Kim (00:00):

We don’t get that question a lot, like, why am I learning this when there’s a context to it and there’s a purpose behind why you need to figure out how to measure to the eighth of an inch, or you have to figure out how to take on some big vocabulary because that’s necessary to understand what you’re doing or how you’re going to solve something. The context is everything for the kids because they then see purpose, which makes them feel as if they’re super invested.

Dr. Sarah (00:31):

How do we teach our kids in a manner that best sets them up to learn, grow, and thrive? There are many ways to educate a child, and today we’re talking about one of my favorite educational models, project-based learning, or commonly referred to as PBL. Joining me for this conversation is Kim Mishkin. Kim has 32 years of experience as an educator and school leader. She started at a school called the Hudson Lab School in 2017 as a teacher and became head of school in 2021, and is one of the perfect people to shed light on the merits of this approach for teaching kids. In this episode, Kim breaks down what exactly a project-based learning approach is and how it differs from what we often see in more conventional American classrooms. She’ll also share what the research reveals about this learning model’s effectiveness and why getting students involved in designing their own learning journeys can have such positive results. Plus, Kim will offer some really practical suggestions for ways that any parent can build project-based learning inspired skills like critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and creativity regardless of the type of school environment your child may be enrolled in, because we all know that so much of learning takes place in the classroom, but also outside of the classroom. So I’m so excited. Let’s get started on this amazing conversation.

(02:03):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights so you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(02:32):

Hello. Welcome back to the securely attached podcast. Today we have Kim Mishkin here and we’re going to talk all about Project-Based Learning, which is I’m, I’m a big fan of this, so welcome.

Kim (02:49):

Thank you. Thank you. Yes. So I’m the head of school at a little school in New York called Hudson Lab School, and I’ve been here since they opened. They opened, this is our eighth year in operation and they have always been a project-based school that was very purposely picked as the teaching approach that we would be using at this school. And since then, if you know me at all, I drank the Kool-Aid a long time ago. I really fundamentally believe in my heart that this is the way kids need to be learning and this is the way education needs to move. And I’ll say I’m seeing pockets of that in the public system, that there are teachers out there getting things started or piloting project-based learning, which that makes me really happy. We’ve always wanted to be a beacon of PBL and fundamentally shift education capital toward this way because we see what we are doing is working, and so we feel very excited about more and more kids having access to that.

Dr. Sarah (03:47):

That’s so encouraging. So people have never heard of PBL or they’re not as familiar with this idea and they maybe don’t even understand that there might be different types of curriculum models. There’s the standard mainstream American curriculum education model and then there’s a couple, PBL is one of them, but I think that there’s a number of, I don’t know what you’d call them, alternative education models. Can you talk a little bit about briefly the history of how our education system got where it is today and then how PBL is maybe a response to that and how that got what the fundamentals of it are?

Kim (04:27):

Sure. So typically, and I was educated this way in the public system, it’s that form of education started during the industrial revolution and we needed factory workers. We needed people who all had the same set of knowledge and could be plugged into a assembly lines sort of system to churn out all the materials and things that we were engaging in back then. It hasn’t changed since, but the world has changed, and so now we’re kind of in this place where kids are in school still memorizing things, still spitting it back out on a test. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t remember half of what I learned in school. It went in one ear and out the other. I just held onto it long enough to get the grade and then it wasn’t internalized. There’s a lot of work around how we learned and the way that we learn best, and then when we internalize information and actually make it part of our schema, part of our brain essentially is when emotion is attached to it, and that can be joy, that can be frustration with something that’s not working. It can be all of the emotions, but if it’s devoid of emotion as memorizing things and spitting them back out tends to be, then there’s no reason for our brain to hold onto. We only needed it temporarily.

Dr. Sarah (05:59):

Yeah, imagine not just emotion. I could see how that would be a really core piece of how we learn, but context too, if I’m just memorizing a bunch of stuff for a science test versus perhaps saying, okay, I’m going to do sort of an experiment and I’m going to try to figure out maybe an experiment that I care about the outcome that would solve a problem that I have in my life, and I’m going to test that hypothesis out. And in doing that, I learn a ton of chemistry or whatever the principles of these core things that might be on a test, even if in good standard American curriculum models, I think those experiential experiments in the class before you test the kid is kind of important because if we’re just memorizing stuff and putting it into an output on a test versus being able to say, oh, I have a place to put this in my brain. I built the bookcases that this book is going to live on, versus someone threw me a book, I took the things I needed out of the book, held him in my short-term memory long enough to get the grade I want, and now the book’s going to drop on the floor into the black hole of the books. I don’t have any place to put the context.

