Student Progress Posts
Capturing more than just grades on a report card
There are some people who are great at capturing moments and sharing them on Instagram or through family albums. I am definitely not one of those people. I struggle to step away from being present to pull out my phone even though my favorite notifications are the automatic memories generated from my Google Photos. I guess that's why social media is so addicting and consuming. We have a near infinite number of creators generating content catered to our interests. For better or worse, we have more and more people willing to capture the moments through our lives. Social media incentivizes us to capture the crazy, funny, cute, or most polarizing moments and share them more broadly than ever before.
In the classroom, many teachers either don’t have the sharing mindset of social media or don’t have the time to capture all of their students’ work in a way that celebrates the very best of their learning. This challenge of capturing and celebrating student work goes long before the social media age. Throughout history we have yearned for mechanisms to capture student learning in ways that are deeper and more meaningful than testing. There has long been talk and interest in portfolios of work, but there hasn’t been a classroom system that makes quality portfolios possible. Project Leo not only gives students an opportunity to share their work in a way that feels natural and celebratory, but it also makes capturing student work and learning the core process of the classroom.
Instead of fighting against the cultural currents, we hope to leverage the momentum of social posting to celebrate the learning of every student. We do that by incentivizing students to post their progress to Project Leo at a regular cadence. Parents and employers don’t want a snapshot of where students are like tests or grades. Instead, they want to hear the entirety of student stories that includes the challenges they overcome, the mistakes they make, and the iterative process of learning. The grades in a Project Leo classroom are determined by the frequency and the quality of student posts. Students must post at least three times for each 6-week project. If a student would like to earn honors credit for a class, they must post five times for a 6-week project. This gives the ambitious student a chance to go deeper into their interest area, develop skills further through more iterations, and earn honors credit in a way that avoids separate, outside of class busy work or inequitable tracking systems.
The question I got most from students during the first few weeks of school was, “What makes a quality post?” I was elated that students were asking about quality posts instead of, “How do I get an A in this class?” This was the first signal that Project Leo was working as hoped. Students are shifting their focus from grades to the learning they are demonstrating through their posts.
There are four key components to a quality post in Project Leo.
Capture the work that you are proud of
Tag the tools you are using
Show, don’t tell
Request feedback
Capture the work that you are proud of
Many classes or education tools talk about the importance of metacognition, but don’t give students a chance to put it into practice. Project Leo forces students to think about their learning with every post. Instead of being another checkbox for students to mindlessly work through, project posts nudge students to think about the most important parts of their learning that happened since their last post. This should include obstacles that were overcome, key ah-ha moments, and areas of growth. One of my students posted about how they chose to use aluminum cans in their journey to create a metal rose wall art after realizing that bending sheet metal may be too much, and paper mâché may be too little. Her thought process that got her to work with aluminum cans is what made her project so special.'
Tag the tools you are using
There are a few aspects of learning that are automatically captured with every project. Every project is connected to the Essential Knowledge and Skill (EKS) that is defined by the teacher and assignment. Any other inputs to the Ikigai Project Generator are also captured in each project. However, we don't necessarily capture the various tools that students are using throughout their project. One student project may call for extensive CAD modeling using OnShape, while another might require students to conduct electronic prototyping with an Ardiuno. We want employers to be able to search for projects that demonstrate mastery in tools that they use in their work, and students to be able to easily articulate their unique skill set. Our Tags add another filtering/searching mechanism for everyone using Project Leo.
Show, Don’t Tell
Some of my early student posts were short and to the point. “I built a basketball hoop.” There was not much feedback that I could give to a post like that as I didn’t know anything about the details about the basketball hoop. When I talked to this student, I realized that a common piece of writing advice is critical to every project post. Students need to show their learning, not talk about it. This can be done in many creative ways. Some students give a timeline of their work each day over the week that gives a clear picture of what decisions and actions led to learning. Other students craft a narrative about their journey to get to the current version of their project that articulates the challenges they have overcome.
Request Feedback
Giving and receiving feedback is one of the most important skills every human needs to grow, but it is something that we rarely attempt to develop in the classroom or in the workplace. Teachers know that feedback is the most important aspect of any assignment or project, but the size of the modern classroom and the available tools haven’t made high quality feedback possible. Even the best teachers can quickly get buried under a pile of papers, tests, project reports, and minutiae that only leaves enough time to give the bare minimum of feedback to their student work. This alienates both students and teachers in the process. In Project Leo students are directed to request feedback for every post. Student feedback requests is another way to assess their mastery. If students give general requests that aren’t relevant to the core project or skill being developed, then they haven’t reached a higher level of mastery. When a student requests targeted feedback, it demonstrates they have put in the work and have hit a common roadblock or gap in knowledge that a teacher or professional can nudge them past. This once again helps students develop the metacognitive skills necessary for growth while optimizing the professional and teacher time for feedback all in one fell swoop.
The best student project posts should feel like a professional project update. Project posts will eventually become the building blocks of student portfolios. The top chef’s only work with the best ingredients to make quality meals. Project Leo helps students capture their best work that will live on forever in their portfolio that will guide them to a quality career.