3 Wins Achieved through Graduate Profiles - PBL and Asset Based School Development | E189
Jul 03, 2024Season 7Episode 189
Magnify Learning
What if the key to transforming your school lies in its existing strengths? Join us on the PBL Simplified podcast as we uncover the power of Asset Based School Development. We'll guide you through the wins of a Graduate Profile—a strategic "North Star" that aligns educational efforts and inspires meaningful change. Drawing from the Heath brothers' research and our own Project Based Learning experiences, we discuss how to cultivate an environment where students face unpredictable problems, experience safe failures, and build indispensable problem-solving skills.
But that's not all—hear how involving parents and community partners in shaping Graduate Profiles can foster a sense of collaboration and shared purpose. Reflecting on insights from an engineering role at a Fortune 50 company, we highlight the necessity of problem-solving, collaboration, and clear communication—skills often overlooked in traditional education. Discover the excitement and purpose that a well-crafted Graduate Profile can bring, igniting a collective drive toward a shared vision for your school. Tune in and learn how to harness the bright spots within your school to inspire growth and success.
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What if the key to transforming your school lies in its existing strengths? Join us on the PBL Simplified podcast as we uncover the power of Asset Based School Development. We'll guide you through the wins of a Graduate Profile—a strategic "North Star" that aligns educational efforts and inspires meaningful change. Drawing from the Heath brothers' research and our own Project Based Learning experiences, we discuss how to cultivate an environment where students face unpredictable problems, experience safe failures, and build indispensable problem-solving skills.
But that's not all—hear how involving parents and community partners in shaping Graduate Profiles can foster a sense of collaboration and shared purpose. Reflecting on insights from an engineering role at a Fortune 50 company, we highlight the necessity of problem-solving, collaboration, and clear communication—skills often overlooked in traditional education. Discover the excitement and purpose that a well-crafted Graduate Profile can bring, igniting a collective drive toward a shared vision for your school. Tune in and learn how to harness the bright spots within your school to inspire growth and success.
Some of the links above are affiliate links which means we get a small commission on anything you purchase using that link (at no more cost to you). As Amazon Associates, we earn from qualifying purchases.
Speaker 1:
We're continuing a series on how to co-create your dream school or classroom with asset-based school development. If you're with me with asset-based school development, that means that you're ready to build on the assets of your school and not just continually harp on the deficits. And if you're with me, then I'm with you, movement Maker. So today we'll discuss how every school should create a graduate profile to achieve three specific wins. Let's go lead inspired to achieve three specific wins. Let's go lead inspired. Welcome to the PBL simplified podcast, where we add value to the PBL movement makers so they can lead. Inspired, because everyone wins when leaders are inspired. Whether you're leading a classroom, a school or a district, your leadership matters and we are obsessed with helping you transform your school. I'm your host, ryan Stoyoyer, the Chief Inspiration Officer at Magnify Learning. Let's go. We are making it happen. Today we are in a series called Asset-Based School Development where we are building out your school and your dream vision really your dream school and we're doing it based on the assets. When you look at difficult, complicated change process, you cannot just fix a problem. You know, just list all the problems on your yellow notebook paper and then just go one by one. You've got to build on the assets. You've got to create some momentum, and this is research that we pulled from the Heath brothers, I think, back in episode 185. And we're going to go deep with this. This is what we do when we work with schools, with project-based learning. We're doing design days to help them build out a three-year plan. We're always doing it from what are the things that are working, because before we get to work with a school, there are educated, passionate, inspired educators there trying to make a difference. Right, and they are. So what we're trying to do is find out what's working at your school and your locale, in your community that we can magnify and grow, because as we grow the bright spots, then we kind of close the shadows, right, you start to find what's working. We can replicate and clone those bright spots and soon your school's shining.
Speaker 1:
Before we jump into the episode today, I want to share a win, and this comes from the PBL movement online community. If you're not in the online community, you need to be, because we've got all kinds of great things happening. I'm just going to share a quote with you. Today that came out, and it was the world is not in your books and maps, it's out there. It's out there A quote from Gandalf the Grey from Lord of the Rings. Now I love the quote. The world's not in your books and maps, it's out there and got a lot of action in the online community.
Speaker 1:
We talk a lot about in the online community. We're talking about what's coming up in people's classrooms, what are they working on, what's their problem of practice. But today was just like an inspirational quote and I like it because we were trying to prepare our learners for the world. Right, and the world is awesome, it's beautiful, it's unpredictable and it's difficult. So our classrooms can be a safe place for our learners to tackle unpredictable problems. It's the place where they can fail and learn and it's still okay. We say it's great to fail, but as I fail, yes, I'm learning. I don't see failure as a loss. I see it as a learning opportunity.