Kim (07:21):

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think another thing that’s happening in that traditional education where we’ve put ourselves in this place where it’s all about the state tests, at least in New York, and I know I was in Ohio prior to this and that was the same there. So there are so many good educators out there that are frustrated by the fact that they know this is a better type of way to teach, but they’re forced to prepare for the test and that is exactly what you have to do. Those tests, each test is different. We think of it as a game, you got to learn how to play the game, and so they’re teaching to that test because that’s how they get their funding or that’s how they’re going to get ranked. And it’s unfortunate because those tests do require you to memorize a lot of unrelated things.

(08:06):

I have painful memories of taking vocabulary tests in science in particular where I would write the definition. I would spend time memorizing them and then I’d have the anxiety around taking the test. That’s another thing that project-based learning does not encourage that anxiety around test taking. We don’t have grades, we don’t have tests, we have assessments. We absolutely are measuring how the kids are doing, but it’s not that they’re going home to cram and then come in with a lot of anxiety and stress to share their learning. That’s not the way I think is a natural outcome of sharing what it is that you’ve learned. But you’re right that the schema, as I said before, is that all of the way those ideas are connected and if it’s just unmoored and floating out there as a fact, it’s never going to attach itself to anything else that, and so creating that context is extremely important.

Dr. Sarah (09:02):

And so PBL, was it kind of developed in response to that sort of the industrial revolution kind of based education system or it just evolved on its own? Did someone say, Hey, that’s not working, let’s do something different, or was it just how did that happen?

Kim (09:27):

Sure. So I don’t think it was in response necessarily, but although PBL works, the organization’s been around 35 some years have been doing this work, they have a lot of research behind what they do. That organization in particular I think was coming along because they saw a need in the system that the system was getting antiquated or that wasn’t leaning into how kids learn best.

Dr. Sarah (09:52):

And so if you were going to describe PBL in a simple break it down, these are the core tenets of this educational model, what are the most important things to understand about project-based learning?

Kim (10:06):

Sure. So one, it starts with some sort of intriguing question or challenge or problems to solve so that the kids kind of get on a mission together. Two, it does have to have a real world component. So that’s an important piece of understanding that the kids, they’ll bring a certain level of care to it when they think that it’s a real thing in the world that needs to be solved. It’s important for experts to be involved. It’s important for field trips to be involved because then you’re creating a 3D dimensional understanding of whatever it is that they’re talking about. It’s often has very hands-on pieces to it. It might mean making a thing, you’re going to build a chair, but it can also mean you’re going to create an experience like you’re going to have a fundraiser or you’re going to have put on a play.

(10:58):

It can be a lot of different things, but there’s definitely an active hands-on piece to it. And it always culminates in a presentation or we call it exhibition and it’s public facing, and so it can mean different things at different developmental levels, but it is important that they culminate in a way that is designed for the public. And the reason for that is because kids do really bring their best selves to when they know that they’re going to be showing this to a lot of people. So that’s kind of a hallmark of a good PBL project.

Dr. Sarah (11:38):

Got it. And this is like the whole year. This is all they do every day. Do they have classes, do they have tests, do they have grades, any of that?

Kim (11:49):

We’re still school, and I tease the kids about that we’re still a school. There are fundamental things here that need to be learned, and it can come in a lot of different ways, depends on your project. Sometimes I know I need to teach something that doesn’t fit in my project. It’s not going to seem natural, so I might just teach that as a little mini unit in a more discrete way. Often in middle school for example, we have time set aside for just skill building in all the subjects, and then projects are in the afternoon. So it can look different depending on what your project is driving, and B, what your kids need. If you need to stop and practice a particular thing that they’re not quite understanding, you need to stop and talk about some grammar. That’s okay. We do do that. So it depends on what part of the day you’re in. It can look a little more traditional or a little less traditional depending on what your kids need. But that’s the beauty of pbl. It really is kid driven. That determines how when you’re teaching, whenever we can, we weave it into the project. So I can get most of my reading and writing, especially at the older grades, but kindergartners need phonics and we do teach, have a phonics program, and you’re learning to read. That’s a different thing. You can’t expect the project to be teaching them how to read. So we definitely have reading groups and such. So it’s a blend. It really is.

