and reflecting on it. So what do they do? They make a pitch or they make a proposal at the beginning of the year, again with some structures from their facilitators. This is what I would like to solve this year as my senior capstone. So I know one learner created a disc golf course in town which sounds like, oh well, they like this golf, that's neat. It is neat because it's part of their passion here, but there's also a lot that goes into it. You can't just throw up some disc golf baskets in the park and have it be okay. Like you've got to talk to the city, you've got to get approval, you need funding, so a lot of those different things.

Ryan Steuer: 19:40

Another one that I loved and was personally a part of hearing about was the women's STEM speakers in their community. So they rallied the community to have these STEM speakers come in from the community and the learners would speak and they could all hear from kind of TEDx style, from all these local leaders around. Stem Again, all designed by a senior in high school Really cool. So what they do is they've got this proposal, they fill out and then there's a board of community partners that they have to pitch it to essentially. So, let's say, it's usually about four when I'm doing it. So there's, you know, the learner comes in, maybe two of their working in partners, and now they're going to pitch. This is what I'm going to do, and then we start to ask some questions, we start to go through this tuning protocol process. I like that you're going to bring in some STEM speakers from our community and our learners get to hear from them. I love that. I wonder how you're going to contact these community partners. That's a good point. Thanks, ryan, I appreciate that.

Ryan Steuer: 20:40

I'm going to really try to figure that out, and so we're not shooting it down, but we are making sure that they have a plan, or making sure that there's benchmarks. Like when will you have all the speakers booked? Well, probably by December, so that we're ready come April. Okay, that makes a lot of sense, for the learner hasn't thought of that, right. It's like well, we'll probably have them booked by April. You know April 1st because it's April 15th.

Ryan Steuer: 21:05

Then we as the adults, as a community partners, get to say how, you know what I, when I do speaking, I usually have it planned out months in advance and sometimes a year in advance. Oh, okay, and maybe they didn't know that, right. So at the very beginning, they've got a proposal, we're creating a benchmark and then we run through it to just make sure that they're not gonna fail Horribly. They might fail throughout the process. Well, they will fail throughout the process. We want them to, that's okay. We want to be supported, though, too. Right, like failure is not really awesome, right? If I just lose a basketball game, I'm excited about that. But if I can fail forward and I'm learning and I'm supported, and they're failing in our environments before they get out to the real world, that's a great place to do that. So you should actually just go see them, right.

Ryan Steuer: 21:48

So at the end of the year, if you want to have a really great tour, if you want to go see some great capstone projects, let me know, be happy to connect you with our friends over at in Columbus, indiana. The senior projects are phenomenal, but it is it absolutely. This is free. Inquiry is like hey, kids, you've done this work, what do you want to solve in the community? But there's structure that still, you're not throwing kids, you're not throwing facilitators in the deep end and saying, hey, I hope you do a good job. There's still some structure for them to be successful. So that's the four Levels of inquiry and inquiry mindset with Trevor McKenzie again, delightful read. We'll put a link in the show notes. Highly suggest that you grab some of his other resources too. He's got some great sketch notes that lay out his philosophy with inquiry and great speaker. Highly recommend his work. So structured inquiry, controlled inquiry, guided inquiry and free inquiry If you're new to PBL, do not just jump into the deep end right away.

Ryan Steuer: 22:47

Right, you, you'll get there, your learners will get there. But take your time. Take these steps of inquiry. It makes your road a lot smoother, trust me. Have plenty of time to put some fails and some some tough beats in. Let's learn from some people that have been there before. If you're a seasoned PBL, are listening like Even as you jump into free inquiry, you jump into the deep end. Know that there's some resources there that we can help you with Too, as you're doing that work. So this is our intro to Inquiry here on the PBL simplified podcast. Next week we'll have a PBL showcase. The week after that we're gonna be talking about inquiry again. We're gonna talk about where is inquiry at in your PBL and what are some ways that you really incorporate inquiry into the classroom. We're gonna give you some more tips, tricks, tools to get them into your classroom, because we want you to be thriving so that you are creating amazing outcomes for your learners.

Ryan Steuer: 23:45

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the PBL simplified podcast. I appreciate you and honor that you tune in each week. Would you please take two minutes to leave a rating and a review. When you leave a review, it lets the next person know that this is a podcast worth listening to. When they go into their player and search project-based learning and PBL simplified popped up, when they see those reviews, they know that high quality, visionary leaders are listening, so they tune in too 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.