Speaker 1:
But we don't really want our learners to fail long-term. That's not our goal for them. We want them to try some things out. We want them to work on difficult problems. If you're working on difficult problems, you are going to fail before you get to that out. We want them to work on difficult problems and if you're working on difficult problems, you are going to fail before you get to that solution.
Speaker 1:
And we want them to do that when they're safe and they're with us, because most of life's problems have a remainder. Most of life's problems have a remainder. Have you ever been in math class and you're or you're taking a test? And I know our learners have done this and I'm sure that our, our math teachers try to push against this in some way. But it's like it's a multiple choice test, right? So it's like they figure out the math problem and they do it wrong and it's got a remainder. They're like, well, that can't be the right answer because there's a remainder, right, so now they go back through and they redo it.
Speaker 1:
But a lot of things in life, like, they've got a remainder evenly, they're difficult, and we need to create these scenarios in our classroom so that our learners have practice with these difficult problems and with failure, so they can redo some things. Because there are some right answers to some of life's difficulties, right, like you should spend less than you make, you should give, you should volunteer. Like there are ways, there are things that happen in this difficult world that, like, we pretty much know some things that work right, we know some things that don't work. So if we can start teaching some of these to our learners like a problem solving process while they're with us K 12, or K 20. If we could do that, then when they get to the real world, they've got a leg up. Like what, if they could identify a problem? They could, you know, spell out what success looks like. They could research possible solutions. They could try a solution, run a solution and then reflect Did it work? And if it didn't work, I'm going to try something different.
Speaker 1:
That process alone that comes from project-based learning. It's in my book, pbl. Simplified, it sounds a lot like the scientific method. It's this problem-solving process that it's not something you write down in six steps and go through it. It's really something that, if you can get it internal, where you see a problem, you don't get discouraged, you know what to do. That's a life changer. That's a game changer for our learners. That's what we're looking for. So even this is just a win from the community. But even our bigger topic for the day of building your dream school and what do you want your learners to know when they leave our school systems I think that's got to be somewhere at the top of the list, that they can go through this problem-solving process for themselves, continue to be encouraged, because we know they're going to interact with the problems. That is like the 100% guarantee that you will have problems in the world, but how you interact with them, that's the game changer. Do you believe that you can solve them? That's where you build confidence and self-esteem. And that you can solve them? That's where you build confidence and self-esteem and you get to build the life that you're really trying to live.
Speaker 1:
Before we jump into our main episode again, I want to tell you we've got one more chance here for you to get into the online July virtual workshops. So wherever you're at in the country, the world, wherever you're at friends that are listening in Scotland, you can jump into this. I think the timing ends up in like your afternoon evening, though, and those of you in Malaysia, I'm pretty sure you have to stay up all night, so we might have to work on, you know, another virtual workshop for you, but if if you're in the States, like this is when you should get in there's no travel costs. You still get a super collaborative workshop over those three days. You build out a PBL unit, you get feedback. You get the protocols you leave with the PBL unit you can implement in your classroom. So it's a great way to jump in. Check out the show notes, to jump into that July workshop. But if you're more of like an in-person learner and you want to be with people, we've got an in-person conference in Missouri that you can jump into in July as well, and there's going to be a jumpstart there. There's an advance, there's an emerging schools. If you want to plan out the next three years with your leadership team, check out the show notes there too. That's going to be a fantastic event and it's actually in one of our really innovative model schools. So you get to be in an environment that's super innovative while you're creating super innovative processes. So check those out in the show notes, jump in, slingshot your practice forward. So our main episode today again, we're talking about asset-based school development. It's been a whole series. We've still got some more to go in the series.
Speaker 1:
This is kind of the middle spot about this profile of a graduate, and I would claim that every school should create a graduate profile to achieve these three specific wins that I'm going to outlay. And the first very specific win that a graduate profile gets you is community involvement. Community involvement, parental involvement, community partner involvement is always in your strategic plan somewhere. And from schools that we continue to talk to, like, it's always a struggle Like how do you get parents more involved? You can blame the parents, right, that happens often, but at the end of the day, what are we going to do, right? How are we going to get them involved? How are we going to get them engaged? And how do we get our community partners engaged?
