Ignite empathy in our students by allowing them to explore and share their unique interests and passions.
The main goal of this Experience is to allow students to discover something they are passionate about, and turn this passion into a project that is actionable, and which will have an impact on someone else's life. This Experience mirrors a Genius Hour approach to learning. For more on Genius Hour check out the blog post under Academic Connections below.
A key competency to this Experience is empathy: when we seek to connect our passion to an action that will benefit others, we practice empathy. I wanted my students to discover and share their passion AND I also wanted them to care about others. This can only be accomplished in its truest form through empathy and seeking an authentic audience to connect with.
Think through various creative ways to remind students about the importance of empathy throughout this project:
A key competency to this Experience is empathy: when we seek to connect our passion to an action that will benefit others, we practice empathy. I wanted my students to discover and share their passion AND I also wanted them to care about others. This can only be accomplished in its truest form through empathy and seeking an authentic audience to connect with.
Think through various creative ways to remind students about the importance of empathy throughout this project:
Create an empathy playlist. What songs make you think about the experiences and feelings of others? Invite students to contribute their song ideas too! Then play this music while students work on their passion projects. Check out my empathy playlist for inspiration.
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Create an empathy image to serve as inspiration for you through this Experience. Images can be printed and posted in your classroom, clipped to your journal/agenda book, added to your computer desktop, or placed as a background on your phone.
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Timeline & Grade LevelClassroom timeline:
User Research timeline: Oct-Nov: Dive into the Experience - the actual activities of the Experience could take 1-2 weeks, however we want to give plenty of time to make it work for your schedule. December: Follow-Up 1-hour conversation with us - we’d love to hear your feedback on the Experience, so that we can improve it. |
Heart and Soul Connections
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Academic ConnectionsThere are many approaches to successfully integrating passion projects alongside curricular objectives. To learn more about these approaches, visit this blog post. |
Our Community
A big part of this experience is talking to other educators who are also trying out some of these ideas. Before getting started, let's get you set up with the tools below to communicate with each other. Click on each one to set up your account, introduce yourself, and get to know everyone else!
For more about why we chose these tools and how to get started, click here.
For more about why we chose these tools and how to get started, click here.
Use Twitter to share your experience with the world! Photos, resources, etc. Tag your posts with #shareourpassions to pull them into our feed. Use Participate to engage in chats.
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Use Flipgrid for reflecting and sharing excitement in video form. [No need for an account.]
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Use Slack for ongoing chats with this community including your Hosts: ideas, questions, advice, victories, and high fives. Click here for help on getting started.
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Use a Participate collection as a portfolio of all the amazing stuff you and your students do. More on this toward the end, but go ahead and set up a free Participate account now.
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Introduce yourself |
Check out our feed |
Inspiration
Passion Projects - getting started
Passion projects give students a choice about what they learn, and how they learn it. There are two main components to this experience that were important to talk about with students from the very beginning:
1. The importance of questions and of curiosity.
Passion projects are empowering for students because it drives them to take ownership and control of their own individual learning journeys. This process involved establishing a classroom culture where I encouraged students to be as curious as a 3-year old. To inspire them to ask lots of questions, I found inspiration in a simple story, “Izzy, did you ask a good question today?”. This story was a good reminder for me to push students to ask questions. LOTS of them. I encouraged it, embraced it, and celebrated it. 2. The importance of sticking with your passions.
After building our question-asking mojo, we honed in to discovering our own passions by listening to The Power of Passion - Richard St. John. I wanted students to think about what they are passionate about, and not worry about the grade or points. Consider also showing your students this pep talk from Kid President and ask them how this video relates to the idea of following your passion. |
Consider showing this Kid President video to your students to get them fired up.
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The Importance of an Authentic Audience
Before your students actually start thinking about their own passion project, introduce the concept of authentic audience to them.
It is important that your students be able to connect their passion to an action that will benefit others, or that will be of interest to others - remember the heart and soul connection of empathy. Also, when students are engaged with an authentic audience during their passion project, or if they know they will need to present their passion project to an audience, they will be more motivated to pay attention to feedback and ultimately ask more inquiry questions, conduct more research, and continue to learn.
