#394 – Building Strong Foundations: How Instructional Innovation and PBL Transform Teaching, with Dr. Jorge Valenzuela

If you are listening to the podcast with your instructional team or would like to explore this topic more deeply, here are guiding questions to prompt your reflection:

• What is project-based learning?
• What essential skills do students need in order to be life ready?
• How can project-based learning be used to help students develop essential life skills?
• Why is it important to begin with a need when developing professional learning?
• What is one action step that you can take based on the content of this episode?

• Lifelong Learning Defined (official website)
• Jorge Valenzuela (authored articles via Edutopia)
• Instructional Innovation+: Cultivating Teaching Teams Through Action Research (written by Dr. Jorge Valenzuela)
• Project-Based Learning+: Enhancing Academic Learning and Essential Life Skills (written by Dr. Jorge Valenzuela)

#394 Building Strong Foundations: How Instructional Innovation and PBL Transform Teaching, with Dr. Jorge Valenzuela

AVID Open Access
55 min

Transcript

The following transcript was automatically generated from the podcast audio by generative artificial intelligence.  Because of the automated nature of the process, this transcript may include unintended transcription and mechanical errors.

Jorge Valenzuela 0:00
The effect size of PBL is 0.78. 0.2 equals a small effect. 0.4 is the average effect. 0.6 is large effect. So 0.78 is a very high impact. So when PBL is done correctly, it’s got the potential to really accelerate learning.

Paul Beckermann 0:25
The topic of today’s podcast is Building Strong Foundations: How Instructional Innovation and PBL Transform Teaching with Dr. Jorge Valenzuela. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid.org. AVID believes that we can raise the bar for education. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:48
Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I’m Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:59
I’m Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin 1:03
And I’m Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann 1:05
And we’re here to share insights and actionable strategies. Education is our passport to the future. Our quote for today is from our guest, Dr. Jorge Valenzuela. In an opening description for his new book, he writes, “Project-based learning plus essential life skills equals student and educator success.” All right, Michelle, what are your thoughts on Jorge’s quote there?

Michelle Magallanez 1:33
I love this, and this is something that we are in the midst of building at AVID as well. So when we think about preparing students for the real world, not just for tests, we have to ask: Are we giving them opportunities to solve meaningful problems, collaborate effectively, communicate their ideas, and reflect on what they’ve learned? And that’s where project-based learning shines.

It provides a hands-on, immersive approach that helps students build not just academic knowledge, but the durable skills they will carry with them into their careers. And so for educators, it’s a chance to create learning environments that are dynamic, relevant, and deeply connected to real life. So I’m excited to be diving into how project-based learning can be a game changer, because when students build these essential skills through authentic, engaging experiences, we’re not just setting them up for success in school—we’re helping them thrive in college, career, and life.

Paul Beckermann 2:33
100%. And I love that this is written as an equation, kind of, because PBL is a powerful learning equation, right? And I think it’s something that all too often has taken a back seat, maybe to standardized testing and skill-and-drill kinds of things. So I’m really excited to take it off the back burner today, bring it out into the forefront in our conversation with our guest, Dr. Jorge Valenzuela. Welcome back, Jorge.

Jorge Valenzuela 2:57
Thank you, Paul. Paul, you have an amazing voice. It makes me rethink how I do my own podcast. And Michelle, I think you broke down PBL better than I could.

Paul Beckermann 3:12
All right, so a little bit of background about Jorge for those of you who didn’t catch his first episode with us here on Unpacking Education. Jorge is a performance and education coach, author, university instructor at Old Dominion University, and speaker at Lifelong Learning Defined.

Dr. Valenzuela empowers educators to lead with confidence and teach more effectively through training in instructional innovation, action research, PBL, STEM pathways, entrepreneurship, and life skills. In partnership with Corwin, Dr. Valenzuela supports schools in strengthening core instruction through instructional innovation and project-based learning, helping educators adopt student-centered and impactful strategies.

A published researcher, he also hosts the Lifelong Learning Defined podcast, where he shares practical insights to inspire and support educators everywhere. So once again, welcome back, Jorge. We’re so excited to have you here.

Jorge Valenzuela 4:09
Oh, me too, man. It’s a pleasure. As soon as I got your email, I was like, I remember Paul, I remember Michelle. Let’s do it.

Paul Beckermann 4:17
All right, fantastic. And we remember you. But some of our guests may not have tuned in to the previous episodes. So to get us started, can you just kind of reintroduce yourself to those listeners, and then maybe, since this is kind of a special moment for you, talk about what inspired you to release an updated version of your PBL book as well?

Jorge Valenzuela 4:37
Sure. My name is Jorge Valenzuela. I’m an education coach, I’m a speaker, I’m also an author. And when I say author, I am a researcher. I am working on—well, I just got my dissertation published. It’s in progress, all right. And now we’re going to work on some other journals.

