The past three Fridays, students in my classroom have been working on passion projects. After hearing about so much about these, I decided to try and lead my EL class through these. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy and that I was going to make plenty of mistakes along the way, which I have. I thought now would be a good time to reflect on the process three weeks into it.
My curiosity with passion projects started when I began hearing and reading things online about them. Then at another school where I teach at they tried to have students create these projects during an advisory time. I thought this was amazing. Students could create and do almost anything they wanted to learn or share. One person that helped guide me through this process was @ajjuliani. I thought this was pretty powerful stuff. Fast forward to this past Christmas break.
I was sitting around thinking: How could I incorporate this into my classroom? I thought to myself. You could do it on Fridays. Then the next question came up. How long will you do it? I decided for two period, because my class is a two period block. Another reason I decided on the two hour block is because technology is not always available. This is not a 1:1 school. I concluded that if they needed to research that they would probably need more time. One period would not be enough for this. So how did I begin.
I introduced the idea to my students by showing some videos from YouTube of what other kids had done with this project. I thought in my head that they would be amazed at some of the projects other kids their age were doing. NOPE! They were lethargic. When I asked them what they thought of the videos, no one responded. I thought to myself: Is this a bad idea? Do they want to do this? Am I missing something? I decided to forge ahead.
My next step was to introduce the guidelines for the project. They will have every Friday until March 4 to complete their project and be ready to present it. No other class will be given to the project. If they needed anything specific, they would have to find the materials and I could help as best as I could, but I wanted to leave it in their hands. Oh yeah. This isn’t graded either. This was the biggest shocker to all of my students. I know what you are thinking. How will you monitor their work. Their progress. Their learning. I am having them record their progress on a Google doc that I manage through Google classroom. I adapted it from one given to me from @LauraGWillis.
After adapting the document to fit my learners needs, I came up with a few main questions that I want them to focus on:
- What do you want to learn from this project?
- What questions do you want to explore or learn about?
- Were you able to answer the questions you had?
- Did you learn something different than what you first thought?
- What will you create to share your project with the rest of the class?
- What was the most difficult part of this process?
- What was the most enjoyable part of this process?
While this is still a work in progress my students are at different stages of their projects. Some of my students are still researching. Others are trying to figure out logistically how they are going to complete their projects with lack of internet at home. One group of students is complete and in the reflection stage.
Overall the process has been an amazing experience for me and the students. They have been empowered to take charge of their learning. It has given them a voice inside the classroom and all of them have committed time outside of my class to work on it. Even though they receive no grade. Sounds beautiful to me.
dreaming big... 