Independence Day: Developing Self-Directed Learning Projects

By DINAH MACK and HOLLY EPSTEIN OJALVO

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Academic Skills

Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.

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Overview | What would schools look like if students developed their own curriculum? How would education and the experience of being in school differ for students if they had more power to direct their learning? In this lesson, students consider an experiment in public education in which a small group of high school students planned and executed a model for their own learning. They then develop and implement their own self-directed projects and reflect on the results.

Materials | Computer with Internet connection and projector

Warm-Up | Tell students to imagine that the school has decided that students can use their time to learn anything they would like to learn. What would they do with this opportunity? Have them write down a list of the top 10 things they would like to study and learn, considering content knowledge as well as skills. Afterward, go around the room and share the lists. Is there any overlap? How diverse are our interests? How different are these ideas from the regular school curriculum?

After the class has shared, show some or all of the 15-minute YouTube video “The Independent Project” (above).

Have students create a chart to use while viewing the video. On one side of the paper, students should record ideas, quotes and topics that sound interesting and doable to them in terms of how they would like to see their own education and schooling changed. On the other side of the chart, students should record questions they have or things they think would not work well.

After the film is done, discuss whether this would work in your school, and talk in general about learning. How does learning happen? How unstructured can learning be while individuals still learn? Are all students motivated enough to complete such a project, or does it take a certain type of person? Ask students to reflect on whether or not they think they could commit to such a project.

To expand the conversation, share with students our Student Opinion question (and the student responses) “How Would You Do in a Free School?” on the free school model.

Related | Susan Engel’s op-ed “Let Kids Rule the School” explores the Independent Project, a student-led and -run educational initiative:

In a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that “as many as a quarter of American students are not finishing high school.” But our current educational approach doesn’t just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.

We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.

That’s why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself.

I recently followed a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts as they designed and ran their own school within a school. They represented the usual range: two were close to dropping out before they started the project, while others were honors students. They named their school the Independent Project.

Read the entire article with your class, using the questions below.

Questions | For discussion and reading comprehension:

1. Why does Ms. Engel feel we need “to rethink the very nature of high school itself”?
2. How was the Independent Project organized?
3. In what ways was the project transformative for some of its participants?
4. Why does the author feel that the students who participated in the Independent Project were remarkable?
5. Would you like to be involved in such a project? Why or why not?

RELATED RESOURCES From The Learning Network

• Lesson: Desperate Times Call for … Liberal Arts?
• Lesson: What Does Change Look Like? Making Documentaries About School
• Lesson: Taking Ownership: Correlating Individual Learning to Standards

From NYTimes.com

• Times Topics: Education and Schools
• Times Topics: Education
• Teacher Training, Taught by Students

Around the Web

• TED Talks: Diana Laufenberg: How to Learn? From Mistakes
• Learning, Freedom and the Web
• Writing an I-Search Paper

Activity | Explain to the class that they will design and carry out a self-directed project for student-centered learning. The overarching question for this activity is: What do you want to learn?

Note that student-directed learning can be done in small ways— even in a single class period or as extra credit — as well as in larger ways, like the Independent Project.

Here are some ideas to guide you and your class:

Collective endeavors, like forming book clubs in which they choose the books they want to read or doing service learning projects, to be carried out concurrently with existing curriculum.

Specific individual projects, like writing I-Search papers driven by authentic questions that students genuinely want to answer, or pursuing a personal dream project.

Class units in which students develop the essential questions, research and choose learning materials, and then design and execute projects to express their learning.

Curriculum development, in which students design a course of study to be pursued individually or in small or large groups, or some combination, as in the Independent Project. This might be driven by a specific activity like gaming or done across the curriculum.

Before you begin, have students reflect on times when they have learned a great deal, whether in school, a volunteer or paying job, a camp, a sport, a hobby or other activity that required learning and commitment. Probe further: what conditions led to deep learning? Why were these learning experiences meaningful? Why do they stand out? Write ideas on the board.

If you want to provide students with frameworks for thinking about learning, you might encourage them to think in terms of topical categories like the natural world, social world, arts and literature, mathematics and technology, as well as in terms of skills. How, aside from the subjects into which school is divided, might learning be categorized?

The next step is for students to begin to design and develop their projects. How this is done will depend on the type of projects that students are undertaking – collective or individual, topical or personal, and so on. Students might, for example, find a way to pursue the topics they wrote about during the warm-up activity, or they might go so far as to design their own school.

Project design and reflection are essential, and time should be taken for students to explore what it is they would want to learn and how that learning would be demonstrated. They should work in groups as they develop their projects, learning goals and outcomes, to provide one another with helpful feedback and suggestions.

After the projects are planned, have students carry them out. As they do so, they should periodically continue the reflection, sharing and feedback process.

Afterward, bring the class together to reflect on the whole experience, from logistics and process to the richness and depth of their learning. How can they transfer their experience to their entire schooling and learning process? They might even create a video capturing and conveying their insights, in the vein of the Independent Project video, to be shown to parents, teachers, administrators and, of course, other students.

Going further | Extend the idea of student control beyond school. To do this, students read the Times article “Art Beyond the Canvas, Resonating With Youth,” which explores how a museum is getting students involved in designing in its programming in order to attract teenagers, and our related Student Opinion question. Students then identify places in the local community in which they would like to be given greater responsibility or a larger role, perhaps to facilitate teenagers’ engagement or merely to share their insights. They might reach out to institutions and businesses with suggestions for how teenagers can get involved.

Another way to take this lesson further is for students to design and create portfolios to capture and reflect their learning and goals.

Standards | This lesson is correlated to McREL’s national standards (it can also be aligned to the new Common Core State Standards):

Life Skills: Self-Regulation
1. Sets and manages goals
2. Performs self-appraisal
3. Considers risks
4. Demonstrates perseverance
5. Maintains a healthy self-concept

Life Skills: Thinking and Reasoning
1. Understands and applies the basic principles of presenting an argument
2. Understands and applies basic principles of logic and reasoning
3. Effectively uses mental processes that are based on identifying similarities and differences
4. Understands and applies basic principles of hypothesis testing and scientific inquiry
5. Applies basic trouble-shooting and problem-solving techniques
6. Applies decision-making techniques

Life Skills: Working with Others
1. Contributes to the overall effort of a group
2. Works well with diverse individuals and in diverse situations
3. Displays effective interpersonal communication skills

Behavioral Studies
2. Understands various meanings of social group, general implications of group membership, and different ways that groups function
3. Understands that interactions among learning, inheritance and physical development affect human behavior
4. Understands conflict, cooperation and interdependence among individuals, groups and institutions

Language Arts
1. Uses the general skills and strategies of the writing process
4. Gathers and uses information for research purposes