High school students don’t have enough life experience to know what they are passionate about.
It is too stressful to pick one career or passion junior year, the most important year for the college application process.
It is impossible for teachers to track and support students who are all working on different interdisciplinary projects, at different skill levels, and on different schedules.
There are plenty of reasons why schools shy away from the complexity of guiding students toward a goal they are passionate about. Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and tenured neurobiology professor at Stanford University gives amazing free scientific advice on his Huberman Lab podcast. He is constantly discussing the tweaks we can make to our mental and physical routines to optimize performance. In the learning domain it is critical to have a clear purpose.
“Don’t pick the end goal, pick a goal.”
-Andrew Huberman
This year many of the juniors from Da Vinci Science are building an Ikigai project to earn honors credit for their classes. We don’t expect them to pick their one and only career passion. Our hope is that they can identify a goal for learning and pushing through challenges.
We chose to center this project around the Japanese idea of Ikigai for multiple reasons. Sure, there is a westernized version of Ikigai that includes a catchy Venn diagram.
There is also a depth of self-reflection required to even think about our Ikigai. We have developed a series of self-reflection activities to help students not only identify their interests, but to dig multiple layers deeper to determine why they have those interests and where there is crossover between passions. We are also building a partnership with TruSpark and TruMotivate to give our students research backed reflection methods to identify possible directions to explore.
The idea of allowing students to follow their passions isn’t novel. At Da Vinci Schools we are dedicated to building the systems that support both students and teachers along this difficult journey.
The core of Project Leo is our project inspiration generator that leverages our 15 years of experience guiding students through project-based learning in a wide variety of contexts. The inputs and outputs are based on the Ikigai framework in a way that gives students a chance to identify connections between what they are learning in school to an Ikigai.
We believe that great projects are built leveraging the passions of both students and teachers. Building off the Ikigai Venn diagram, there are four key inputs to generating project ideas:
Essential Knowledge and Skills (core component of mastery learning) to show what you are good at
The art and science of teaching and learning to make content accessible and relevant by identifying what you can get paid for
Students’ voice and choice to connect to what they love
Career relevancy (connections to what the world needs through O*Net)
In the past it has been extremely difficult for teachers to create projects that meet the needs of all their students in a way that is manageable. Generative AI is a gamechanger in this regard and will help teachers make connections and differentiate in ways they couldn’t imagine before ChatGPT changed the world. The key is building the right prompts and structure for teachers to coach student breakthroughs.
When building a new project, teachers will define two components of the Ikigai Venn diagram; the skills that students are meant to develop (1), and the area that people can be paid for (2). Finding what you can get paid for doesn’t have to be selling the output of this particular project but should lead to creating work that the world is willing to pay you for. This might entail the project helping students understand how humans, history, and the world works in a deep way to eventually get paid with those ideas. In the end we need to help students develop the skills to thrive beyond the classroom, and getting paid in some capacity is a key component of breaking through.
In most classes students have little say in what projects they work on. This is usually because it is hard enough for teachers to manage the logistics of a project they create, let alone figure out how to manage multiple project ideas they haven’t yet thought of. We have students provide areas that they are passionate about (3) and the careers they are interested in (4).
We will then take these four inputs and pass them to a Large Language Model like ChatGPT and generate project options where students can build the skills that the teacher has identified as key foundational skills in that subject area, career relevant, and connected to what the student is passionate about.
Students are now creating individualized projects that they are excited about while building a portfolio of work that connects directly to a career. Teachers no longer have to come up with every project on their own, they get to spend their expertise and energy identifying the most important foundational skills that will set their students up for success no matter what they pursue.
The key is giving the teacher the structures and support they need to give students feedback on the essential skills in a way that helps every student grow. More to come on that in future posts.
We continue to evolve our thinking and the specific details. Our north star is that Project Leo will continue to build the supports students need to identify an Ikigai and to breakthrough with the skills, passion, and grit to succeed no matter how the world changes.