Start your experience by openly sharing with your students and express the importance in seeking an authentic audience to help students connect their work in the classroom to the real world and share reasons why you feel this is important.
Teacher Resources about the importance of authentic audiences (some of these could also be shared with students, depending on the grade level you teach).
Focus on Audience for Better PBL Results [article]
It is important that your students be able to connect their passion to an action that will benefit others, or that will be of interest to others - remember the heart and soul connection of empathy. Also, when students are engaged with an authentic audience during their passion project, or if they know they will need to present their passion project to an audience, they will be more motivated to pay attention to feedback and ultimately ask more inquiry questions, conduct more research, and continue to learn.
Start your experience by openly sharing with your students and express the importance in seeking an authentic audience to help students connect their work in the classroom to the real world and share reasons why you feel this is important.
Teacher Resources about the importance of authentic audiences (some of these could also be shared with students, depending on the grade level you teach).
Focus on Audience for Better PBL Results [article]
What gets in the way
Many things can get in our way of pursuing our passions. Becoming aware from the very beginning of what these are can help us not be discouraged by them.
If this is the first opportunity for your students to have some voice and choice in their learning path, the freedom may initially be unfamiliar to them. In order to ensure students are using their passion time wisely, hold a class viewing of The Time You Have in Jellybeans.
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Have your students watch the video My Invention that Made Peace with the Lions and then ask them to list all the elements that Richard had to overcome to solve a huge problem. Point out to them that they too will have to overcome an equally long list of elements to bring their passion project to fruition.
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Regardless of their project, they will each deal with two main things that will try to get in the way:
1. Fear. When students work on a project that will be visible to an audience greater than their teacher or classmates, fear can show its ugly head quite often during the project: fear of failure, fear of not being good enough, fear of embarrassing oneself, etc. Students being aware of this from the very beginning and even brainstorming ways to deal with this feeling when it arises is important.
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2. "My idea is no good." Watch the video below to help students become aware of the mental trick our brain can play on us when we think that our ideas are never as good as other people's ideas. Ask your students to reflect and share their thoughts on the following question: When you may have possessed some unique perspective or knowledge on a topic or interest, but didn’t share?
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What moments have brought inspiration? How do you feel?
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What are you wondering? What ideas were shared by students? Any questions for your host? Jot down quotes and share in Slack.
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Share some student reflections! Share short video clips of students' reactions to the inspiration videos using the hashtag #shareourpassions. |
Ideation
Project Idea Brainstorming
It all begins with wonder. Students will now begin the work in brainstorming, wondering, and generating ideas towards their own passion project topic. Their task is now to connect something they are passionate about to something that will also benefit others, and that could possibly make the world a better place.
Question prompts to help them during this stage in the experience could include:
Have them jot down the answer to some of these questions.
Question prompts to help them during this stage in the experience could include:
- How does this effect…?
- Why does it matter that…?
- How could things be different if…?
- What is more important…?
- What is the best design for…?
- What is the difference…?
Have them jot down the answer to some of these questions.
Student Interviews
Each of your students now has an idea of how one of their passions can benefit the world. It's time for them to present this idea to others. Pair students up and ask them to interview each other around some of the questions below (take a look at Tarah Tesmer's work as inspiration for this stage of the experience):
- What is your topic and why did you choose it?
- What information do you already know about your topic?
- What problem are you looking to solve regarding your topic? What is the mystery behind your topic? What remains unknown?
- Who benefits from the information you will find? Who would benefit from hearing this information from you?
- How will the world benefit from it? How will you benefit from it?
- Students should pay attention to whether or not the topic they are interviewing their classmates about is ‘Googleable or Non-Googleable.’ We want students to create projects that can’t be answered by conducting a simple google search.
Proposal Time
What collective idea or individual thought is igniting your class to move to next level of implementation? How do you feel at this point?
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Are students creating connections between empathy & individual passions? In what ways are they ON FIRE about learning? Share in Slack!
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How are student topics and questions progressing? Are they non-Googleable? Share some insight into their processes and how the interviews went. Continue the sharing with the hashtag: #shareourpassions |
Implementation
Make it Happen
Once you have given feedback on the passion projects presented to you, it's time for students to start making their project happen.
