The 3Ps Framework That Makes Lessons Stick

Welcome to the show everybody I'm Renata Salas and I'm here with Colleen Whitfield And Colleen I need to share something that completely saved my prep time yesterday I was looking at a lesson plan for my third period ELA class and it just felt so flat like a plate of unsalted broccoli Then I remembered this piece by an educator named Chris Leverton published in Edutopia back on May 5th 2023 called A Uni Designed Framework for Teachers He lays out this incredibly simple mental checklist People places problems That's it Three piece Three Ps Right so it's not some massive state mandated curriculum overhaul that requires a three day professional development seminar and a binders full of worksheets situation Exactly It's literally a five minute mental filter You look at whatever you're teaching tomorrow morning and ask is there a human voice here Is there a physical location And is there an actual problem to solve Leverton's whole point is that we often teach concepts in this sterile placeless vacuum And then we wonder why the kids are staring at the clock Well the research on this is actually quite robust If you look at John Hattie's visible learning synthesis authentic tasks which is essentially what Leviton is structuring here consistently outperform routine worksheet style work for both student engagement and long term retention It hooks into place based and project based learning When you ground a task in a real place or a real human struggle the brain registers it as information worth keeping rather than just stuff I need to memorise for Friday's Yes and the magic happens when you stack all three P's together Leverton gives this great example of a grade 5 biodiversity unit Usually that's just pick an animal research it on Wikipedia write a report But under this framework it became how do we help a local nature society that's the people protect native bird species The problem right here in our own county forest preserve the place A local nature society See that immediately shifts the students from being passive consumers of information to active investigators They aren't just writing a report for you Renata they're solving a problem for real people in a place they might actually visit on the weekend Right and it is so easy to adapt this to what you're already doing Take my middle school ELA class We have to do argumentative writing Normally the prompt is something generic like should school uniforms be mandatory Support your claim with two sources The kids hate it I hate grading it So yesterday I ran the three piece checklist on it People places problems And let me guess the original prompt scored 0 out of 3 Oh completely blank It was a total ghost town So I did a quick redesign The problem Our district's actual highly debated cell phone policy The place Our school cafeteria where they just banned phones during lunch The people I had them write their arguments as formal letters addressed directly to our student council president and the principal who actually promised to read the top three letters That's brilliant You've taken the exact same standard argumentative writing and by anchoring it to the cafeteria and the principal you've made the stakes real The practical takeaway for teachers here is so simple Score your lesson for tomorrow as strong weak or missing for each P If one of them's missing just patch that one hole You don't have to rewrite the whole curriculum Exactly just fix the weakest P Leverton shares a couple of other great examples of this in his Edutopia piece In a grade 4 math unit on data and graphing instead of using a textbook dataset the kids went to a local beach the place collected plastic waste the problem and then presented their graphs to the local beach cleanup committee the people Or a grade 7 STEM class that designed physical bird deterrents for their own school kitchen garden The kitchen garden Again a highly specific place And you know if you're sitting there thinking I don't have time to brainstorm these local connections for tomorrow morning this is where AI is actually incredibly useful Oh tell me you have a prompt for this Colleen I do You can copy and paste your current lesson plan into Claude ChatGPT Magic School or Brisk and literally write score this lesson as strong weak or missing for Chris Leviton's People Places and Problems framework Then generate three no prep additions to strengthen the weakest P That is genius It takes 30 seconds and suddenly you have three concrete ideas to make your lesson memorable It moves the kids from just being compliant to actually caring Precisely It turns schoolwork into real work Well that is our quick take for today Try scoring your lesson for tomorrow morning people places problems and see what happens We'll see you next time Cheerio