My, how the time flies! It's a rainy day just before the kick off of our 2nd semester's 20% project, and it's good weather for contemplation. As these seniors' last half of the year begins, I'm spending time thinking about what we've done so far and what we need to do moving forward. I just finished looking over and selecting some highlights from the previous projects, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how many great ones we had!
There are some very creative people here doing some great things for the world! I'll be honest, as a generally critical person, I spent the first bit of time thinking about things that could have been better, or projects that just didn't quite catch, time misspent and opportunities missed. But looking back, it was much more of a mixed bag: there were great successes, and unfortunately failures that can hopefully be learned from.
One of my principals sat in on a batch of presentations, and her comments were as follows:
"Hello! How fun to see them in their element presenting! I loved the structure of their power points - it felt like every slide was relevant and answering a specific question or issue. I know it sometimes feels off topic or frustrating when they go on tangents or start ooing and ahhing with each other, but I have to say, it was refreshing to see them be so empathetic and sympathetic with each other. Although, I wonder if there was more gender equality in our classes if we would see less giggling. Lol! :)
There are some very creative people here doing some great things for the world! I'll be honest, as a generally critical person, I spent the first bit of time thinking about things that could have been better, or projects that just didn't quite catch, time misspent and opportunities missed. But looking back, it was much more of a mixed bag: there were great successes, and unfortunately failures that can hopefully be learned from.
One of my principals sat in on a batch of presentations, and her comments were as follows:
"Hello! How fun to see them in their element presenting! I loved the structure of their power points - it felt like every slide was relevant and answering a specific question or issue. I know it sometimes feels off topic or frustrating when they go on tangents or start ooing and ahhing with each other, but I have to say, it was refreshing to see them be so empathetic and sympathetic with each other. Although, I wonder if there was more gender equality in our classes if we would see less giggling. Lol! :)
With my little experience on 20% - I can’t give much feedback other than a lot of questions that I’m having and that I suppose you are as well:
What our your reflections? How has the process been? Were their projects as service oriented as you’d hoped? As civic minded? I’m curious - what ratios of students did individual projects v. group projects? As a whole, did the presentations/projects live up to the proposals? Live up to the time dedicated to them?"
I guess my general comments are that I feel ok with where we started, but I'm not fully satisfied with the process yet. There's a lot to learn still, particularly in pushing students to be more aware of their process, as well as in being more civic minded. I was disappointed by the impact piece; I feel like it's a great opportunity to have an impact, especially since this is the FIRST SENIOR CLASS of our school! That's huge! I would hope that students would take something like this to heart in their choice of projects and really take time to make a difference. But, that being said, the purpose of the project is to give students space to explore, and that means that the projects may go in an entirely different direction.
The proposals were generally pretty honest about the time and effort spent; students that didn't put in the time didn't show the effort. But I did hope that students would make better use of the in-class time especially, and I'm going to consider that moving forward. It's a significant time investment, and I want to see a return!
That being said, here are some other general thoughts I had about the way the projects went, and places we can improve:
- Planning and scheduling became one of the biggest hurdles
- Took longer for some projects to get to production
- Didn’t use in-class time as effectively
- Time was up before some projects even got going!
- Making definitive goals was key!
- Really successful projects determined what they wanted to do early and didn’t change
- Some groups kept “moving the bar” lower
- Keeping track of each project’s progress on blogs was not as strong
- Stay interested, and keep each other accountable!
- Groups were supportive at times; challenging at others
- Don’t sacrifice what you want to do for the sake of your group!
- Advice I gave to lots of groups: Contact an expert!
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