1. The KWHLAQ chart is a fantastic tool for helping your students structure the work ahead. Encourage them to seek diverse sources of information, including primary sources: interviews can sometimes be the hardest type of research to do well in a class. But here’s the cool thing: adults rarely deny an interview request from a child-yes! For example-if a student is interested in cleaning up a local waterway, they should reach out to municipal and village trustees and also the waste management company. If a student is concerned about the safety of recreational athletic fields, visit the local park district and schedule some time to chat. Developing a survey or set of questions ahead of time works best. However, what those questions are is specific to each topic and the student’s audience. For additional assistance in this phase, be sure to check out The Launch Cylce by John Spencer & A.J. Juliani.
2. Encourage your students to present their work to you and their classmates in stages. This will accomplish three main things:
3. Consider co-creating with your students the assessment rubric for this project. Involving your students in this process is an extremely empowering experience for them, as it creates opportunities for self-evaluation and reflection. A rubric like this could be the starting point.
4. It is time for your students to present their project. By this point all the preparations towards the final presentation have been make: the audience has been invited, the location of the presentation has been determined (and booked, if necessary), the tech tools are all lined up, etc.
1. The KWHLAQ chart is a fantastic tool for helping your students structure the work ahead. Encourage them to seek diverse sources of information, including primary sources: interviews can sometimes be the hardest type of research to do well in a class. But here’s the cool thing: adults rarely deny an interview request from a child-yes! For example-if a student is interested in cleaning up a local waterway, they should reach out to municipal and village trustees and also the waste management company. If a student is concerned about the safety of recreational athletic fields, visit the local park district and schedule some time to chat. Developing a survey or set of questions ahead of time works best. However, what those questions are is specific to each topic and the student’s audience. For additional assistance in this phase, be sure to check out The Launch Cylce by John Spencer & A.J. Juliani.
2. Encourage your students to present their work to you and their classmates in stages. This will accomplish three main things:
- it will offer students plenty of opportunities for feedback and iteration.
- it will give you visibility into where the knowledge gaps are. These gaps could be addressed in a number of mini-lessons on certain topics that you may choose to put together to support your students.
- it will help you and your students refine and narrow down the authentic audience best suited for this project. Who will your students present their work to? How will the students reach their authentic audience? Where will the final presentation happen? What logistical preparations are necessary in order for the final presentation to go well?
3. Consider co-creating with your students the assessment rubric for this project. Involving your students in this process is an extremely empowering experience for them, as it creates opportunities for self-evaluation and reflection. A rubric like this could be the starting point.
4. It is time for your students to present their project. By this point all the preparations towards the final presentation have been make: the audience has been invited, the location of the presentation has been determined (and booked, if necessary), the tech tools are all lined up, etc.
Have your students reflect in a flipgrid: What are a few things that you learned during this experience? How do you feel about your passion project? What do you want to tackle next?
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Take a few minutes to check in with the other teachers and add your thoughts. How do you feel as you observe your students present their passion project to their authentic audience? How did you think the presentations went?
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Following an Experience of finding connections with empathy through passion projects & an authentic audience, what are other areas of your classroom that could be considered in terms of diversity and empathy? Share in Slack.
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How are students sharing their work with an authentic audience? Blogging? Website creation? Ted Talk? Be sure to share the final results using the hashtag: #shareourpassions! |
Craft a story about this experience. This story can look like anything (video, blog, interpretive dance, etc), but think about the stories that catch other teachers on fire. These stories have the following in common:
- Visual: What did this actually look like in your classroom? Show us! Even the messy parts!
- Student Impact: Talk about your kids! Did they love it? What did they learn? How do you know? (Need help assessing this? Consider using a rubric like this.)
- Educator Impact: Be honest: how was this for you? What did you love? What made you super uncomfortable? What does this mean for you as a teacher moving forward?
- Real Voice: Be yourself and avoid eduspeak; jargon doesn't make anyone feel like they're on fire! How would you talk about this with your colleagues, family, and friends?
- Shareable: How will you get this out to the world and into the hands of people who need to hear this story?
What's next? Check out some other experiences you might enjoy.