A few days before the start of a new semester, the semester that my own sons are taking French Immersion Modern History, Armand asks the question, “How might we make a connection between what kids love in their own life and Modern History?”
As a teacher, I am excited about any kind of thoughtful innovation. As a parent, I wonder about the education of my own sons. This question is very intriguing to me.
Armand already had an idea of Passion Projects. Give kids a chance to talk about themselves and their passions and find some connections to Modern History. How will we make it a valuable experience? Students will value what we value. They will know what we value by what where spend our class time and what grades we assign to it. (This hurts a bit, but tends to be true for a certain, and significant portion of the population)
How do we balance passion projects with the mandated curriculum? In a middle school, there is seems to be more flexibility in content, where as in high school, it seems to be content heavy. Remember, Armand was an award winning Middle School Teacher and is now has completed a single semester of high school.
He dedicated on average, 1 day a week (after Googles 80-20). As a teacher, I got to watch what happened during class time. As a parent I got an inside look into what was happening at home. It was a rough start for the first month and a half, because of the passion projects and because of the wonderful but new way in which content was “delivered”, but that deserves its own post.
If students are going to embody the project, they needed to have some control. Armand used tech to do small group collaborations and then a whole class collaboration where they defined the critical parts of the project, co-created a rubric and decided on the relative values of each category. This was empowering to kids. It also gave the a chance to talk out loud what is meant by “wow factor”, to talk about the difference between superficial and depth, about using perhaps unreliable internet resources, and using the internet to make contact with actual real live people or official historical archives.
With 2 weeks left to go, my sons, and most of the rest of class is freaking out. They have been working on it little by little all semester because Armand had created check in points all along the calendar. Now it is time to kick it into high gear and take all of the diffuse research and learning and turn it into a “no time limit” presentation. They are researching, creating, trying to find something with a wow factor.
The long weekend before it is due, they asked me to cancel a canoe trip so that they can work on their project. They were VERY invested. We can go canoeing next weekend after it is submitted.
I am usually skeptical of Powerpoints. The night before, both sons call me down to show off their Powerpoints. They were well done, not the normal “cue-cards-everything-you-will-possibly-need-shown-on-the-slide-so-you-can-read”. A picture and maybe a word to support what they were saying. One made a connection to the medical field while another talked about architecture. However, they were not just talks. One 3D printed a scull and is going to put butter in it. Then he is going to re-create how they would have done a trepanation through the eye socket to deal with brain issues. The other 3D printed the vision of the Nazi Germany main plaza and compared it to other influential architectural pieces such as the Pantheon, the Eifel tower and L’Arc de Triumphe.
The amount of information and more importantly the connections that they were making from different parts of history and to the present were amazing. I did well as a student in history, but I never made these kinds of connections , with such detail and insight. Very higher order thinking, and that is just from my own sons.
One girl is looking at a yoga and a connection to the Syrian refugees that just arrived. Another is talking about how Baseball had an influence on the war and vice versa. Still another is looking to redesigning the bolt action of a ross rifle so that fewer soldiers would have been injured or died from a faulty design.
They reached outside of the classroom. The UN Human rights commission retweeted some of the work. The Canadian Human rights commission contacted our school principal and left a message that contained only Armand’s name and a return number. So the principal called Armand into his office and asked, “Why is the Human Rights Commission calling us and how are you attached to it?” He was pleasantly surprised and impressed when they discussed that it was about a school project and not something that happened in class.
The Ross Rifle project made contact with the armed forces base who had some rifles in their library and would let him take a look if he could travel an hour to the base. A world class 3D game design company gave him a 3D model of the rifle in full detail.
The Baseball project communicated with the head researcher for the Major League Baseball and were having intelligent back and forth conversations.
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau heard about these projects, he became interested in them. Particularly the Syrian Refugee and Yoga project. They may go nation wide shortly.
Although he won the Prime Minster’s Award for work he did in Middle School, I suspect he is well on his way to winning another one for his high school work.
