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Unlocking Student Potential: Revolutionizing Education with Active Learning and PBL | E209

Magnify Learning Season 7 Episode 209

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What if the key to unlocking student potential lies in transforming traditional teaching methods? We explore this question with the innovator, Lauran Kerr-Heraly, Ph.D., from Houston Community College, who is revolutionizing classrooms through active learning, Project Based Learning (PBL), and gamification. Lauran shares her approaches that bring history to life, illustrating how smaller class sizes at her college provide the perfect environment for creative experimentation. Her techniques, including turning a classroom into an escape room, aim to inspire curiosity and prepare students for real-world challenges by enhancing critical thinking and teamwork.

Tune in as we dissect the pivotal role of executive function skills in education and how the pandemic has magnified their importance. We debunk myths about students naturally mastering skills like time management and focus by the time they reach college. Instead, we emphasize the necessity of intentionally teaching these skills through PBL. This episode explains how breaking down tasks and understanding motivation can empower students to conquer academic and professional hurdles.

Join us as we champion the power of partnerships and community in education. By gradually reducing the support students need, educators can cultivate a sense of ownership and self-sufficiency in learners. Lauran shares an inspiring success story of a student who thrived through a personalized oral history project, underscoring the transformative impact of individualized education.

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Ryan Steuer:

Welcome to the PBL Simplified Podcast. I'm your host, ryan Stoyer, and we are here to inspire you to fulfill your vision to be a movement maker. To look at your school and say, hey, something could be different. I wonder how I do that. So in today's episode, we have a guest. It's a guest episode, which means that we're going to bring you an outside view, say, hey, I wonder if this voice could help you in your journey of transforming education. Today with us, we've got Lauren Kerr Hurley, phd. She's coming in from Houston and it's hot where she's at, it's not where I'm at. So there's always pluses and minuses, that. But, lauren, thanks for joining us.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

Of course, thanks for having me.

Ryan Steuer:

And Lauren's coming from a community college setting, and so we're looking at higher ed and using project-based learning, which is always exciting, I think. I think our audience spans. I don't know if K-20 is the right verbiage, right, but you know, we've got some higher ed listeners, a lot of K-12 or P-12, I should say, because we've got some preschool teachers that are listening too. But I think it's really helpful to hear from the whole spectrum. Like, even if we're secondary teacher, what are our kids going to next? And sometimes in elementary it's hard to see this, but they're going to be going to college or the workforce, whatever that is. So love to have Lauren on here. Lauren, again, thanks for being here. The first question for every guest is always the same so what is your? Why? For the work that you do?

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

Well, I want to kind of focus that question on I'll call it active learning, and I've been in education for over 20 years and one of the best things about being an educator is that you could get to reinvent things and try new things and innovate. So one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about doing things in new ways and getting students and colleagues actively involved in the learning process is because people change, society changes, but we're all really curious people and we operate better when we're creative. It's actually the latest version of Bloom's Taxonomy has creation at the top of that pyramid, so that's the highest critical thinking level is creation. So when I do project-based learning, when I do gamification, even in my executive coaching practice, executive function coaching practice I'm doing things in different ways because I'm really interested in how people see the world and I want them to experience what they're learning. History is what I teach as my subject, but it's the easiest one to make interesting, I think. But not every student thinks that right.

Ryan Steuer:

That's correct.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

So spinning things into a way that they could get actively involved is so exciting.

Ryan Steuer:

Yeah, excellent. We'd love to hear the different whys as guests come on. History is an interesting piece because we had a guest on that. Eighth graders, seventh graders, history is not their most excited. They're not most excited about that. But then you, as the professor or as the teacher in the classroom, I always say you're the perfect person to, as you say, kind of spin that into active learning, because you love the subject area and you can tell us why it applies to the current world. So I love that. So you mentioned gamification. You're using PBL and other strategies to spin curiosity. I love that. I think curiosity is a big deal and creativity, and you're doing that at college level. How do your learners respond to a different learning environment? I went to Purdue so I had 800 kids in a lecture classroom, right, and I just absorbed or did not absorb, right. But your classroom is different than that. So how do your learners respond at that level?