Dr. Sarah (13:21):

That’s so interesting. I love that because I think that child led piece is also what I would imagine would be a critical hallmark of project-based learning. Not only are we following where the children are at, where their skill level’s at and teaching the sort of scaffolding whatever it is they need to know to do the project, but we’re also, we’re following their interests. It’s led by what There isn’t a set curriculum at the beginning of the year. You don’t know what the project’s going to be in advance. It unfolds as the kids find what they are drawn to, which I think is such an important and special piece of this type of academics.

Kim (14:00):

Definitely students are actively engaging in a real world problem or challenge. It’s extended inquiry, so it goes on for several months. For example, most of our projects are 14 to 20 weeks depending on the calendar. It’s very interdisciplinary. It’s all woven in to a topic that the students are studying, which allows ’em to go really deep because they’re spending a lot of time in the research phase and getting to really understand what it is that they’re grappling with. And that’s another part that’s really important is the grappling and being able to make mistakes and pivot and iterate on things are all part of the PBL world. My favorite part of it as a teacher I taught in the early years here at Hudson Lab School is that you’re on the journey with them. Now as a teacher, you have to be able to give up a little control, which sometimes is hard for people when they’re first learning how to do this because the students have a lot of voice and choice and autonomy to help make decisions with you in the project. Actually, let me back up a little bit. The PBL L model has actually been around quite a long time, and if you really look, it started the John Dewey 115 years ago maybe. But the Buck Institute now has been leading this for about 30 years, and they have a lot of research about why PBL works and yet many things in education, it’s slow going to make changes. So it is kind of something that I think we’re headed that way, but we’ll have to see, the public systems are dinosaurs. They go very slowly.

(15:47):

So yeah, fundamentally we teach it through the design thinking process. So every class has a driving question that is your big overarching question, not something you can Google. It’s very open-ended and they go deep on that. So for example, I had a question one year that was what can we learn from the past and the present of the Hudson Valley to affect its future? And so we spent, and that was a year long project so that we spent the first half. They didn’t know much about the Hudson Valley or the river, so we had to go, we studied the history of this area in the present, we studied the ecology of the river understanding. So I was able to weave a lot of social studies and science into that part of the project. And so the first step in a project is understanding and when you’re designing something, and when I say design something, I mean it could be a thing or it might just be an experience.

(16:48):

So you spend a lot of time connecting with experts. Experts are an important part of PBL L all along the way, either consulting to gain knowledge or to invite them at the end for feedback. We do a lot of field trips, getting kids connected to things that are happening in the real world. The Hudson River is, we connected with Riverkeeper, we connected with the Sarah Lawrence BZA Center down in Yonkers, and we took the kids, sing everybody. We took the whole school and then we got into the river and went staining. Anytime in a project that we can make it connect to the real world, experiential, looking to people who really do things like this in the world is important in a PBL model. And then we have to then decide, this is where I have the most fun, is when we get to the place where we’re like, okay, we know a lot about the past and the present of the Hudson River.

(17:43):

Now what are we going to do with this information? And that’s where the kids take it really. And they often teachers will have either brainstorm and vote or sometimes it becomes very clear what we should do as a group. That year, it was funny, the kids were super interested in a lot of different things. So I had kids that were really invested in the estuary and what fish were thriving there, et cetera. Another group was really interested in more of the military history. The Hudson was used a lot in the military as well as well, a variety of things. So we kind of got to this crossroads. We’re like, well, what are we going to do? And so the kids came up with the idea to do a 60 minute style show, like a broadcast news show. And so I was like, all right, let’s open it.

(18:33):

And so they opened WHLS, but then the beautiful part of a project is then, now that you have your idea hatched, the kids then have to make this come alive. And in this particular project, they wanted to build a news desk. They wanted it to look kind of sleek and fancy. So they built a desk, which they then lit up with the LED lighting. I didn’t know how to do that back then, so I learned along the way. They developed a jingle they developed, had to get mugs, so they had to develop a logo. This is all stuff that I never anticipated as a teacher.

Dr. Sarah (19:07):

It’s so cool. Literally it’s like a window into, I don’t know, when you have this open-ended project, the kids, it’s like the problems they identify to then solve are even in and of themselves completely. You wouldn’t have known if you had as a teacher had designed this curriculum, you wouldn’t, I’m imagining you might not have occurred to you to be like, oh, let’s also give them this assignment to do some mugs and learn some graphic design skills, but they just bring the problems to the project that it’s like this whole way for kids to come into it.