Speaker 1:
And creating a graduate profile is a great opportunity to do that, because we can bring them in and we can ask them, like what do you want out of our graduates when they leave our system? What are the things you want our graduates to know, say and do? What do you want them to be able to accomplish? How do you want them to think? And you get some really valuable input. This is not just a scarecrow kind of thing that you're doing just to walk through a couple steps so you can get whatever graduate profile you want.
Speaker 1:
You really want to hear from your community partners, like especially those industry partners that are there. A lot of our work actually started from hearing from industry partners and we did some roundtables and said hey, large industry partners, what do you need from our graduates to hire them? Because they're hiring people from out of state, out of the country, and bringing them to work in our community. And it's like, well, why don't you hire our graduates? Well, here are some things we need your graduates to do, and you get a very common list. Right, you can go through the four Cs, but it's something along the lines of they need to be able to work in a group, they need to be able to collaborate, they need agency, they need to be able to hit deadlines, they need to be able to solve complex problems. I can't just tell them here's this simple problem, now bring it back to me with a couple answers. They've got to be able to think through these difficult problems.
Speaker 1:
And when it comes from an industry partner, it kind of changes your world a little bit. In education, I know, it absolutely rocked mine, like I thought that I would be a teacher, I was going to care about kids, I was going to have big relationships. That was super important for me, and we're gonna get them to graduate. So they go to college and then do what they want to do. Right, and when I heard from industry partners, though, matched my experience working for a fortune 50 company as an engineer, because there was very little that I learned in high school or in college that I actually used in at that fortune 50 company.
Speaker 1:
Right, I was shipping, we were. We were shipping 1.5 million packages every single day and using technology and people to do it, and so as new technologies came about, we had to explain those to new people, we had to train them, we had to have systems behind all of that that were supposed to work correctly. And if I input one number incorrectly, suddenly you know 600 packages went to the wrong place, like that day, right, like even actually in that shift. So it was such a big deal, but it was all problem solving, like why did those packages go to the wrong place? So let's track that down and see what happened in the software. Or how do we get this, uh, this person on the very front lines handling packages, to understand this super complicated technology and understand that it's better than what we asked them to do last month or a year ago, because they've been here a long time and it's been working. Now we want them to change.
Speaker 1:
So there's this collaboration piece. This is working with people, presenting information clearly, like those were skills that I had to learn to be successful at a fortune 50 company. And it's like, well then I get into an eighth grade classroom and it's suddenly like, how many of those skills am I actually teaching my learners right now? And it turned out it was not a whole lot. So I was trying to teach them compound sentences, which is great. They need no compound sentence. They need to be able to write and they need to do argument of writing. They need these skills and they need to be able to present this information in some way that makes sense, that they can talk to adults in a work environment. And that was a big wake up for me when the industry partners started saying you know, what we need from your learners is not necessarily what you're providing.
Speaker 1:
Hey, we'll get back to the episode in just a second, but I wanted you to know, just in case you haven't checked it out. My book, pbl Simplified, gives you the structure that you need the six steps to move project-based learning from idea to reality. If you've been thinking about PBL but haven't been able to implement it, if you're a principal who wants to bring PBL, this is a great way to start, and if you use the link down in the show notes, we're going to give you a free book study. Do not PBL alone. Invite the teacher next to you If you're a principal. Take that small group of innovators and get them started in the book study so you start to have your own PBL success stories before you start your full movement. Go out and grab a copy today. Let's head back to the episode.
Speaker 1:
So the first big win that your school gets from a graduate profile is community involvement, because when you ask your community partners to come in, they'll do it. They want to help us out in the school systems. They want to hire our local graduates, but they've also got objectives they need to achieve to serve their customers as well, right. So they want to find a way to give back. So when we invite them in, they're happy to give their voice. The second win that a school achieves with a graduate profile is you get a North Star. You get a North Star. So if you are sailing and it's the middle of the night and you can't see the sun, the North Star is always in the same place, right, so you can navigate based on that North Star. There's no other star that does that right. So when we say North Star, there's this guiding principle as we move to graduate profile that is going to guide all of our work, because if you are a leader which you are you're a movement maker, whether it's a school, a classroom or a district.
Speaker 1:
You see something that needs changed right, otherwise you probably wouldn't have gotten the leadership. You saw something in your education. You saw something in the professional work that you did in the classroom. You say you know what? I think I can make a difference at the next level by making these changes. You're listening to this podcast because you think project-based learning might be that answer. I agree with you. I think it could be.
