Passion Projects
An online space where students and teachers of various disciplines can collaborate and negotiate how learners want to spend their passion project time.
The 21st century teacher wants to challenge the status quo of the prevailing teaching and learning dynamic, but they are not being empowered or trained to do so. The training they do get often limits their potential, making them the products of established models of learning and ill equipped to embrace new personalised learning approaches. Passion Projects aims to bring together teachers and learners to co-create learning objectives around something they feel truly engaged in.
How it works
This online space would offer a medium where:
Students collaborate with teachers and potentially industry etc from the local area to ‘negotiate’ passion projects
The student and teacher agree what outcomes, processes and competencies will be developed and demonstrated.
Scaffolding is provided to enable this negotiation, making it clear to students where they need to focus their projects.
Regular conversations between the teacher and the student steer the project and can be used as evidence of progress.
Value to the user
The idea stems from a desire to help teachers enable personalised learning in a safe and controlled way through mutually agreed specifications for ‘passion projects’. A way to blend with the current modes starting the journey to a new kind of learner and a new kind of teacher.
How is this different?
Constant conversations inspired by approaches and technology in performance management applications (e.g. lattice.com) creates a new way to gather evidence and demonstrate progress.
Learners, teachers and 3rd parties work together (as in research scenarios) to agree and validate the projects in a collaborative way.
What’s needed to make this happen?
Strong leadership at local school level to empower teachers to broaden their horizons to include more personalised learning.
Development or partnerships with VLE’s and other common in school platforms/technologies.
Research.
Challenges
Accountability.
Gathering evidence to demonstrate progression. Inevitably there will be calls for ‘grading’ of work produced this way, this presents a significant challenge.
Passion Projects - Rebecca Osborne Day 2 snippet
Have your say
Are you already working on something similar? Do you want to get involved with this?
Reckon we’ve got it all wrong but know the solution we’re looking for? We’d love to hear from you - drop us a comment below.