Kim (19:42):

Yes, absolutely. And a couple of different examples come to mind, but in this one, they had to learn how to film. So we did a lot of work with iMovie. They had to edit, we had to learn about the audio equipment, the lighting equipment. So those are all things I could not have anticipated learning alongside with them, but they came out of that project and boy were they good video editors and still are. Some of those kids have just taken that skill and just run with it. And so that was a really good example of a project that came together and the kids did most of the thinking once we got, all I knew is I wanted to teach a lot of history and science about this area and then got a life of its own, so to speak. And then we ended up, we had a lot of trial and error, which is the testing and refining phase in a design project where we are learning the equipment and failing and that’s okay.

(20:43):

We really try to celebrate mistakes here. That is how we learn and improve. And then finally, every project does end in an exhibition, which purposefully is for the public. And the reason for that is I see kids step up when they really bring their best selves when strangers are watching, not so much of the youngest grades. I think K one, your parents are plenty. They’re rock stars too in your eyes. And then as you get older, by the middle school time, we are bringing in scientists and professors and you just see the kids kind of throw their shoulders back and bring their A game.

Dr. Sarah (21:20):

And this makes them feel so important to have an outside professional coming in and listening to you and being interested in what you’ve built or created or learned or have to teach them how much self-confidence that imbues in a kid.

Kim (21:40):

Absolutely. Definitely. I see time over time in this particular one, we had culminated in a live stream like seven o’clock at night where we kind of streamed the show, but we shared it out to grandparents, friends, neighbors. There were a lot of people watching not just mom and dad, which meant a lot to them. I can think of another project last year. I’ll just kind of skip to the exhibition. Originally there was going to be a debate series here at school and we ended up getting the Hastings Community Center, and so they ended up setting up the debate there. We got the mayor on board who brought along some board members from the school board, and so they were judges and the level of engagement when the kids learned that we were going to be the community center and anybody could walk in off the street and that the mayor was going to run the debate, judging just, wow, they blew me out of the water. They were so fabulous. It was awesome.

Dr. Sarah (22:37):

And that’s the middle school, but you guys are elementary through middle school. You were telling me previously about the project that the kindergartners and first graders did and they had to pitch a board of directors to make a rain garden. Can you talk a little bit about that project?

Kim (22:56):

Sure. So the whole impetus of that project, the kids started from the very beginning. It snowed and a lot of them, it was a big storm last winter, and a lot of them didn’t remember snow really. It had been so long since we’d had a proper big snowstorm, and they got really fascinated about the arctic and polar bears, et cetera. Then they learned the ice was melting and the polar bears were struggling. And then they said, well, we can’t see the polar bears, so maybe we should look around our community and figure out what’s happening here with the water, which led them to talking about the Hudson River, which eventually led them to wonder where our water went, which opened up the idea of erosion and watersheds and they were into it, the water cycle, all of that. The teachers were able, and I can talk a little bit later about how a project is built, but they were able to touch on a lot of the core curriculum standards and the kids just didn’t even know it really.

(23:57):

And then they were on a walk one day and they realized that there’s a hill outside their classroom that was all washed out, and that was completely eroded. It was just dirt by that point, and it would just run off every time it rained. And they got on a mission to do something about that because they had already learned about erosion. So when they decided, what do you do when things are getting eroded? And the idea of Raining Garden came forward from one of the kids. So they studied why does the rain garden work? What kind of plants go in it, et cetera. They raised money to do a rain garden, but then they came to me and I said, ah, we don’t own this land. We rent here. You’re going to have to ask Andres, which is the building we’re in, you’re going to have to ask the leadership if you’re allowed to do this. And so they did. They put together a proposal and they asked the CEO and a couple other high up leaders to come and view the space and hear their proposal. So they got permission.

Dr. Sarah (24:58):

These are five and six year olds.

Kim (24:59):

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Sarah (25:02):

Unbelievable.

Kim (25:02):

It’s awesome. But again, it’s that expert piece, right? They’re like, they take it so seriously. They have to talk to somebody really important about this, and this is something we really think needs to be done. They were just on this kind of mission. And there’s another piece to this that is, there’s a real factor, and my son’s project last year was one of his favorites, and I kept saying, well, we’ve had some great projects. What’s so good about this one? And he was like, mom, it’s for real. It’s for real. So if we have a project where it feels like the teachers kind of picked it versus the kids, it does not go as well as when the kids feel like they’re doing something real in the world.