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

Yeah, one of the great things about community college is that we do have small classes. At my institution we cap out at 32. So I do have the opportunity to explore some of these alternate learning methods and I'm also fortunate to be working at the Innovation Center at Houston Community College and it's very much a yes culture and so anytime I go to them with a weird idea, they're like sure, do that.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

So culture that supports of learning and experimentation, it is students kind of all automatically come in, knowing this is probably going to be a little bit different than you know what I what a typical lecture class, but I'll talk about some of the ways that I do get buy-in, because college is aspirational, university is aspirational, and, for some students, if they come in and they see that I'm playing a game, they're disappointed, because they think, well, this should be, I should be taking notes in a lecture and preparing for an exam, because that is their sort of mental view of higher education. So there is a little bit of me explaining. You know, here's all the ways that you're using your critical thinking brain throughout this process, and here's how I'm preparing you for the workplace and for life, because we are not you're not going to sit down and take an exam every day, but you are going to be working with people, and you do have to know the steps of a project and how to plan and all of that. So, if there is lack of buy-in, then that's the kind of approach that I take. Most of them, though, are excited, because they will say how much they enjoyed an experience, and then they'll talk about what they learned through it, and I see them really getting involved, for, you know, for some students, in ways that they don't in other sort of learning environments, so I'll give an example, if that's okay.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

I turned a classroom into an escape room, so this is one of my projects and I made it one of their projects. So in that process they have to use their content knowledge, they have to use teamwork to get clues to open the next lock to. You know, quote unquote, escape the room. And when I first and this with students, I told them I actually have a saying that my class is always in beta because I'm just like constantly testing, yeah.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

So I told them this is beta. You guys are going to help me figure out if this works, if it's good, what can be changed. And so the first time that I ran, it was really exciting because not only were the students having fun with it, but they also knew that they were part of developing it and so that they could make it better for future classes and give suggestions, things like that. And then so in successive semesters then I've had them kind of develop questions. I've had them develop games. I've had them. We have a makerspace on campus and so they've gone to design boxes and puzzles that they cut out of the acrylic on the laser cutter. You know things like that. That's quite fun. So that is a really fun thing that I've done.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

And you know, as far as convincing people that they're actually learning content when they're doing that, that could be the harder part. So there does have to be a connection. Piece of this is why we did this, this or this is why we're going to do this. Here's the knowledge that you need to know. This is basically like I I actually use my escape room as their midterm um sort of exam, grade, um, so I tell them what they need to know. I tell them how you know, remind them this is how we use sources, because you're going to be looking at a source and you're going to have to be, you know, getting information about that and then. So we talked through the process and then afterward I again make those connections of this is why we did this.

Ryan Steuer:

Yeah, so I think that's awesome. I love the idea that you've got this kind of metacognition that you're explaining to your learners like, hey, this is what's happening and it's good. Right, it's. Yes, you need the content, but you also need more than that, right, and and I love the idea that you have an engaging college classroom, right, and again, when I was at Purdue, and it's a little different scenario, right, there's 825 kids and nobody knows if I'm there or not.

Ryan Steuer:

Uh, eventually, I wish I would have done a little better and not figured that out, right, and but I feel like in your, in your room, it's like your classroom, your college classroom, like I would want to be there, right, and I would want to be learning things. It's so different. And in engagement, the higher level, and I really don't think it's that different K-12. It's not where I would like it to be. Right, like we've got this goal of 51 of schools are using pbl by 2051, because we think that changes the world. Right, if we change the classroom culture, like you have, but from? But I would also, I think, acknowledge that.

Ryan Steuer:

I think you can correct me if I'm wrong, but the higher ed world is a little bit different than k-12. So when you look at kind of the higher ed world is a little bit different than K-12. So when you look at kind of the higher ed world, do you feel like professors are a little slower to adopt these engaged learning methods? And so I guess that's the first question. And then, if they are like what do you? Do you think there's a fix in there? What are your perceptions?

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

I do think higher ed professors are slower to adopt this. I think part of it's like I said they higher ed professors are slower to adopt this. I think part of it's like I said. They don't feel like it's an actual college class unless they've lectured for an hour with no feedback. But I also think that a lot of higher ed professors don't have actual education training. I do. That was important to me. I have a degree in secondary education.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

I've done a lot of professional development on how to teach, keep up with pedagogy studies et cetera, and I teach those to other people. So without that kind of knowledge of this is what a lesson plan is, even like some fairly basic things that it is difficult to make. That jump so oftentimes is what will work to sort of shift the needle and you're not going to. There are some people who are like me and I'm an early adopter and I'm an innovator and you bring an idea to me and I'm like that's so fun. But other people are like, well, the way I've been doing it is working and that's okay.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

But one of the ways to sort of shift the attitude is to encourage people to try one thing. So my department did this, where we presented a lot of different types of activities. They could do simple things that they could sort of apply in the classroom or to change their course or something like that. We just encouraged people to try one thing and overwhelmingly people thought after they changed that one thing that okay, it wasn't that hard, it worked fine. Maybe I'll do it again, maybe I won't, but they at least were engaging with the prospect of doing something.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

Different in all ed is that learners, if they are engaged, are more successful. And you know, if we, if you work at a state institution, that your funding is directly tied to that. If we're just going to talk sort of brass tacks, right, but that, but also you want them to stay. And if you can prove to people, if you can prove to any educator, no matter the level, that students are performing better, they're more engaged, they're connecting what they're learning in the classroom to what they're going to do in their career, then it's a little harder to argue with.

