Our first project in year one was an individual water project. For Global Studies, students researched a water crisis somewhere in the world. For physical science, students looked at molecular bonding and did water testing. For algebra they had to find statistics about water issues in the country they were researching and make a visual display of their learning. For English they wrote an argumentative research paper on the water crisis in their country.
We expected that kids would choose a country with water issues that interested them or made them angry. For our entry event we showed the documentary, Tapped, which garnered their interest. As we began to work on the various parts of the project, we did some traditional skills based teaching so that students could begin to put their project ideas together. We wanted students to choose a topic they were passionate about, but, for some reason, most kids chose the drought in California as their topic. The drought is a great topic, but when students had the opportunity to choose any water issue in the world that we had talked about and what seemed like 1/3 of them chose the same topic, we knew that we had to set up future projects in a better way.
One of the most painful aspects of the first project was that to many the "no tests" message students heard in the spring was meeting up with the reality that they actually had to produce something. The first few weeks were really rough. We had to overcome the misconception of what "no tests" actually meant. To students, projects were what happened after the test took place, like dessert after a meal. Our idea was that in creating the presentations for high school juniors and seniors, they were doing the learning and their final project was a series of pieces on the water crisis of their choice.
We emphasized that failure was expected, meaning that not everything one tries works out. We were no exception to that rule. We had spent the first two weeks of the school year trying to get kids to unlearn their 9 years of school. In retrospect, we should have taken more time to work through more collaboration, teamwork and leadership activities so when we started the project, they would have the tools to shut down disruptive activity before it interfered with their project work. In overestimating how prepared our kids were to be self directed, we also made a major miscalculation.
After they created their visual data piece for math, did the chemistry of water for science, researched a country and its water issues for Global studies and wrote their research paper for English, students presented their projects to juniors and seniors who were not that impressed with the initial offering.
We thought we had all parts of the Gold Standard project, entry event, driving question, learning in class contributes to final project, final products presented in front of an audience other than their class or their teacher, but we missed the mark. Part of the miss was us expecting too much of the students off the bat. Even if they were really excited to do the project, we could have given them smaller more frequent checkpoints. I think the project was so big that they didn't know where to start or where to go next if they had already started.
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