It’s for integrating computational thinking, which is part of computer science, into instruction. And I made some discoveries in that—how it impacts teaching practice, but also how it impacts professional development. There was a discovery I made that I did not know, but well-structured professional development is going to build teachers’ self-efficacy and confidence in how they perceive what they’re doing better than the actual strategy itself, which I didn’t know that. So that’s something we learned, and we’re going to build upon that.

I’m a coach. I work in schools helping school teams and instructional leaders with instructional innovation and providing them a process. Part of the process is what I learned in the PhD program, but also in my old district job a long, long time ago, where we did something called instructional rounds using learning walks. And we would visit classrooms, and we would collect data based on what we saw, and then we’d look for themes in the data, and then we’d develop our PD—our professional development—based on what we saw.

So once we identified a need, then we would identify a solution. So a solution might be engagement, improving engagement, improving literacy. So now the PD became an intervention for that solution. So I’ve been doing that about four years now. I’ve partnered with Corwin Press, and we released a brand new book that explains the entire process. Most of the big ideas in the book are all over Edutopia. I’ve been writing them over the years, but now they’re an actual book.

And the same thing with PBL Plus. As I was in the district and I learned action research and how to be part researcher, part practitioner, and in the PhD program, I started realizing that even as a PBL coach—a national coach—that every teacher doesn’t need the same treatment. Every school does not need the same thing. How can we do innovative things if our core instruction isn’t right? And so I’m very dedicated to that in my career, and I’m working on expanding that and just meeting districts where they are using scalable frameworks and a model.

Now, as far as PBL Plus second edition, when it was released a couple of years ago, it was after COVID, right? It was after COVID. And in getting in schools and meeting students and meeting more teachers, that’s equivalent to doing more research and realizing that not every kid needs the same essential life skills. Essential life skills might be emotional intelligence, which the first book heavily focuses on, but some students might need knowledge of self—where they start to understand why they do what they do, right? Which is not the same as self-awareness. Self-awareness is knowing what you’re saying and what you’re doing, as opposed to the why. So that’s another life skill.

And then some young people don’t need those skills because they learned them at home. So they might need some, you know, career readiness—how to use AI, how to use ed tech in meaningful ways, how to implement the four Cs: creativity, communication, those things. So learning that not everyone needs the same thing, and also with how AI has exploded, where it’s changing how we work, how we plan, but it also is changing content creation.

Content creation, I believe, is not just the future—it’s now. So depending on what you do, how your content appears is very important. So I’ll just show you an example. And I didn’t know this until recently, but I’m learning. So all of my content is curated in a way where you see which part is speaking, which part is coaching, and which part is scholarship. And so when people are looking for it, they need to be able to find it, and the more professional and the better it looks, then you’ll have more impact.

So AI and social media and all these platforms that we’re all using—AVID included—it makes a way for us to show our content in rich, meaningful ways. So I think all of that, an amalgam of all those things, had to be included in a newer version. And so it came a little faster than most second editions, but I think we have a really good one, and I’m hoping that as we bring in other PBL coaches, once we get started, then I’m hoping that their insights and the things they learn that I couldn’t do become the third and fourth and other iterations of PBL Plus. The “plus” is what’s happening now.

Paul Beckermann 10:19
That’s cool, Jorge. And I’m so excited that you started this whole project based on need. It wasn’t, “Yeah, I think I’ll just write a book.” You saw a need, and now you’re trying to plug in some solutions to meet those needs. That’s cool.

Jorge Valenzuela 10:34
Yeah. I think anyone that has ever followed me—and I know that I met Michelle in Portland, and that’s where she heard me speak—I’ve never… So in my personal life, I’m already validated by my family and friends. I have a very strong circle. So in my professional life, it’s all about how do you pour into the audience? And so the audience, if they are reading your book, if they’re tuning into a podcast, if they’ve hired you to speak, it’s not for them to validate me. That validation already came in the fact that they’re listening, in the fact that they’re reading.

Now it’s about pouring into them. And I think a lot of folks make the mistake of starting with their origins as opposed to what their conversion is. An origin story—I think people only want to hear it if you’ve accomplished something great, and we haven’t, right? Like, we’ve done some great things, but we’re not like Barack Obama or someone like that, right? So no one cares. But your conversion stories are the things that you overcame in life. And so if you start there, people need those things, right? And then they lean in a little bit closer because it’s going to help them.

And I’ve always led that way. And even when I made the mistake of not leading that way, I’ve always auto-corrected. And so all of my work now is innovation, right? Innovation using action research. And I think it’s better that way because you hear a lot of people online, especially, and they’re dropping a lot of opinions. But as we know, as educators, we should be making inferences, making decisions based on fact and evidence.