Ryan Steuer:

Yeah, for sure. So that provides me with, you know, a path for empathy, right For higher ed folks, right, because it's also like hey, we haven't had, you know, some of the same training. And I think we see that when we do workshops with higher ed professors is a lot of times it's the side workshops we're really surprised, you know, it's just making a lesson plan, like you, it's like people love that it's like oh okay.

Ryan Steuer:

So we're happy to bend to whatever someone needs, but I think that's an important point, that the preparation maybe has been different at a higher level too, and I also love your idea that came out of your department, this idea of change. One thing let's give people a place to start, let's have some empathy and give people a place to start. So, lauren, this other piece that you have with you, do some work with altering course and you've got, and we'll put a link in the show notes for people. But you talk about this role of executive function. What is executive function? And then how is it used in a successful PBL?

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

Yeah. So executive function is the set of mental processes that helps you get things done. So it's anything from organization to task initiation to self-regulation. It encompasses a lot.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

I've become really passionate about it because because, especially with COVID, we've seen an underdevelopment of these kind of skills. We've seen a massive, we've seen a lack of preparation in you know plan out your week, how you schedule your time, how you stay focused. And I saw this in my students, I saw this in my colleagues, I saw it in myself, right. So, although I sort of sympathize with the idea that, oh, by the time they get to college they should know these things, it's not actually the case, right? And if you haven't been taught these skills, then you can't be held accountable for them, right? So I work with my own students in the college classroom and then I have my coaching business through Altering Course, where I work with students and families to just help teach them these skills and help them get organized and realize that the problem is not their brain, it's the skills. So, applying this to PBL, if I go to my college students and I say at the end of this semester, you need to have finished doing this oral history interview with a family member to talk about your family history and also give me 10 good sources and write a paper and do something creative for a presentation. See you in December, right? That doesn't work.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

So what I've done is I think some of us think, well, if I just give them like incremental deadlines and that's good enough, right? Like the bibliography is due in a month, like great. But it's not that simple, is it? Because, again, if we haven't taught them you should be at this point by, you know, in the next week, or something like that, then they don't know. So when I'm doing a big project like that, I go through with students and I give them sort of sample plans that they could use and I give them some tips on how to stay focused. I give them tips on how to push through roadblocks, because that's a big deal. That's one of the biggest reasons I see students abandon projects is because they'll hit some kind of roadblock halfway through and sort of give up. So we talk about navigating through. If you get stuck, here's what you do, and we have various check-ins throughout the semester, that kind of thing.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

So this is really important because the National Association of College and Career has put together a list of basically, these are the skills that you need to have by the time you graduate from college, or graduate from high school even and half of them are executive function skills, because you have to be able to organize, you have to be able to work on a team, you have to be a self-starter. So these are really significant skills and we just can't assume that anyone knows them. I like to just assume nothing right, and if you happen to be amazing at planning your project and you can finish it without me, that's great, but you might learn something you didn't learn before, or maybe I'm going to communicate it in a way that you could help others with. So I do think this is so, so important when you're embarking on trying to do a big project with students or with colleagues, or you know your own work that if you need to have these skills kind of narrowed down so if the project feels really big and you've never been taught how to break it down and you've never been taught how to chunk the tasks and you've never been taught how to break it down and you've never been taught how to chunk the tasks and you've never been taught how to prioritize then it actually is impossible, right. So it's such a big piece and it's exciting because there are some skills that you can be taught and that you can apply pretty quickly that make you feel some really big success.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

Because the brain operates off of dopamine. It's that chemical that gets released when we check something off a list. So when your brain knows like oh wait, this actually isn't as hard as I thought it was, I just didn't know how to do it Then you'll want to keep doing it. So once you get those sort of small successes, you keep rolling. And that's another good tip for sort of follow through with a project right that you have to get started. You have to get started. Of course it feels like it'll never happen if you haven't done the first step. Right. So you get started and then you keep rolling because you have the skills to be able to do that.