Dr. Sarah (25:46):

I can hear parents who might be less familiar with this education model being like, okay, so great, you do all this all day long at school. Where are they going to learn the reading and the writing and the math? How does this get layered in? How does the academic curriculum, this isn’t all just gardening, right, or filming, which are cool and important skills. And I think it’s important that we think about these more global impact skills and life skills. But I know parents who are ambivalent about leaving the standard American curriculum models of like, well, where will they learn these core academic skills?

Kim (26:35):

Absolutely, I get that question all the time. I’ll start with math because we’ve discovered that math really doesn’t need to be math, honestly. So we do have a standalone math class that looks a little more traditional. You just simply can’t get all the computational fluency and all the practice in a project. We can often get data collection or measurement often will be in projects, but kind of straight up long division that’s hard to fit in a project. So we do keep math a little bit on its own. However, when you go to look at social studies and science and reading and writing, the teachers, we have a document we’ve pulled together called The Elements of Learning. It essentially is just the New York State curriculum standards, but all kind of in one place, in one document. So we start there and we’ll sit together with their partners and they will look to see, all right, what do we need to do in social studies this year?

(27:31):

What topics do we need to make sure that the students are engaging with? Or what skills do they need to have? What types of writing do we need to introduce this year, et cetera. And we start to put things together that kind of make sense together. And so they select social studies, science, reading and writing that seem to play well together essentially. And then you can get at those things lots of different ways depending on what question you’re coming up with. Usually teachers kind of create the question and then the project takes on a life of its own from there. But you can create the questions with the kids too. So I might say, alright, everybody, we definitely are going to have to do a piece of persuasive writing. We are going to need to look into some chemistry. Maybe this is middle school, so we’re going to need to learn some basics in chemistry. We’re going to need to look at this era. Maybe it’s a civil rights movement. And then you’ve got to get creative to think about how can these things be put together under one umbrella that will make sense for the kids. But we do start with the concepts and skills that need to be showing up in that particular school year for that child.

Dr. Sarah (28:40):

It feels like almost like a reverse engineering approach of instead of how I think a lot of typical education models are, it’s like we have the curriculum, we have the things that the kid needs to learn, and now we’re going to teach them each thing with the hopes that they’ll eventually be able to put it all together on their own someday in life. Versus flipping that and saying, let’s look at the way life exists for these kids, the problems that get brought up in real life that need to get solved. Let’s follow kids’ natural interest to identify what problems do they want to solve because there’s that intrinsic motivation coming through and being reinforced. And then now we’ve got that piece and we will find opportunities to embed probably pretty organically and naturally these academic elements, but they’re already in a packaged context versus these disparate singular subjects that then we just hope that the kids will be able to integrate it, then apply to real life situations later, hundred percent if they come up.

Kim (29:57):

But the way I describe it is there’s a lot of connective tissue, a lot of context as to why we have to learn this. We don’t get that question a lot, why am I learning this? But I’ve certainly heard kids say that over the years, when am I ever going to use this? But when there’s a context to it and there’s a purpose behind why you need to figure out how to measure to the eighth of an inch, or you have to figure out how to take on some big vocabulary because that’s necessary to understand what you’re doing or how you’re going to solve something. So the context is everything for the kids because they then see purpose, which makes them feel as if they’re super invested. And that’s the beauty of PBL, that they’re in it deep.

Dr. Sarah (30:46):

Yeah, and like you said, this is not a super brand new way of teaching. There’s probably a significant amount of research and data that’s been done on outcomes. What are we seeing? What are the impacts that you’ve seen or that the research maybe shows in the way that this type of education model impacts academic achievement later in life, but also potentially career performance and career options later in life. And then I’m also curious, of course, because a psychologist on self-esteem, relationships, emotion regulation, all these sort of soft skills that I think come potentially resilience, grit, growth, mindset, all that stuff.

Kim (31:31):

Absolutely. Well, I think you threw a lot of questions at me there, so lemme think where to start.

Dr. Sarah (31:36):

I’ll break it down the research on academic and job sort of stuff, because I think that’s the fear is if my kids don’t go to this sort of typical school model, how will they get into college, which is going to be that typical school model. Your school doesn’t go to high school. How will they do in a high school and what jobs do they have access to? What does the research say about that?