Michelle Magallanez 12:30
There you go. Interesting times at the moment. But what I really appreciate about you—and I’ve followed your work for years—is that sense of reciprocation, that you’re working so closely with the audience, the educators, and really listening to what they need and being able to provide that feedback. And so it’s so beautiful to see as you’re thinking about future editions of this work, really incorporating the people who are using it and their opinions and where education is going in the future. I love that.

But to focus on what you’ve done now, your book outlines those five key elements of the PBL Plus framework. And so let’s begin really with understanding the elements of the research-informed PBL, which is at the heart of this work. And so what does that look like in practice? And how is it different from traditional project-based learning?

Jorge Valenzuela 13:21
All right, so there’s PBL, and then there’s a “plus” at the end. So it’s still traditional PBL. As a researcher, I have to honor previous research, right? I can’t act like, “Well, it’s not important.” It’s extremely important, and project-based learning is the foundation of PBL Plus.

And let’s look at research for a moment. The effect size of PBL is 0.78. And for folks out there that may not understand what that means, let’s break down effect sizes using John Hattie’s scale, which is widely used in education. 0.2 equals a small effect—there’s no impact there. 0.4 is the average effect or the hinge point. 0.6 is large effect. So 0.78 is a very high impact. So when PBL is done correctly, it’s got the potential to really accelerate learning.

So in Chapter 1, I address the high-quality PBL framework, which is part of Element 1. Project-based learning is a research-based instructional approach. It’s a teaching methodology. It’s a way to teach. It’s built on constructivist learning, where learning happens along a continuum—not in one day, not in two days. Projects are a process.

And all the PBL experts back in 2018, they all got together and they designed this framework. So it’s got six elements: intellectual challenge and accomplishment, authenticity, public product, collaboration, project management, and reflection. So these six things—what they are is the student experience.

So my version of PBL, or my brand of PBL, it honors that research. But then there’s a “plus” based on the research I’ve done in the last 10 years of visiting 31 states, over 80 cities in our country, and being in high-performing, low-performing, rural—you name it—and just seeing what people need, and then being able to now take all that into the “plus” and just making it where, like, it’s a buffet. You take the parts you need and you leave the parts that you don’t. And so essential life skills is part of that “plus.”

Paul Beckermann 15:56
Speaking of the essential life skills, let’s talk about that a little bit, because that brings in another element of your framework here. How can teachers—first of all, maybe, what are those? And then how can teachers intentionally build those life skills into a PBL experience?

Jorge Valenzuela 16:13
So essential life skills is just very simple. It’s life skills. It’s skills that young people—really, all people—need in school, after school, just for life, right? And that can mean a lot of different things. In the book, I have a category of three main ones, which is knowledge of self, emotional intelligence, and also career readiness. But the way that the teachers—I believe the way that they should be implementing life skills—is survey the kids and survey the parents. Get to know what they want to really focus on. I think that’s extremely important.

So knowledge of self is when young people learn how to know themselves. Now, all young people don’t know this because they don’t all have a conscious adult in the home that is helping them understand themselves. So what should they be known about themselves? Why they do what they do, their values, their beliefs, aspects of their culture, things like that.

Now, emotional intelligence—it really pertains to self-awareness, social awareness, and responsible decision-making, which we all know about that SEL. But like I said before, when you’re focused on, let’s say, career skills, those are soft skills like the four Cs, but also how to use emerging technology safely, ethically, and for the greater good—just like artificial intelligence—and also how to explore careers.

All of that is in the book. There’s even an inventory. Let’s say young people don’t know what they’re into or what they want to learn about. There’s an inventory and there’s a curation that they can explore that has art, music, engineering, law, health and medical, and technology—you name it, lots of options for young people.

Paul Beckermann 18:13
That’s great, you know. And that’s one of AVID’s driving missions too. It’s that opportunity knowledge, right? How do we help kids really know what the opportunities are out there? Because if we haven’t been in a circle where those things have become evident to us, we don’t know. We’re kind of left out.

Jorge Valenzuela 18:29
Yeah, like my entire life, I basically did what everyone told me to do, right? As a kid, I was very compliant. I went to school, I went to college, I got married, I had children, and I thought that adults knew better because adults back then took being an adult very seriously. But as I’ve gotten older, I realized that I never got to really explore my interests and my passions until I was in my mid-30s, and look at what I’ve built in 15 years, right? Imagine if I would have learned that back in my adolescence.

Paul Beckermann 19:12
Yeah, so becoming more authentic to you, right?

Jorge Valenzuela 19:16
Exactly. And so PBL Plus, it allows young people to explore the things that they like, the things that they’re into, because I think that’s more important than actually trying to monetize something. If you develop how you think, how you learn, and the things that you do, and you take that with today’s tech—AI tools—and with making content, you have a career right there just starting out. And then as you learn different skills, you can integrate that into all the things you do.