Ryan Steuer:

Yeah, for me, when we talk about project-based learning, like agency is something we tend to grade right. And, oh goodness, chapter 12 of my book, pbl, simplified we talk about grading and so you have content, a certain percentage, you give communication a certain percentage, you give presentation a certain percentage and almost everybody gives agency. And agency is that idea of I can set goals, I do the things I'm supposed to do, but then, like you said, we don't always teach it Right, so we just start grading it like, hey, you didn't turn this in, so you lose points. Well, neat, but you never taught me how to turn things in really Right. And we I mean it could go down to I don't want to get into the giant like kids bring a pencil to school debate that seems to be huge in education and like you want to blow up a chat room.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

Just ask if you should give kids a pencil Right.

Ryan Steuer:

But I love the idea that you're giving intentional tips, and I think we need to do workshops on this. I guess I'd like your take on this too, because you gave us some tips already. But you know, even when we chunk things for kids and we say, hey, I want you to turn in, you know the bibliography at this point and then the rough draft on this day, and are we then? Are we teaching them that? Are we doing it for them? Right, like, what's the difference there of like giving them a structure, but then what happens when they're not in that structure? Right, because when they get to college and they get to the workforce now they have more freedom. We want them to have truly learned it, not just lived in a framework. Is there a difference there?

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

I do think so because I think of it as a partnership. Because if what you do is lay it out for them, then they haven't learned the skill right. But if you work with them to say we're going to take and educators are loath to take up any sort of class time, and I totally get that but if you say we're going to take the next 10 minutes and I'm going to model for you how you could structure the first week of your project, and then you give them five minutes to try it on their own and then you check it, right, so that's teaching them, but it's also empowering them, right. Because the other thing is, if you just tell them the rough draft is due on this date, they're still going to wait until two days before it's due or the night before it's due. They haven't really learned time management in that process. Yeah, 100%. So what you want them to do is take some ownership of those skills, because another thing that happens is that we don't define these skills either. You know we, like I, love the idea of agency. It's something that I use in my own rubrics right? I want them to evaluate how they were involved in the process, but I have to take time to explain what that is and why it matters, because some of them, you know it's hard for students, even college students, to think beyond what's happening right now. So if you tell them this is going to be really great for your career, which you will get into in 10 years, right, it's like who cares? But if you can tell them, if you do this, if you learn these skills, you're going to get a lot more free time, right. And you ask them what they love to do and sort of center it around that.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

And I was working with a student recently who loves softball and hates history and I was like, well then, make a playbook for yourself. You don't have to use a planner, I don't care if you use a calendar, but make a playbook, base it all around softball, um, so her brain got invested because she cared about, you know, that activity. So so there is. So if you think of it as a partnership and not I'm doing this for them or I'm just letting letting them loose and then also think about scaffolding, right, you're not going to spend the same time at midterm or midway through the project that you did in the beginning, showing them how to manage their time and how to plan. But maybe you're doing check-ins and maybe you're saying you know, I'd love to see everyone's plans, I'd love to see everyone's like you know, progress or whatever it is. But so you're doing check-ins but you're still you're not doing it for them and you're scaffolding it because you want them to also see growth.

Ryan Steuer:

Yeah, I think, yeah, I think you're spot on with the idea because, like, classroom time is super valuable, right? Like we don't want to give that up, and, at the same time, like, if you do that work, this executive function work, like intentionally at the beginning of your year. Now you get to benefit from the advantages of that because your learners are more organized and they know how to plan. So, as you're teaching these things at the college level, do you have a success story that you can share, whether it's executive function or maybe just an engaged classroom of one of your learners that just kind of lit up and got it?

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

Yeah, I mentioned this oral history project that I do and it's centered around food, mostly because I wanted to do a project about food. But part of the assignment is for students to choose a family member or close family friend who's at least a generation above them and interview them about a dish that's important to them or a recipe that's important to them, and use that as sort of a gateway to talk about family history. And I had one student in particular who was really struggling in the class, not engaged behind on a lot of work, and they came to me and said my family history is not interesting, it's not anything unique, it's not whatever. Um, and so I said well, I think you'll be surprised. First of all, it's your story, so it is important, but I also think you're going to be surprised once you get into this.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

And, um, he ended up having a conversation with his older sister who raised him, and the sister told him a lot of things that he didn't know about, like why she was the one to raise him, essentially.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

And they I cried on when I listened to the recording because they're both crying and they're both having this like really like healing moment together um, he, he said I had no idea that having this conversation with her would would lead to any kind of reconciliation, um, and then he was really invested in finishing the project because he wanted, he was proud of his story. He wanted to, you know, get the transcript right. He wanted to do the essay nicely, you know, um, so, and then he came up with a really cool, like creative project at the end to kind of present it all. So that's a story of when you get personally invested, you're a lot more like apt to finish right and be proud of what you're doing. And this is someone who struggled with executive function too. But once he got invested in it, then I was able to sort of work with him about like this is this is how you can finish strong. You know you've, you've already done the hard part, so let's finish strong and let's figure out how.

