When Students Design Their Own Challenges

For the next two weeks, our Design students will design their own challenge.  It seems only fitting for them since our entire premise is to create solutions and solve problems using your existing skill sets.  While we just getting started, it has been really interesting to see their enthusiasm and excitement around doing something that they are passionate about doing and learning.  We also have our students writing their own rubrics for the 4Cs and student agency.  I have attached some of the rubrics that our students have created.  There are three categories for them to evaluate what each of these competencies look like.  Those categories are approaching / developing, proficient/meets, and exceeds/accomplished.  The conversations that have occurred with each group to develop their own criteria for evaluating their challenge have been very rich.  Many students have shared that they love being able to explore something that they have always wanted to do and the fact that they can do it during school is even more awesome.

The ratings for each criteria are adapted from the NC Teacher Evaluation tool and uses three of the four ratings used in teacher evaluation.  As you can see, students view each of the ratings for each criteria in various ways  But the idea that students can evaluate their own progress against standards that they designed can be powerful and this is precisely what we hope to connect as students complete their challenges.  This is much like the goals that adults develop in life:  I create a goal and figure out the criteria that I will use to measure my progress.  It is our hope that students will begin to connect the evaluation of goal setting by designing carefully selected criteria that realistically measures their progress. 

As a side note, we fully realize that this approach may fail or need to be modified.  It is these results that we are precisely looking for in order to better refine this challenge for our next group.  If you are looking to learn more about Design Your Challenge, check out our introductory document provided to our students.  Some of the challenges that our students have proposed involve creating a set of rules and policies to make MMA (mixed martial arts) safer for athletes, creation of YouTube channels to showcase various interests such as make up and fashion review, and the creation of a sponsored pep rally for our Special Olympics athletes.  It will definitely be an interesting and exciting conclusion to our class.  Be sure to check out this blog for more updates as we progress through this Design Your Own Challenge.  I know that I will definitely learn a lot during this challenge.