Michelle Magallanez 19:58
I love this conversation, Jorge, because I think what is so important in what you’ve done is you are giving students the language that they need to build that knowledge of self, to build their SEL—their social-emotional learning skills—and think about what do I want to do based on my own passions and interests in the future? And I think all of that really comes together beautifully in what you’ve talked about in terms of knowing your students to inform your teaching practice.

So important to educators. And here you emphasize something that I think is so important, coming from a design thinking background, and that is empathy mapping. And so why is it so foundational in project-based learning, and how can empathy mapping help shift a teacher’s focus?

Jorge Valenzuela 20:48
John Hattie once said, “See learning through the eyes of students,” meaning we have to know them both as people and learners. Knowing them as people is knowing their interests, their goals, and their assets. Knowing them as learners are their academic needs, their career needs, and their life skills needs.

And if you think about it, in education, we’ve got three buckets of learning: academic, we’ve got career, and life skills. So if we start to know what those needs are in tandem with their interests and their goals and their assets, that’s knowing them as people. All the empathy map is, is just a tool for helping us to get to know them in those areas so we can make informed instructional decisions as a teacher.

And I think Zaretta Hammond said this, which I was really impressed with. This statement, or this way of thinking, is that being culturally responsive is building a relationship with kids. And I believe it’s like what Hattie said—seeing learning through their eyes—so that you can make the learning partnership that is needed so you can give them the tools and frameworks for them to level up in their learning. Yeah. Knowledge of students is knowing them.

Michelle Magallanez 22:05
And then pulling together the different frameworks and making them really relevant to teachers.

Jorge Valenzuela 22:09
And as a researcher—well, that’s what I learned in the PhD program. As a researcher, the importance of being able to do that, right? Because then you’re simplifying the very complex for people. And that’s what teachers need. That’s what all people need, right? They need things explained in a way that they understand, not the way that you got it. And that’s what I aim to do with everything I do.

Paul Beckermann 22:37
That’s great. And you know what? I want to take this idea to PBL now, because everything that you’re talking about, you’re starting with the learner, and I love that. I mean, that’s where we should be starting. And now we want to design projects that are relevant to our students, but we’ve got a really diverse audience out here, and they all have different interests and things like that. So what advice would you give to educators who want that relevant experience for students, and they want to move beyond a cookie-cutter project—this one-size-fits-all? How do they do that in a PBL sense?

Jorge Valenzuela 23:09
So there’s one project that’s in the book. It’s in Part 2 of the book. Once I break down what the framework is, I provide another framework. Like I said before, it wasn’t until my 30s that I started to think for myself, and I created a framework that, if teachers implement this, it’ll allow young people to be able to explore their interests, if they have any passions, explore those, but then find purpose in it.

So Step 1 in the framework is not even jump into passion or interest—it’s to understand the causes of happiness and stress. When I visit schools, a lot of young people don’t want to be there. A lot of them don’t feel that school is really relevant to their lives right now and what the future is for them. So I think that we have to help kids help themselves right now.

So what I say is this: there’s external things that can make someone happy. That’s true, like a brand new job or a brand new car or a relationship or money. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is happiness can also come from within, from doing things that we like or that we love doing or that we enjoy. So have kids assess individually for themselves what makes them happy, and then encourage them to do more of those things. And as teachers, we can help them by personalizing projects, and we can do that just once a semester.

And also stress. Stress can come from external factors, but research also shows us that stress can come from within, from doing things that you don’t want to do. So I think young people need to learn that at times we have to do things we don’t want to do, but we don’t always have to do them. And so we should avoid the things and the people that cause that internal stress.

So once they know what makes them happy and stressed, and after making that very important distinction that even adults haven’t made sometimes, then Step 2 is to now consider your interests and your passions, right? And there’s many ways of doing that, but in the book, you know, I have an inventory of things you can ask them. It’s a survey and things that they can internalize and then put forward.

And then Step 3 is to set some goals around the mastery and the accomplishment of something within that interest. For example, my interest might be speaking. So now I have a goal. So my goal is to be a top-tier speaker, let’s say. So that is part of goal setting—identifying where I want to go. But now I have to manifest through finding experts, repetition, practice, 10,000-hour rule, all those things. Now I have to find what the goal attainment steps are. It’s two different things. A lot of people have goals, but because they don’t have the steps, then they become wishes.

So Step 3 is all about setting a timeline and finding the right people, the right experts that are going to help us. I see a lot of people that say that they have imposter syndrome and they don’t feel that they’re ready, or they’re not really securing themselves. Personally, I feel that a part of that is from listening to the wrong people. Young people should know that we should—that they and we should—never be listening to anyone who hasn’t accomplished what we want to accomplish. It’s a waste of time. So that Step 3 is all about that.