Ryan Steuer:

Yeah, that's awesome when when a PBL unit around food right Can like create reconciliation between siblings, it's like it's incredible.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

Yeah, you know, and I always tell them like get ready to hear some family secrets you never know. And then just just a quick sort of tack on of how you can scale something like this. We, you know, I do this project in my own class, but I work with one of the pastry professors and a biology professor and a librarian and we do an event called Back to the Food-ture instead of.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

Food-ture and we come together and the pastry students and the culinary students will create something amazing. And then my history students have to tell the history of that dish. The biologists talk about the nutrition, chemistry students talk about, you know, the chemical components of the food. We've had anthropology students come in and we have this amazing event where we bring you know, my institution is quite large with lots of campuses, and so we we bring people from all over and last time we had a celebrity chef be a guest judge and it's just the coolest thing. That just started with this. You know, a couple of us thinking like we like food, what can we do with that? And it scaled into something so awesome.

Ryan Steuer:

Yeah, right, it can be a great place to start, right. Just like the facilitator interests often will match or overlap with with learner interests, so it's a great place to start. So, as you mentioned, like multiple campuses, higher ed is not always the first to innovate. So, as you, as a professor who is looking for different ways to innovate in the classroom, what are some obstacles that you face?

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

Community college. I've got students like my youngest this term is 15, and my oldest is 60. So there is a very large range and it's one of the things that I love about it. I think one of their obstacles time. You know we, we are all busy and you know if you, if you really want to see like the veins pop in a teacher's face, tell them I have this really cool idea for you. Go do it on top of all the other things, right, yeah?

Ryan Steuer:

sure.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

That you have to do can make things easy for educators and I don't mean easy like you know, they could just do it in their sleep but I mean like actually implementable then they're much more likely to do it, and so some of the things that we've done with this back to the future project, for example, is develop modules in our learning management system so if a professor is interested in joining, they can just go and see that there's so many materials there, there's templates, should they choose to use them, etc. So it's not something that they have to sort of reinvent, but they can still be creative with it. But they have a starting place.

Ryan Steuer:

Yeah, awesome. There's obstacles but there's solutions, right, and there's people working towards those and you're doing a great job of that, lauren. You're a great example of bringing engaged learning, pbl gamification, trying to be innovative in that higher ed space. So certainly appreciate your work and for our listeners, if you're listening, you're like, hey, this executive function piece is interesting. Or hey, I grade on agency but I'm not sure I'm building kids up.

Ryan Steuer:

You can go check out some of Lauren's freebies that she's got. We'll put them in the show notes. She's got a free infographic on college prep essential skills, which, if you're a K-12 teacher, that's our whole job. We want our kids to have great opportunities after they leave us. We'll also put some links in the show notes for where you can follow Lauren on LinkedIn, instagram or Twitter. But, lauren, for you, we've got one last answer. I want you to imagine that you are in front of a room full of teachers and principals. They're pouring their hearts and souls into their work every day. They truly desire the best outcomes and opportunities for their learners. What parting advice do you have for them to help them on their PBL journey?

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

I think if you can observe someone who's done this, you know, if you're wanting to start off, then find someone who's done it and who loves it and talk to them about the process and then think about what are my own goals. You know I'm really big on objectives and you know meeting our learning outcomes. So think you know what are some ways that I can still meet my learning outcomes and possibly meet them better by doing project-based learning. So once you've seen other people do it and people get invested, then just know that the first time you do it you're in beta, and maybe you're always in beta as you are practicing it, but that it's going to be fun, it's going to be engaging and you're going to be surprised in the best way.

Ryan Steuer:

So good. I love that we can all be in beta and that's a good place to be because we're growing. Lauren, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been awesome.

Lauran Kerr-Heraly:

Thank you.

Ryan Steuer:

All right, pbl Simplified audience. You just heard it Higher ed is. There's innovative places, there's innovative things happening. They want our learners to be prepped when we get there. Executive function is something that we can all be working on working on the agency piece and Lauren's advice is to go find somebody else who's passionate about it. So one way you can do that immediately is go to the show notes and you can follow Lauren on Instagram, right, and you can follow people from afar before you go visit. So continue to do that and you will continue to move your PBL movement forward. Go out and lead. Inspired 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.

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