Speaker 1:
And now, how do we get other people to understand this? Now you are suddenly involved in the change process. You this? Now you are suddenly involved in the change process. You are no longer talking about, you are talking about standards, but reading another educational book isn't going to help you with change process. Right, it's a whole different process. Now you're interacting with people, processes, systems. You're fighting a hundred years of educational inertia to do something different.
Speaker 1:
So you're going to go in and you're going to say hey guys, we're going to change everything and all these passionate, inspired educators go. Is that because we're doing everything wrong? Oops, right, like oops? No, it's not Right. That's why we're very specific. We're doing asset-based school development. We're going to say look at all the wonderful things that we're doing and, as we hear from our community partners and parents and students, they want to have this skill set of critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, communication when they leave our school system. What do you guys think? And your teachers agree, because they've given some input into this graduate profile as well. And now we say, hey, do we all agree that our graduates should be able to do these things? Yes, we do. That would give them the best opportunities. We want them to have great opportunities. Okay, great, how are we going to get there? And now this starts the change process.
Speaker 1:
But it's not because you're a new leader or you've been to a conference or you listen to a podcast and something should change. It's because we collectively the community, the teachers, the students, the parents have all talked about this graduate profile and we say this is where we want our learners to go, because they'll be most successful when they graduate. So, as we listen to 2024, our kindergartners are going to go through 14 years of education, which puts them at 2038. It's like, ah, what is going to happen in 2038? I don't know, but jobs are going to look different. They're going to need a different skill set. They're going to need these things. How do we get people there? I'm passionate. I want to do it Now.
Speaker 1:
We are moving in the same direction, towards this graduate profile that we have all created and all been a part of, that we have all created and all been a part of. That's different than saying, hey, I went to this conference on PBL, I did this emerging schools thing and it was great, and I think we should change some of the things we're doing. That's not a big enough. Why right, like the why behind that isn't strong enough. That's more of a how and a what right. The graduate profile which, by the way, we do help you create design days is your why. We give you the steps to go back home and create this with your team and with your community and actually spoiler alert, we're going to talk about it in the next leadership episode is how you do this. But now this is the why the North Star, your graduate profile. This is where we're going. This is how we make decisions, now, right.
Speaker 1:
When we look at new curriculum, it's like does it move us towards this graduate profile or does it handcuff us in a way that will not allow us to do the things that we believe are true in this graduate profile? And again, another spoiler alert it's rarely black and white in that scenario, right? So what the graduate profile does help you do, though, is if you, once you adopt a certain curriculum. Now you should be having the conversation of how do we use this curriculum and allow our teachers to have the flexibility to help our learners get to that graduate profile? So the graduate profile should be coming up again and again, and again. And, yes, it's going to be posters on the wall. Yes, it's going to be on your website, but if it stays there, it's the same as the mission and vision statement. That's all dusty that you don't look at either, right? So we don't want that. We want the graduate profile to be the North Star that we're continually going back to. Our learners know it, our parents know it, our teachers know it and have confidence and believe in it, and now we're all moving that direction together, and that is a big deal.
Speaker 1:
So the second win that you get from a graduate profile is you get a North Star. You get a reason for this change process to be exciting and to be purposeful, and it's one that we've all agreed on. Now. That's a big win. The third win that you're going to get is the one that we really all want. It's why we got into education. You didn't get into education because you needed a gig. Right Like every time I speak or we run a workshop, we have educators talk about their why for being in education, and we do that because it gets us fired up to talk about the how and the what right.
Speaker 1:
And when we talk about the whys with educators, they always say, like I want to see light bulb moments with my learners. That's my favorite. I want them to have more opportunities than I had when I was in school, and the why gets exciting. So the third win that your school achieves with a graduate profile is change. Learners Lives are changed in ways that are really exciting. Did I want my learners to learn more about compound sentences and do argumentative writing? Well, yes, absolutely, and I wanted to have so many opportunities that they had to turn some down, or I wanted to create their own opportunities. Here's an example that I love to tell.
Speaker 1:
I had a learner that was towards the bottom. Actually, he was the very bottom last learner of the school of 951, 7th and 8th graders when it came to our formative assessment. So we're using NWA is at the very bottom and we gave him PBL, we gave him a Y, we gave him workshops, we gave him need to know. So we actually said, hey, what is it that you need to learn? So I don't know. And he said, okay, well, let's, let's, let's think about that. And then we actually did what he said.