Now, Step 4 is now applying the 10,000-hour rule, which is inspired by Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm has a book. It’s called Outliers. And in the book, he says that—well, his research shows that people at the top of their field, they all have the 10,000-hour rule in common. That’s three hours a day, 20 hours a week for about 10 years. So in the book, it breaks down how young people can start that entire process.

Step 5 is now finding purpose by taking what they’ve learned in this entire process and using it to help other people. Research shows that we are powerfully positioned to help the person most that we used to be. And so helping them find purpose in helping others—I think it’s an important thing because you don’t even have to be passionate or be an expert in anything in order to find purpose.

And so there’s this framework, and this project, it’s presented in the book as a standalone activity. So let’s say a teacher doesn’t want to do a project, so they can just have the kids do the inventory, and then they facilitate the entire process. Or it could be an actual PBL unit. But my goal really is to just help young people. And there’s even an e-book version that’s on my website for adults because I realize a lot of adults haven’t done that internal work.

Michelle Magallanez 29:05
Yeah. How many people you meet are like, “I’m 40 years old and I still don’t know what I want to do with my life”?

Jorge Valenzuela 29:11
Well, it’s weird. It puts me—well, let’s be honest, right? Like, if you go online, you see a lot of people being upset. When you figured out this part, you already figured out how to make yourself happy. You already figured out how to drown out the noise and not focus on things that you can’t control, and then try to help the people that you can help.

Paul Beckermann 29:38
Yeah, if we can help our students get to that point, right? To find their joy? Well, what a gift that we are giving them.

Jorge Valenzuela 29:46
It’s like a person being on an airplane. They always tell you, before you put the mask on your kids and on your wife or your partner, you got to put it on yourself first. And so for me, you know, it’s sad to see people so upset and so upset about where things are in their life or the country or whatever. But if you focus on the things you can control, starting with you, that’s half the battle right there.

I know this. I grew up in poverty. I grew up the hard way. I’m not trying to do all that again. I’m not trying to feel that way. I’m not trying to let anybody make me feel that way, if I can help it.

Michelle Magallanez 30:29
Yeah, and I think that’s huge because students today, they’re so impacted by what they see in media. And giving them the tools that they need to think about who they are and what they want to give back to the world at such an early age—I think this framework would be powerful, as you said, whether it’s implemented as “let’s work on the knowledge of self and how these skills are going to translate into everything that you do for life,” or within the context of a really relevant, socially responsible project experience.

Jorge Valenzuela 31:04
That’s awesome. And one thing I do is, as I develop new frameworks by looking at research, I turn them into articles before they actually become a book, and we try them in the field. So I put the Edutopia article that has the framework, that has the inventory—put that in the show notes. Let people try it so they don’t have to buy the book if that’s not what they want to do. But I think it’s an important thing because for me, it hasn’t made me happy because I don’t think that we can be 100% happy on Earth, but it’s made me content, and it’s made me very appreciative of all the good things.

Michelle Magallanez 31:46
Yeah, and in turn, that you’re able to give back so much because you have that sense of contentment in self. And so wrapping up what you’ve done within this book, that framework is so important. But there’s another piece that you highlight, and that is the importance of providing timely feedback. So why is frequent feedback critical in PBL, and what are some practical ways teachers can gather it and use it throughout the project process?

Jorge Valenzuela 32:17
Well, feedback helps all people, not just kids, improve their work in and out of projects. In PBL Plus, I intentionally weaved in having the kids do their content creation, do their product design in drafts. So whether young people are working on a performance task or a full-blown project, they’re going to learn how to create and design what they’re doing in drafts—draft 1, 2, and 3, and so on.

At each draft interval, they’re going to get feedback from either their peers, from experts, or from their teachers. It all depends on where they are in the project. That way, they learn the value of improving and building knowledge as they go along. It’s knowledge construction instead of the attitude of one-and-done and then having blind spots about what good work really is.

In the book, we use a feedback protocol that young people can repurpose for any product, for any project. And even the teachers in my PBL Plus workshop, as they’re designing their learning experiences for their students, they’re getting feedback in three intervals using the same protocol. So they’re practicing what to do so they can now do it with the kids.

In the book, there’s also a single-point rubric that any teacher can use. To edit, using the learning goals from the project, and putting the learning goal or the “I Can” statement into the actual rubric, and leaving the other columns of “emerging” and “exceeds expectations”—leaving those blank so that young people can write in why they’re emerging or why they’re exceeding the target. It’s a powerful way of aligning learning outcomes with what kids are actually doing, and what they’re doing is follow-through in their transfer.