Kim (32:02):

So part of the reason my founders started this school was that they’re not educators, they’re entrepreneurs and they’re working with CEOs of very large companies all around the world. And they were hearing a lot of complaints that students are coming out of college and they are not equipped to problem solve or to innovate. They just want to be told what to do. And so on the other side of college, there’s a real need and a void that we’re looking to similarly, I have a 10-year-old, I cannot begin to imagine what job will exist when he gets there. It hasn’t been yet. Just think about how fast AI is changing everything. So we have to educate students to be ready to problem solve, to innovate, to work together. That’s huge. And projects that’s all baked in a collaboration is a huge piece of project based learning.

(32:59):

And I’ll give you a good example. One thing that I see when kids have transferred in from other schools, especially if they’re a little bit older, like third grade, fourth grade, and they’ve been in another kind of setting, they ask three questions inevitably every time, is this good? Am I done? What do I do next? My kids don’t ask those questions because we’ve put it in such a way that they know what needs to happen next. They’re determining whether something’s good or not and they’re not spoonfed. And so I think that more traditional education is not serving kids. They’re becoming conformists, and that’s not what this world needs. We’re headed in unknown territory. And so we need to have students coming out of college that are equipped to figure things out essentially. And I see it with our students. When you start making presentations when you’re five and when you start speaking to essentially adults in real ways when you’re five, by the time you get to eighth grade, it’s a beautiful thing because they have such ease with tackling things, with presenting things, with collaborating, with taking the lead on things. Because over the years, we’ve asked everybody to take a lead on something. So as I said at the beginning, we’re a young school, but we have two graduating classes now. And the feedback has been phenomenal. They’re all thriving. And I’ve been checking in on them.

Dr. Sarah (34:32):

They’ve now gone to mainstream high schools that follow a general sort of mainstream American curriculum model?

Kim (34:37):

Yes, because unfortunately there’s not a school like us at the high school level in our area. So several have transferred to the local public schools, several, a couple have transferred to another independent school nearby that shares a philosophy with us in terms of whole child and really wanting to, it’s a very SEL based high school, but their academics are very traditional. And so our students have had to learn to adapt to that. And so far it’s been great because they come in, they have all those other skills that some of the high school kids don’t. Two of our freshmen went on to become student ambassadors the second week they were at school because they were so at ease with leading groups. And it caused a little ripple too. It was some of the older kids were like, wait a minute, what are these new freshmen doing here? But they were shining through. And so I feel like because we also spend a lot of time teaching kids how to tackle problems well, to sit and memorize and take notes and all of that sort of thing is easier than some of the challenges we’ve given them over the years. So I don’t see an issue with them having to ride out that traditional high school experience, possibly college because they’re just equipped in so many other ways to wrestle with whatever comes their way.

Dr. Sarah (36:02):

And I think that kind of speaks to the benefit of this idea of flipping the problem. Instead of teaching these disparate skills of I’m going to teach you how to write notes, I’m going to teach you how to study for a test. I’m going to teach you how to memorize facts, and then I’m going to teach you how to pass this test. And then asking a kid how to hopefully put that all together on their own in the end and be a critical thinker, teaching the critical thinking skills and then just understanding the notetaking, the the administrative tasks of being a student come get folded in. It doesn’t always have to be so explicitly taught, it’s there. It’s just they’re not sitting in a class being like, all right, now we’re going to practice the five structure paragraph and it’s just, we’re going to do that.

Kim (36:53):

That’s doing, who in the role really does the five paragraph essay as a living? That’s not a thing. That’s a construct that we’ve put into school. I think also nowadays, anything they want to look up is in their hand, the phone or the computer. So I’ll often tell parents the way we think about it, no, I’m not going to, the content is not necessarily the most important thing sometimes. So do I need the kids to memorize what happened in the war of 18, 12? Maybe not. Maybe they could go look that up if they’re interested in that. Do I need the kids to understand what the civil rights movement is? Yes, I do. So we really lean into the rich areas and not worry about memorizing facts because that’s a thing of the past. We’re not in a space anymore where we have to hold all that knowledge in our head. I think other skills have emerged as being way more important than memorizing vocabulary that you may or may not ever use in your life.