Speaker 1:
He was used to kind of being ignored or passed over because he wasn't that all-star learner that fit into the system. So he did a great job, made it through middle school, made it through high school, did a great job, got a job at FedEx moving packages which, by the way, I worked at UPS, so I don't know if that kind of works together or not, but anyway, he did a great job, worked at FedEx and one of my favorite things that he did because you might say, well, he didn't go to college Is that a failure? I don't think so. Like he wanted to work at FedEx, it allowed him to do what he wanted to do.
Speaker 1:
He got married, did a great job, and one of the things that I love that he did, though, is he got the hazmat certification right, and if you get the hazmat certification, you get a pay bump, and there's a whole lot of security in that, because most people don't know what happens when there's a spill. It's a very specialized piece. He had to take some extra learning, but he knew right and this was his thought process when I talked with him is that he knew that he could level up for job security and the pay bump, and that would be good for his family. I level up for job security and the pay bump, and that would be good for his family. I think that's a huge win for that learner right. Like. He identified a problem. He could get laid off. That'd be really bad for his family. He could use some more income. He went through some possible solutions hey, could I get another job or not? Oh, right, here I could get the hazmat certification he did. He got it reflected like, yeah, this is perfect, and he's got an important position right, and that comes with some pride in your work, so what a cool win Like that's a changed learner right Before that, before his interaction with project-based learning in eighth grade.
Speaker 1:
He would have just floated along. I don't know if he would have made it through high school or not. Kids have amazing coping skills of making it through high school but not actually learning to read or apply themselves. So he may have made it through, but would he have had the success afterwards without the ability to solve problems and reflect and identify and to kind of retest those those problems in his life? I don't think so. Can he write a compound, complex sentence? Ah, that's 50,50. I'm going to say no, I think he could identify a compound sentence. I feel like I crushed that in eighth grade but he may not still remember the content now that he's 27,. But he's made a better life for himself and he has more opportunities than he would have had otherwise because he's learned these graduate profile skills. That's a huge win that I would want for any of our learners to have.
Speaker 1:
You can't do that unless you identify it right, because the truth is that we all have this vague idea of who we want to help our learners become. We want them to have more opportunities. But the tough part is realizing that vague goals don't work right. We don't achieve anything with vague goals. If you want to lose a few pounds or you want to eventually play the guitar that's on my wall right now like you're much less likely to lose that weight or play the guitar if it's this vague goal. But if I come around and we say, hey, I want to lose eight pounds by the end of the year or I want to learn to play four songs on my guitar by next month by the way, I'm writing that one down because I do I want to learn how to play four songs on my guitar by next month and that's totally doable for me and I haven't done it because I've had vague goals around the guitar. Vague goals don't work.
Speaker 1:
So when you start to formalize these vague goals, this calling that you have around the graduate profile this is why we get an education. This is more related to the calling of. Why we're in education is the graduate profile. As you do this hard work, because it is hard to formalize and crystallize these ideas and bring people together. If you notice, we're doing the work that we want our learners to do, by the way, we're collaborating and solving a problem. But if you do this hard work now, you have the North Star, you've crystallized the goal and now we can start making it happen. This is exciting stuff when we're talking about asset based school development. Thank you for joining me in the series.
Speaker 1:
Your call to action is a little bit of a baby step, because you can't just say hey, tomorrow, guys, we're going to do a graduate profile. There's some work to be done. We're going to talk about that in the next leadership episode, but right now there are a lot of graduate profiles out in the world. Just do a quick Google search graduate profile examples. They're going to come out with a whole bunch of them. Getting Smart Edutopia uh, battelle has some great examples of graduate profiles out there. Uh, I want you to go explore some. I want you to find ones that inspire you. And then, for extra credit, I'm not real big on extra credit, so really, just the next step is go visit the schools, say, hey, I really love this graduate profile. I'm going to go visit that school and see what it looks like in action, cause we've got some amazing schools that have a graduate profile and they do use it for daily decision making. Right, it forms the work that they do every single day and people have got behind it. So if you need some help, I'm happy to recommend that, again, we run this through our design days to help you and your leadership team create a graduate profile. In the meantime, between now and the next episode, that's, your assignment is to go look at some of those graduate profiles. Next episode, we're going to talk about the steps to creating that graduate profile. Today we talked about why you should have one Community involvement. It's a North Star and that's how you get changed learners, which is our goal. So between now and then, my friends, go lead inspired.
Speaker 1:
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.