BACK TO PROJECT BASED LEARNING BLOGS
By: Meganmarie Dennis, Middle School PBL Facilitator
Magnify Learning Facilitator
Community partners, this oh so crucial component of an authentic PBL project is often overlooked when first delving into the Project Based Learning world. You have this amazing idea for a project, but can’t seem to find that perfect community partner. Let’s just skip the community partner part. It will be fine, right? Wrong!
Let’s take some time to understand why community partners are so important for the success of your project and why you can’t fake them. I’ll share my own embarrassing personal experience, so don't worry, you aren’t alone if you’ve missed the boat on incorporating this part of a PBL.
What/Who are Community Partners?
Community partners are people, businesses, non-profits, and organizations outside of your classroom that make your project real. They can serve as Entry Events and starting points for the project, and give your students a call to action. They can also serve as resources throughout the project and are crucial in the evaluation of the project.
I often tell new PBL teachers to “put the blame” on the community partner, since they are the ones asking your students to do the project not you, as the teacher. We also call this “externalizing the enemy”. As teachers we are always asking our students to do this task or complete this assignment. They need an authentic audience who wants them to complete the project because it is something that is needed out in the community not just because you told them to do it.
Not only do these partners ask your students to complete the project, they are there to support them throughout the project. I’m a teacher. I didn’t go to school and get a degree in chemical engineering. How neat is it that if we are doing a project that needs that kind of input, my students can contact an actual chemical engineer? Don’t you think that will be more realistic and exciting for our students?
I’ll Just Make Up My Community Partner
Let me save you the trouble. I’ve already tried that, and it doesn’t work. Yes, the idea of finding real world people to come and interact with our students is daunting. Not to mention finding people that fit the kind of project that you might have in mind can sometimes be a lot of work. Just to give you a chuckle and a good reason not to fake a community partner, I’ll tell you my own story of when I made up a community partner.
I was so excited about the first project that I ever concocted: School Zoo. I wanted to combine our students social studies standards about European geography with my science standards of biomes. The idea was that someone at Majella National Park in Italy would contact my students and ask them research the habitats around our school to see if 5 of her animals would thrive in a learning center in Indiana.
Made up Entry Event Letter from my “Fake” Community Partner
Sounds fun right? Super realistic? Maybe not. Elena Liberatoscolli was a real person who worked at Majella National Park. I looked her up, found her info, and reached out. I didn’t hear back from her while I was constructing my project. I “wrote” an entry event letter to my students from her and hoped that she would eventually message me back. She never did.
Long story short, I went ahead with my project and my pretend community partner. What do you think one of the first questions from my students was? “Is Elena Liberatoscoli even a real person?” To this I could thankfully reply, “Yes, she was a real person. Here she is on the Majella National Park website. She just couldn’t talk with us in person.” Did my 6th grade students buy it? Not at all. So there went my authenticity. Again it was just another project that their teacher wanted them to complete. I put all of my eggs in one basket, and I didn’t have any additional community partners lined up for my students to get help throughout the project. Now it wasn’t a total loss. It was still a different and interesting way of learning the standards; however, this project lacked the authenticity that makes a PBL project magical. Believe me, I learned from that mistake.
Make it Real
What did I learn from my inexperienced mistakes? A real community partner is crucial for making the project real and meaningful for the students. Are you always going to have super involved community partners? Maybe not every time. Are they sometimes going to bale on you? Yup, sometimes they will, but the magic created by those partnerships that work is so fun to see. In my School Zoo project, my students knew that no one else was going to see their results. It was just going to be me, their teacher, like always. Their research and conclusions were not going to be used in the real world, so they were no more motivated than they would be for any other project or assignment. Let’s imagine how my project would have looked with an authentic community partner. I would have had a local zoo or refuge representative that was asking my students to help them design new habitats. Those representatives would come in as part of my project launch and would have served as my Entry Event. They would have asked the students for help, which would help create excitement and motivation. The representative would serve as an ongoing contact and provide info and feedback while the students worked on the project. Then the representative would decide in the end which student designs to use in their zoo/refuge. This kind of work is what the students would jump on. When someone out in the real world is going to use their work it automatically makes it meaningful! This gets them inspired because they feel like they are making a difference and being heard. This work isn’t just for a test or an assignment but a real need in the community (local, national, or international).
To ensure that there is a solid relationship and the students experience the authenticity take a look at the Six A’s for Authenticity & Adult Connections for Project Design Rubric. If your students are not connecting with adults then the authenticity piece is lacking. In my School Zoo project, my students did not interact with adults aside from myself. The next step in the right direction would be having an adult come in as a guest speaker or “Entry Event”, but again if adults are not involved throughout the process, students will start to see that their work will not be used in the real world. If you really want that exemplary component of adult connections, make sure they have multiple opportunities to interact with adults outside of school.
Community partners should be a part of the Entry Event and project from the very beginning. They are they help “train/teach” your students information or skills that are used in their line of work and that connect with the projects. Students can visit a location or worksite relevant to their project and work with adults in that field. With all of that interaction, students will see how the information and standards they are learning are relevant and used in real world situations and in professional careers. This provides the motivation for learning and understanding the standards and information because your students will see how the knowledge is relevant to their lives outside of school.
Ways to Incorporate Community Partners
TurboMill community partner helping students present the TurboMill to the school board.
