The focus of the discussion has been on flexible pathways. It seems like these pathways are what people are having trouble wrapping their heads around, particularly in areas like math. How do you provide different ways, for example, for a student to demonstrate that they understand probability? Our facilitators are providing some pretty inspiring anecdotes about things they are doing in their classroom. One teacher from Essex was describing a block in the day devoted entirely to student-directed projects based on questions they develop at the beginning of the year. She has students in internships out in the community learning about things that are their passions. Wow!
But...what's missing here is how you prepare students for this type of thing. I have a tendency to just jump into big ideas. I dream up an idea for a project and throw it at kids. I don't, though, dream up the steps I need to prepare students for the project. That was the case last year when I tried project-based learning. I had a good idea, or so I thought, but I hadn't helped students practice the skills they needed to work collaboratively with one another. As a result, the project fell flat.
This year, my team and I plan on experimenting with "passion projects." It'll be the first time that we'll be doing something like that as a coordinated team. I'm excited because it means that we'll have to work together to plan the project as well as talk to one another about what is going well and what needs work. I'm hoping that this small project will grow into something larger; it might help us springboard into implementing flexible pathways in the future.
The more I read, the more I am impressed with your thoughtfulness. The culture/climate that we create as educators is such an important force in how students experience their learning. As you allude to, if we implement new things without thinking about the culture in which students are doing them, they can easily fall flat. It's one of the reasons change is so hard in schools. It's not enough for practices to change-- attitudes, dispositions, skills, power dynamics-- all of those things must change, too. I used to do passion projects with my middle grades students as well. They were an important part of their learning. The most success we had with them was when my teammate and I scaffolded the work, built in time for consistent reflection, and feedback was regular. We built a culture that was ready for that by including those same concepts in our everyday teaching as well.
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