Whew, it's been a bit of whirlwind at school, so I'm going to update on both aspects of my work one after the other! For the 20% Projects, we just got through pitches, and we're bearing down on the final presentations! Pitches were interesting for a few reasons. First, I think it definitely lit a fire under folks. In our summer reading for our school, we looked at a book called An Ethic of Excellence, where the author, among other things, discussed holding public criticism sessions for student work. He talked about using the power of positive peer pressure to help motivate students to do higher quality work, where the class acts as an authentic audience and students want to work better because they are being held accountable by their peers. I think this idea really shines through with the pitches. There was a definite feeling that students wanted to impress, and when there was less progress, it showed, not only in the grade for the pitch but in the questions and the feeling from the audience that they wanted more from each individual student.
I was also surprised by the thoroughness of the audience and the questions they asked. It ended up taking the whole class session in pretty much each class, which I didn't at all expect from 1-minute pitches, but students really grilled each other and expected a lot of each other! I am hoping that this energy continues to carry over into the following project days.
There are a few things that I'm concerned about. A large number of students and groups are not as far as they might want to be or need to be to get to their project end date. I know this is part of the learning process and I'll need to relinquish a bit of control, but I feel like if I had pushed them more on intentionally scheduling things out, this would be less of an issue. Also, blog posts are real low. I went through and did a checkpoint grade on their blog writing, and many blogs weren't even made, which is worrisome since that just coincides with the progress issues. If they aren't writing about it, they aren't likely to be doing it. I need to be much better about that. And that also means that they can't comment on each others', which means less of that positive peer pressure. The blogs have to be a central part of the process!
I was also surprised by the thoroughness of the audience and the questions they asked. It ended up taking the whole class session in pretty much each class, which I didn't at all expect from 1-minute pitches, but students really grilled each other and expected a lot of each other! I am hoping that this energy continues to carry over into the following project days.
There are a few things that I'm concerned about. A large number of students and groups are not as far as they might want to be or need to be to get to their project end date. I know this is part of the learning process and I'll need to relinquish a bit of control, but I feel like if I had pushed them more on intentionally scheduling things out, this would be less of an issue. Also, blog posts are real low. I went through and did a checkpoint grade on their blog writing, and many blogs weren't even made, which is worrisome since that just coincides with the progress issues. If they aren't writing about it, they aren't likely to be doing it. I need to be much better about that. And that also means that they can't comment on each others', which means less of that positive peer pressure. The blogs have to be a central part of the process!
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