Dr. Sarah (37:58):

But trusting that if you need it, you could figure out how to find it. And that, I think, is speaks to this sort of interest in learning and acquiring the knowledge as the need presents itself because it serves some greater function or it helps you get where you’re trying to go. It’s really still aligned with the intention of the kid in that moment, which unfortunately, I think sometimes other academic models can sort of teach out of our kids. I work with a lot of kids and I don’t work in a school setting, but I am. And in parenting in general, this comes up all the time. Parents want to know, how do I foster resilience? How do I foster intrinsic motivation? We hear all the time in the parenting world, there’s all these Instagram memes about, don’t say good job, praise the effort, not the outcome. And I still think it’s totally okay if you say good job to your kid, but why? What is the function of that shift? Why are we thinking about praising the process rather than the outcome? And just we’re talking about little kids and parents and just the way we talk to them.

(39:14):

But I think that same idea is getting played out in the difference perhaps between a really test-based measurement-based, standardized testing academic model that’s praising the outcome, like the grades and the scores and these sort of outcome-based measures versus thinking about the process, being able to understand why am I doing something? How do I care about what I’m doing? If it gets hard and it doesn’t matter, I could work really hard at something and get a bad grade. So why not just work on the easy thing to get the good grade versus being like, that’s not really what the point is. There isn’t a grade dangling at the end of this. So it’s really about my motivation is to solve the problem. I’m not going to stop until the problem is solved. That feels like a very significant core skill to be teaching the future generations.

Kim (40:21):

I couldn’t agree more. I mean, just think about us in our adult lives, everything we do as a project. I don’t come to work and set a timer for 42 minutes to work on one thing and then completely switch to a totally different thing for 42 more minutes. It doesn’t make that I’ve been in this kind of project-based learning world so long, I think I can’t make sense of the other way anymore because it does feel very disconnected. And that’s not how the real world is when these kids get jobs either after high school or after college. This is how we function. We function together. We strategically think sometimes we got to take the lead on things. We need to create things. So the PBL problem solving model makes so much sense to me in that I’m not trying to, lemme back up here at my school.

(41:17):

The goal is not to get kids into college. It’s to prepare them for life. And we talk about it that way. Do I think they’ll get in college? Sure, no problem. I don’t worry about that at all. But I’m more worried about who they’re going to be in the world. And we talk about creating good humans, good thinkers. People maintain their curiosity and their inquisitive nature that’s so natural to kids. When kids come in into kindergarten, they’re just, everything is interesting. Everything is, they’re curious, but they want to know anything around them. And I see that kind of disappear as kids get older in other kinds of schools. I think about my own son, he would’ve been fine in the local public option. He would’ve done exactly what he is told. He’s a rule follower. He would be fine. I think he’d be a different kid than he is now.

(42:05):

Now he wants to be an engineer. He’s always kind of got opinions about things. He’s very, the other day in our school, we actually built, the kids are building catapults to fling pumpkins. The pumpkins after Halloween into the woods for the deer to eat. Amazing. And so they’ve iterated, they’ve had to tinker with it. It wasn’t quite working. So my son and a couple of the other kids gave up their recess to go figure out what was going on with it. They just really wanted it to work. And so they did. And a few kids kind of drifted off as it got hard, but a core bunch of them stayed to take it apart, put it back together, figure it out. So I had asked my son about that. His teacher had written to say, wow, he was really into this. He gave up his recess, et cetera. And I was asking him about the card the next morning, and he is like, mom, I’ve been thinking about it all night. I got to see Brooke as soon as I get there. I got to tell her I think I have the solution. And so it was just such a cool moment for these kids who are just, they didn’t even realize all the measurement they were doing or all the kind of physics that were involved. They were just invested.

Dr. Sarah (43:17):

And as I’m listening to this, obviously we’re painting a very nice picture. It sounds really awesome. And the reality is that PBL is, it’s definitely gaining momentum. And I think there are ways that it’s starting to dip into even standard public school curriculums, which is great. And I think that’s something to really advocate for. But if you’re parent listening and you’re like, okay, well that’s awesome, but I got a public school that I go to. I have no control over this curriculum, and I don’t want anyone listening to be like, oh God, I’m not giving my kid, the last thing parents need is more anxiety that they aren’t giving their kid a shot or setting them up for success. We know that kids thrive in all kinds of academic models. Some models are not optimal for everyone. I imagine that even PBL is not optimal for all learners, right?

