Monday 26 October 2015

Learn Like a Pirate Part 8 - Final Chapter - Empowerment

The key to the student-led classroom lies in the idea that leadership and learning responsibilities belong to the students. How do you get your students to take control? You want to empower them to make decisions, address the entire class, utilize the “Give Me Five” to interrupt the class to ask questions, make suggestions or share their insights. Our previous postings discussed the importance of letting the students take charge of classroom routines and procedures. It means giving the students the skills, resources, authority, opportunity, and motivation they need to make decisions and become leaders in the classroom. It also means holding students responsible and accountable for outcomes of their actions.

Getting Passionate About Learning
Passion time is a dedicated amount of time each week for students to pursue interests. The topic needs to be approved by the teacher, but the students are free to choose anything that interests them. The students have the opportunity to build, create, design, research, learn, survey, etc. about their passions. Every project ends with a reflective blog posting. Each passion projects can be done individually or with a partner who share the same interests. Although we want to be collaborative, Solarz only allows a student to work with the same student one time per year on passion projects. 

Step One: Essential Questions
Passion projects begin with an essential project that is approved by the teacher. The question must be a meaty enough to keep the student working actively for 6 weeks (he does this activity twice a week for 45 minutes).  Once the essential questions are approved, the students submit them to the teacher through a Google Form so that he has them all in one spreadsheet, where he is able to share the sheet with the class so they can all view the topics that interest their classmates. To make sure students have enough questions for the entire year, Solarz encourages them to keep a Passion Time Journal, where they can write down any questions that come up throughout the week and save them for future Passion Time. CLICK HERE to see examples of essential questions from Solarz's class.

Step Two: Planning
In this stage, students list the steps necessary for answering their essential question. Solar recommends doing this on the computer so there is a record of all the work and so project notes are easy to share. Here is an example of the steps a student would take:

1. Research the different theories of the formation of the solar system.
2. Explain then in my own words on a video.
3. Choose the theory that I think is most correct and identify specific reasons why I agree with it. 
4. Explain my preferred theory on video and put all the videos together on iMovie.
5. Upload the video to YouTube

These first two stages can usually be done in one session. It is recommended to give a hard deadline for 6 weeks, but students can finish early and begin a new project.

Step Three: Discover and Blog About It
This will be an ongoing blog throughout the project, but Solarz has them publish the blog each step of the way so that he can watch their progress. The blog  has students complete an inquiry based version of a KWL chart, enhanced to be a KWHLAQ chart. This incorporates finding information, taking action with that information and identify new questions once the project is complete. At first, the students fill out the KWH, while the other three sections are fallout out at the end of the project. 

(K) What do I already know? 
(W) What do I want to Learn?
(H) How will I go about learning it.

Step Four: Wrap up and Share
Each final project includes a written reflection, a video and a completed KWGLAQ chart.
The written reflection focusses on the process. Solaz does not grade these projects, but often has the students complete a self assessment. The reflection process reminds students that the more we know about something, the more we realize we don’t know.

To finish the KWHLAQ chart, students answer the three remaining questions:

(L) What did we learn?
(A) What action can I take? How do I involve others in my learning?
(Q) What new questions do I have?


Step Five: Peer Feedback
It is not practical to have each student present every project in front of the entire class. Instead, Solarz devotes one class period for each student to watch each other’s videos (independently, while wearing headphones), reading reflections and providing helpful feedback. To make sure every student gets feedback, Solarz uses Popsicle sticks and randomly assigns students to add comments to a fellow student’s blog. After leaving thoughtful comments for that student, they are free to read other students projects. For this to work effectively, the teacher has to first spend time teaching the class how to give effective feedback; how to complement, how to give and how to receive constructive criticism. 

Another amazing strategy Solarz uses is to have one student give a 5-15 minute mini-lesson, teaching the class what he has learned from his passion project. You can imagine how many new skills the students learn on their own and from their peers over the course of the year through the passion projects.

Solarz summarizes this concept by saying, “ My students are encouraged to take risks, to tinker and play and experiment without fear during their learning. Freed from the fear of failure, students take more chances. They know they will received feedback, and they’ve learned to graciously accept constructive criticism. No longer do they worry about imperfections or pleasing everyone all the time. Instead, they become adventurous explorers. They don’t wait for their teachers to show them the way, they blaze their own trails!”

CLICK HERE for Solarz's resources on Empowerment and Passion Projects

You can learn more about Learn Like a Pirate and the student-led classroom by following Paul Solarz on Twitter @PaulSolarz and his website at learnlikeapirate.com  As you experiment with these concepts, I encourage you to explore the website for more resources and email Paul (psolarz@sd25.org) with questions and comments. I want to thank Paul for sharing his wisdom with us; not only did it provide me good reading on my summer vacation, but it has given me a great topic to blog about the last few weeks. 


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