Michelle Magallanez 34:14
Yeah, that’s great. And it’s just that pedagogical sense of a student really owning their learning process and that they’re responsible for their own assessment. And it’s just so timely because that’s the direction—well, hopefully that education is going—with shifts at the Carnegie Foundation, where we’re really seeing that competency-based learning being embedded in the classroom and also respecting what’s happening outside of the classroom and those skills kids are bringing to the table. That’s awesome.

Paul Beckermann 34:43
And I want to say hooray for the single-point rubric. I’m so glad that you’re amplifying that. Where was that for most of my career? Because honestly, it’s kind of a game changer because it opens up so many possibilities, and it takes the minutiae maybe out of it to a certain degree and lets kids just kind of grow where they need to.

Jorge Valenzuela 35:07
And it stops wasting teachers’ time of having to make all these tools to have all this information that no one’s going to use anyway.

Paul Beckermann 35:17
Well, now one thing that has been changing in addition to popularity of the single-point rubric is that AI has kind of entered the equation, right? I mean, I don’t know what’s been more disruptive than AI the last number of years—in good and challenging ways alike. But as we look at artificial intelligence in the realm of the PBL process, without losing the human-centered learning that’s at the heart of the framework, how do we integrate AI into that?

Jorge Valenzuela 35:48
I might have said this earlier—it’s just in getting work done more efficiently, more effectively. I know a lot of people like to focus on the ethics of AI, and that’s extremely important. But AI is here to stay. Bottom line, it’s here to stay, and we can either be upset about it or we can use it in ethical and important ways.

Young people need to see it modeled. They need to start using it for their research as a thought partner as they’re designing, and they need to start using tools that are going to help them in that content creation, in that design, so that they can compete with what’s happening out there today.

Because honestly, I might be wrong—I’ve been wrong before—but the way I’m looking at entrepreneurship… See, as an education consultant, I’m part speaker, part coach. That’s true. Part teacher. But I’m also a business owner. And if you look at what AI has done to content creation on social channels, on websites, online, virtually—it’s completely changed the entire game in a very short time. And I believe that if you’re a business owner that doesn’t have a very established brand, like from 50, 60 years ago, you’d be left behind.

So why not get them started now? Why not train our teachers on how to use it as they design projects, as they’re finding lessons that are personalized for individual students, right? Using it to take the guesswork out of having to go buy content, having to go do all this research—it’s right there. And learning how to engineer prompts that are going to get them what they need, and then using the right tools to now make their content, whether it’s a project, whether it’s a lesson, whether it’s a blog, whether it’s a podcast, whether it’s a newsletter, whatever. Just use the tools for what you have to do right now, and then you’ll eventually get the knowledge for the things that you don’t know how to do or that you might want to do later on.

And I think that’s how it should be used, and that’s how it should be integrated into PBL for young people and for the adults.

Michelle Magallanez 38:18
And what I love about that is because so often we see people talking about learning about AI literacy and how to use AI in computer science classes, CTE, etc., where what you’re talking about is this is relevant in every content area.

Jorge Valenzuela 38:36
And it sounds really great when someone is able to break down language models, right? And someone is able to break down bias in AI, which—these are important things—but people need to know how to use it. And yes, ethics is weaved into the book. All of that’s in there because we have to understand who’s developed these models and how they can be used in the wrong way. But we also have to learn how to use them in our work.

Paul Beckermann 39:09
As do students, right? I mean…

Jorge Valenzuela 39:11
Oh yeah. Yeah, the new administration is going to sign the new bill. Exactly. It’s happening. And I’ve been in schools where it’s been banned, and the kids are still using it because they find a way around the firewalls. But now it’s going to be mandatory. I was just asked, “Hey, Jorge, how are we integrating AI into the PBL workshop?” And that’s in San Diego. Someone just asked me that. So even if you don’t want to do it, you’re going to have to do it because people are asking for it.

Paul Beckermann 39:43
And kids are going to need to get their hands on it because you can’t really just learn it by hearing about it. You’ve got to get in there and experience it.

Jorge Valenzuela 39:51
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think for some of these teachers that are nervous about, you know, the openness of it, if you leverage a tool like School AI or something and build a custom space for those students, you can build some guardrails around that and still allow them to learn that experience.

Jorge Valenzuela 40:10
Definitely. And I think that we’ll see a lot of that. And schools should be careful, though, when they’re using a tool. You know, they have to understand the knowledge base and what’s that knowledge being used for, especially when it’s children’s information and your own information—your intellectual property—all these different things. So just be mindful of that.

I like ChatGPT. I have the Plus version. But the nice thing that I like about it—and I asked it, “How are you using my information?”—it describes it: “It’s only for you, Jorge,” you know. So, you know, just be mindful of those things. But yeah, use it, learn it, and use it for the greater good—helping others, finding purpose, your passions, your interests.

