What Happens When Students Design Their Own Learning

The ability for students to choose their challenge to be a formidable challenge for many students.  It definitely pushed my colleagues and myself to our limits.  Part of the difficulty involved trying to coordinate over 15 different challenges and checking in the progress of students over time.  Most students did a great job keeping us updated.  We had a few that tried to dodge our "check ins" and it hurt them in the end.  For those students who regularly communicated with us about their progress, their challenges exceeded expectations.  Students were evaluated based on five competencies:  critical thinking, collaboration, communication, creativity, and agency.  Agency proved to be the most challenging for students.  Students were tasked with providing evidence to show that they exceeded the standards for each of these category.  We provided working definitions that were written in student friendly form.  We also did not provide a specific format or challenge book for students to complete as we have in the past.  Instead, we infused a connection to the real world where students will have to show how they meet various competencies in their job into this challenge.  For students who complied their evidences early, they had the opportunity to have their work reviewed and feedback provided.  These students then went on to revise and resubmit for higher grades.  

I mentioned earlier that agency was the most challenging for our students to provide evidence.  We defined agency in two ways:  1)  how you managed your learning  and 2)  why your work matters.  I feel particularly strong about students being able to explain why their works matters.  For our final challenge, it was important that our students could explain why their work matters.   Upon some conversations and ideation, many students were able to succinctly explain why their work matters.  One of our groups was particularly fascinating in responding to this.  This group was made up of two students whose families come from Mexico.  This group wanted to help other students understand (notice empathy's integration) some of the similarities and differences between their own culture and the culture here in the United States.  They created a powerful keynote that showed comparisons ranging between TV shows, foods, and many other things.  Below is their converted presentation.  When I asked this group about why their work mattered, they initially had to think.  This allowed this group to think deeply about why the work that they did mattered.  They provided a later reflection where they shared it was important to them to "let others know how they grew up ... how they lived ... so we can show them how we experience life."  This group then presented their presentation to the school's newly formed Equality Club.  The group was a bit unsure about doing this initially but we pushed them to share their work.  One of our colleagues who was in the room during the presentation shared how proud that she was of them for sharing and how informative it was.  

This example is but one of many of the amazing design challenges that our students came up with during this rotation.  Overall, we were very pleased to see how much the students had grown and changed from the first part of the year.  It is my hope that the experiences that our students have had in Design will provide them with the skills necessary to be successful in any job in the future.  But further, I pray that we were able to give them experiences to help them believe in themselves and know that they have the skills, knowledge, and attributes necessary to lead a productive life where they are able to adapt to an ever changing world and solve complex problems while making the world a better place.