Our next lesson began by showing the video 'Obvious to you. Amazing to others' by Derek Sivers. The message being that we often judge our own ideas harshly but not holding back and sharing your ideas can result in valuable inspiration.
Students were then divided into groups and set off with their mentor teacher to flush out their passion project. As a group, we had toyed with the idea of being completely constructivist in nature and letting students naturally discover their projects, but again due to our space and materials limitations we decided that students would need a little scaffolding to help them prepare for the next lesson. We provided each student with a planning form to fill in.
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Not surprisingly, some students knew exactly what they wanted to study and eagerly filled in the form, while others had trouble coming up with an idea. I had read from my research that an open ended model of learning can result in a flip in achievement. Top students in a traditional setting often struggle with the vastness and unpredictability of a passion project while students who might resist pen and paper learning thrive on exploring their own ideas. We certainly saw this phenomenon in our setting. Some of our students were paralyzed by the idea that there was no 'right' answer and that there was a very real potential of failure as part of the learning process. Other students, eagerly embraced the notion of free choice and came up with much better ideas than we could have provided them with. I was left wondering how can we as teachers inspire all our students- serious and playful-to take risks in their learning?
“Constructionism is not interested in pitting serious against playful, but instead finds ways to live at the intersection of the two” - Paulo Blikstein (2015)
“Constructionism is not interested in pitting serious against playful, but instead finds ways to live at the intersection of the two” - Paulo Blikstein (2015)