Paul Beckermann 41:02
All right. Well, part of the greater good is adding to our toolkit. So let’s hop into that section of our podcast.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 41:11
Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 41:19
All right, toolkit time. Michelle, I’ll let you go first. What do you got for the toolkit today?

Michelle Magallanez 41:24
This has been such a rich conversation, Jorge. It’s always so great to have you here, and congratulations once again, Dr. Valenzuela.

Jorge Valenzuela 41:33
I appreciate it.

Michelle Magallanez 41:34
For me, the toolkit is what you talked about in terms of the framework, and I’m so excited that you’ve made it available as an e-book because I think this is not only powerful for students to really help build a generation of thinkers who know themselves and know meaningful ways to engage with their community—which I think is so important right now—but there’s so many people in the world who could benefit from being able to take that moment to meaningfully walk through this framework, to learn about themselves and what’s really meaningful for them and how they can give back.

Because I think with so much happening in the world, sometimes it feels impossible to identify what’s that thing that I can do. But this provides a way, step by step, to give people that opportunity. So thank you for sharing that with everyone. I think that’s an amazing gift.

Jorge Valenzuela 42:27
Yeah, and that’s what I hope that my PhD will symbolize. Instead of it being a trophy, it’ll be a tool that would be used for the greater good of solidifying and blessing these frameworks and these tools because they are research-based. You can look at the article I dropped—all the research is there for each step. In the book, of course, it has more, but it’s based on theory. It’s grounded in theory, but it’s also grounded in practice. I lived it.

And actually that framework was developed because—and this is where I met you, Michelle—I was invited about two years ago to do the keynote at CSTA. CSTA had a forum. It was in Portland, and I was invited. And although I am a computer science major, I’m more steeped in the pedagogy aspect of education because that’s where the real need is. And yes, integrating educational technology—these things are very important, and I do that—but my main focus is instruction. And if I’m talking about tools, it’s how it’s going to help instruction.

So I reached out to a friend that understands CSTA and that audience very well. And I’m like, “What should I really keynote about?” And he said, “Jorge, you are the poster child for someone who found their passion, perfected it, and has implemented it everywhere. Show the teachers how to do that.”

And so at that conference, a version of this was what I had talked about. But then as I got a little more grounded in the research and making it practical and going into schools and helping teachers implement it—and it was really just from tracing my own journey backwards and then looking at what other models and frameworks say works.

Michelle Magallanez 44:37
And I just have to say, it’s so funny because speaking with people who’ve done their PhDs, when you reflect on the topic that you’ve chosen, it is so personal to who you are and what you do. So it’s amazing to hear that theme continued here. So congratulations.

Jorge Valenzuela 44:55
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for folks that are considering a PhD, doctoral students learn how to create knowledge. That’s the difference. We’re not just studying knowledge. We are creating knowledge. And if you have a vision, you have to become the embodiment of that vision. So doing research and then implementing it allows you to live it.

Michelle Magallanez 45:22
I love that.

Jorge Valenzuela 45:23
And that’s the important thing—it’s your receipts.

Paul Beckermann 45:30
That’s awesome. I almost feel like the toolkit is pretty full already. I’m just going to drop just a little reference to something that we have in the AVID Open Access realm. You’ll find an article collection there called “Empower Students Through Creativity and Choice.” And I think it kind of piggybacks off a lot of the topics we’ve been talking about today. It gives teachers ideas of how students can use audio, video, writing, coding, multimedia mash-ups, things like that, to maybe open up possibilities for students in ways that they can create. And perhaps that can be somehow connected with Jorge’s inventory that he’s talked about.

Jorge, you get a chance to drop in the toolkit too. I know you’ve been dropping stuff the whole time here, but anything that’s just kind of hanging there that you think is like an actionable piece that you want to add in?

Jorge Valenzuela 46:22
Yeah, just one thing. So Instructional Innovation Plus: Cultivating Teaching Teams Through Action Research is going to be released through Corwin Press, my professional development partner and my publisher, mid-May. Project-Based Learning Plus will be re-released in July, mid-July. Please get these books. They have the frameworks, they have the tools that you’ll need to do it on your own, or realize that you might need a coach. And then y’all can bring me in, and then eventually bring in other people that will be implementing these as well.

Paul Beckermann 46:58
It’s awesome. Double Valenzuela coming out in the books.

Jorge Valenzuela 47:03
And years and years of work. They’re an amalgam of years of research in the field and failing a lot of times—failing more than succeeding.

Michelle Magallanez 47:13
Thank you so much for saying that. Can you say that again? Because I think so many people are afraid of failure, but failure really leads to your success.

Jorge Valenzuela 47:20
It does if you’re following the right methodology. So if you look at how knowledge is developed—so human beings, before we were researchers, we were artists because you can see in anything you do, it’s part science if you’re doing it right, and it’s part art. Like being a teacher—that’s what pedagogy is, right? It’s part art, it’s part science.