(44:16):

Because it’s a lot of, there’s less structure for kids that really need that containment, that structure, that open-endedness could be really challenging for them. So I want to be very clear, there’s a lid for every pod. But also if you do think that like, oh man, this resonates with me. This would be a really amazing way to set my child up, but I don’t have access to this. What can parents do to take some of these ideas and just integrate them into their their life to talk to their schools about bringing it in a little piece, maybe an extracurricular in the PBL community? What are people saying to the greater community?

Kim (45:03):

Absolutely. There’s a lot you can do. PBL is not just a teaching method, it’s also a way of thinking. It’s a paradigm shift that we’ve made here. To move to a space where you’re happy to fail, for example, that is a big thing. That’s hard. Nobody likes to make mistakes. But when we try to frame it that that’s actually a beautiful thing. That’s how inventors figure out their inventions. That’s how we learn if we don’t stumble and grapple with things. So I would say do hard things with your kids. Let them celebrate failure and model for them. Like, whoa, that didn’t work. We better figure out another way to try that. Don’t tell them things, ask them questions. I think that’s another thing. Questioning is very big. And you’ll be surprised sometimes about where their minds will go. So I would say play games that have a lot of questions or simply just getting ’em off their device perhaps and exploring things with them and being curious with them. Making is a big part of PBL L can be, kids love to do things with their hands, so cardboard does not go wasted around here. So I would say get all those Amazon boxes, cut ’em up.

(46:24):

We’ve created at Home Shields in medieval times, and a big box is the best when it comes in and we create a fort or whatever taking apart too. That’s really fun. So if you have an old phone or an old whatever, tape recorder, take it apart. Get inside. The kids love to do that too, and that just brings up more questions. What does this part do? How does this work together? I would say that curious piece is so important. Whatever they’re curious about, get in there and let them just take the lead on things, be it finding books or looking for video about something that they’re interested in or whatever. It’s a lot of leaning into those natural impulses. Kids have anyway. They are naturally curious. They love to learn. So feeding those developmental drives I think is something that we as parents can just think about being really purposeful and thoughtful when we play our kids and what are we encouraging or saying or not saying. So being very explicit with kids, this is super interesting. Let’s keep going.

Dr. Sarah (47:40):

Yeah. Are there any books or resources that you recommend to a lay parent who’s like, oh, I want to learn more about this so that I can bring it into my home or bring it into even maybe bring it up with the school board or the PTA, but where’s a starting place for people to learn more about these ideas?

Kim (47:57):

Sure. Well, two books come to mind. One is more geared toward the educator, but it is the Project-based learning, kind of the original book that the Buck Institute, which now is called PBL Works, and there’s a website you could check out that is kind of the original fundamental starting place. I would say, if you’re interested in it from that lens, how is this done in schools? That’s the book you take to the school board and say, Hey, maybe we could have a teacher try this. The other book that I really value is Most Likely to Succeed, I’d have to stop and look up the author, but there’s also a documentary. It’s based off a school in California called High Tech High, which now has middle and elementary schools as well. And it really speaks to that piece of why we should be moving this way. This is what the world needs, these kinds of thinkers. And it’s a beautiful documentary that every time I show it or recommend it, people really do, as our assistant would say, get inspired. We tell everybody on our tours to go watch it encapsulates what everything we’re talking about.

Dr. Sarah (49:07):

Yeah, I’ll link those in the show notes, in the show description too, so people can find that easily. And if people are interested in learning more about Hudson Lab School, or if they’re local to the Hudson Valley in New York, how can they learn more about your school? How can they consider it as an option for their academic paths?

Kim (49:34):

Sure, sure. Well, first I’d start with the website, which is hudson lab school.com. You’ll learn a lot there. I encourage everybody to take a tour that can even just to see who we are in action, because you kind of feel it when you come in the door. You can really kind of get a taste of the spirit of this place and of project-based learning. So the tour is good. I would also say if you’re local and you’re not planning to leave your school, we have afterschool classes and camps that are all project based. And so a lot of local kids from the local river towns will take our afterschool programming to be able to engage that way. So that’s always an option as well. So those are the first couple steps, and then if you feel like you want to keep going, then we’d encourage you to apply.

Dr. Sarah (50:25):

Amazing. Thank you so much. This was so enlightening and wonderful, and I hope parents took something helpful out of this. Thank you for being here.

Kim (50:34):

Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. I clearly love Project-Based Learning and could talk about it for hours. So thank you so much for the opportunity.

Dr. Sarah (50:48):

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