You have to ensure you have a community partner that is asking your students to complete the project. There are many ways to incorporate them as I’ve mentioned above: have them skype in to give feedback to projects, have them come in as a guest speaker and serve as an expert for research, or have them come in to the classroom to launch the project. Have real world experts who help your students complete portions of the project along the way and provide meaningful feedback on ways to improve. Finally have your community partners be a part of the presentation piece. It is so powerful for students to have their work viewed and evaluated by real people outside of their teachers! In the TurboMill project our main community partner, Andrea, did a Skype call to propose the project. She wanted to help educate the surrounding communities on wind power and why it is so important. She lead them on tours of the facility and answered questions. Finally she brought a TurboMill in and helped with the final presentation to our school board. Our students could see that she and her company were investing time and energy into the project, which proved that it was important work. Combine her presence with the time of the school board to listen to the presentation and ultimately the installation of the TurboMill on our school roof and in the end our students knew that what they did made a difference. Their project actually had a positive real world end result!
How Do I Find & Keep Strong Community Partners?
Hopefully by now I have you convinced. You know you need to have a real community partner. The question is, how do you find a community partner? And once you’ve found them, how do you get them involved? Sometimes the first step is just thinking of places in your community that would be doing the same kind of work that you are asking your students to do. Are they researching habitats? What about a local zoo? Or maybe you can think of a group that needs help with a project/problem, and they are the ones to ask your students to complete the project. Maybe it’s a new business that is trying to get their name out. What better way is there to get publicity in the local paper than by coming into the schools and talking to kids? This happened with a new Wind Stream Technologies factory that opened nearby to produce TurboMills, and we had an awesome community partner and project come out of that. Really the list of people that you can reach out to is endless, but you also have to build a relationship.
A parent, who served as our community partner, showing our students how his solar panels work.
One method that I found helpful is to have my students help me create a list of potential community partners at the beginning of the year. I would have my students write to someone who had the job that they wanted someday. So we had to find people with the jobs they were interested in. Often they already know someone who is a vet, doctor, or hairdresser. If they don’t know someone, we have a running list, and I ask the students in all my classes if they have a relative or friend who has any of the jobs that we are looking for. Usually if we have some sort of connection with the person, they are more likely to write back to the students. This gives me quite the list of people that are willing to interact with my students plus the experience and expertise of their professions. One of our best community partners was a father of one of my students, who worked with solar panels. It was so neat to have him bring a solar panel in to show our students and eventually help us get one installed at school!
Check out the Community Partners slideshow from Magnify Learning for more details on where to find community partners!
Take Care of Your Community Partners
Once you find them, take care of your community partners. If they are awesome, you will want them to come back for other projects! Not only that, but by building a solid relationship with them, it just makes your project run that much more smoothly. Some partners are reluctant because they are busy so you want to make sure you value their time. If you have multiple classes throughout the day, your partner probably can’t take off work for a full day to talk to each class. Maybe they could talk to the whole grade all at once or record them presenting and show the presentation to the classes who missed it. Maybe they can’t get to your school, so instead have them Skype or create a video message, which makes is much easier for them to serve as a partner. Find out what works for them. Often when they see how powerful their presence is, they tend to want to spend more time in the school.
Help guide them along in the process. Usually when you first reach out to a partner, they might be open to helping but have no idea how to talk to the students or what you want from them. I’ve found that if I draft a practice entry event letter for them, it helps guide them. It lets them know what “breadcrumbs” (vocabulary, key ideas, concepts) need to be communicated to my students to meet the standards and help drive student need to knows. It also helps them decide what they want to talk about when they meet the students. Then they can alter the letter with their own information and even write their own ideas when they feel more comfortable. Check out this sample Agronomist Who Entry Event letter with breadcrumbs (content clues) to help lead students yet not give them all the answers. In this project, I worked with a local Agronomist who was asking my students to test the growth of his seeds. He helped me come up with the project and keep in mind information that he would actually use. I wrote a rough draft of an entry event letter and then he added in terminology and information. He then came in for the Entry Event launch and brought the students the seeds that they would be testing. For more on Entry Events, check out the Magnify Learning Entry Event Resources.
Make sure you stay in contact with your partners and thank them after the project is over. They will probably already see the benefits of their time spent in your classroom, but it is still nice to be thanked for their time!
Prepare Your Students
If you make it real, your students will notice the difference. It may be intimidating to them at first, but that excitement leads to motivation to do well on the project. They are being asked to talk to adults they don’t know, and they will need help how to do that well. There are many workshops you can do to help your students: model talking on the phone, writing emails, introducing themselves, and handshakes, etc. I’ve found that is often helpful to give the students the Entry Event letter from the partner before the partner comes in to school. That gives us time to work on relevant questions and prepare for a visitor. Make sure they understand the community partner is going to get a positive or negative impression of your school according to how the students act in their presence. Students will need to practice and prepare to ensure a productive and pleasant interaction with community partners. These are important Employability ( 21st Century) Skills that they will gain throughout the project.
Go Forth and Find Your Community Partner
I could go on and on about all the things I’ve learned by bringing the community into my classroom. The most important lesson though was realizing it is a crucial component of an authentic, successful PBL project. Whether you scour the internet, or find a connection through a student’s relative, make sure your community partners are real. Their involvement will vary, but each time they are included into your project and your classroom, your students gain an authentic, memorable, and meaningful experience.
For more details, check out Magnify Learning’s Community Partnership Resources.
Meganmarie Dennis began her PBL journey in 2009 after hearing about the training from her husband. This enabled her to implement PBL into her 6th grade classroom for 6 of her 8 years in teaching. She became the PBL innovator at her school and enjoyed involving and working with her cross curricular teachers on PBL projects. She loves the real world application of PBL and now enjoys sharing PBL with others as a Magnify Learning facilitator.
SIGN UP TO RECEIVE OUR PROJECT BASED LEARNING BLOGS & RESOURCES!