So the art part is looking at what the research says works for lesson design, how to facilitate, how to engage, how to have them collaborate, research—all these things. But your art is how you do it.

So humans, before we were researchers, we did art. We followed what we felt and what we thought. But if you look at the PhD program and what the process is—you’re trying to study something or solve a problem or do something in a topic that you’re passionate about. Well, you have to address what the problem is. That’s Chapter 1. Then you got to look at what’s been done. That’s Chapter 2. That’s your literature review. And most likely, there’s been a framework, a tool, or a model. There’s something out there that’s already been done.

So you take that prior research, and now you implement it into your own design, right? And then you now have to collect some data, see what works, see what didn’t work. And sometimes you’ve affirmed that previous thing, or sometimes you’ve created something new.

Paul Beckermann 48:58
That’s awesome. It’s like the whole brain, right? The left and the right side. So, hey, we’re using our entire brain. What a novel experience. That’s awesome. I love that perspective. Yeah. All right, Michelle, guess what? It’s time for that one thing.

Music 49:17
It’s time for that one thing. Wow. For that one thing. It’s that one thing.

Michelle Magallanez 49:30
What I really appreciate about what you’ve shared, Jorge, is the big picture idea that not only for our students, but for ourselves as educators and just as adults in our communities, really thinking about how we’re going through our existence with that knowledge of self, comparing that knowledge of self with our emotional intelligence, and really thinking about what do we want to do as our career evolves.

Because as we know, careers aren’t just one and done. We can continue to evolve and change over time. And what is that narrative we tell ourselves about who we are and how we’re growing that impacts our trajectory into the future? So I really love how you’ve created sort of that triumvirate and giving people the tools that they need to think through what that could look like for them.

Paul Beckermann 50:25
I am right on board with you there, Michelle, with that. And I also like the fact that project-based learning is a vehicle that we can use to make a lot of these things happen. I love that Jorge talked at the beginning about the research that underlies project-based learning and how it does have this large effect size, and it is research-based, and it can impact learning in really great ways.

Because I think a lot of times teachers shy away from it and think, “Oh, it seems kind of just loosey-goosey out there, and I’m not sure that it’s really going to have the impact that it should.” But it does, and it’s super powerful, and I encourage people to take a really strong look at it. Jorge, you get a one thing too. What’s your final thought for our listeners today?

Jorge Valenzuela 51:12
If trying something in your classroom intimidates you—like giving kids more leeway or more autonomy—do the things that scare you. But before you do them, just research the best way to do it.

Paul Beckermann 51:27
That’s like a very wise ending, Jorge. I like that a lot.

Jorge Valenzuela 51:33
I mean, that has helped me in every aspect of my life. Like, before I post something, before I approach my wife with something or one of my kids or one of my friends, I just try to find out… So, like, I’ll give you an example. Like, occasionally I like to smoke cigars, and so we have a deck and all of that, and sometimes I’ll smoke out there. But I have friends over. But then something told me, you know, the cats are going out there on the other days. So let me do some research. Secondhand smoke—it lingers way after the fact. So now I don’t do it.

So anything you do, just research and find out what’s the best way. And with today’s technology, there’s no excuse. So I forgive my parents. They weren’t always the best, but I forgive them because they didn’t have AI and YouTube and all that. You know, they didn’t have internet. So they didn’t know what trauma was. They didn’t know what generational trauma was. They didn’t know how to level up.

Paul Beckermann 52:44
Do better till you know better, right? Yeah. Maya Angelou had that, I know it. Another wise person. So as we get ready to sign off, can you just remind our listeners again about the double Valenzuela book release? What are the two titles again, Jorge?

Jorge Valenzuela 53:00
Yeah. So the first one is called Instructional Innovation Plus: Cultivating Teaching Teams Through Action Research. And the date of release is May 13th. And my second book is called Project-Based Learning Plus: Enhancing Academic Learning and Essential Life Skills. And that will be re-released on July 15, 2025.

Paul Beckermann 53:23
Fantastic. We’re looking forward to it.

Michelle Magallanez 53:26
And I’m super excited about upcoming computational thinking because I think that’s something that works so beautifully within the framework that you’ve shared here.

Jorge Valenzuela 53:35
Thank you.

Paul Beckermann 53:36
All right. Well, thanks a lot, Jorge. Take care, and maybe we’ll touch base again sometime.

Jorge Valenzuela 53:41
Sounds good. I look forward to it. Take care.

Michelle Magallanez 53:43
Thank you.

Rena Clark 53:46
Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 53:49
We invite you to visit us at avidopenaccess.org, where you can discover resources to support student agency and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 54:01
We’ll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark 54:07
And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin 54:10
Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 54:12
You make a difference.