WIT 2003

Creating interest-based projects

In this lesson, you will create the major projects your students will engage in during your unit. Projects are the most important element of passion curriculum life, from the students’ point of view. By doing projects, your students get to see their interests come alive in your classroom.

Read on to get more information about the ideas behind projects, or jump ahead to get started creating your projects.

You can also click here for examples of passion curricula.

Back to the start of the Passion Curriculum WIT module

What happens in a passion curriculum project?

Projects are major works that embody your theme. Each project is built with multiple, complex elements and clear stages that endow the work with a sense of progress – each project has a clear beginning, a middle phase with a real feeling of moving forward, and an end that brings closure.

In passion curricula, projects begin with an approval process. Students must present a viable plan for the project.

• Download an example proposal from the Multimedia Studio passion curriculum, created by Denise Nacu.
• Download an example proposal from the Video Crew passion curriculum

Each project ends with a culminating activity – a public performance or publication.

• See an example final project from Multimedia Studio. See if you can learn about tables from the work of this 5th grade student! (note that the images are missing -- we took them out because we have not requested permission to use them for this site).
• See some images from a final project from Video Crew

The middle of each project is structured with clear, specific, required elements and deadlines, as well as opportunities for reflection and revision. This scaffolds your students in doing their work.

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How projects motivate your students

Projects are directly tied to your students' interest in the theme. You can also give your students opportunities to add even more of their own interests. For example, in the Video Crew passion curriculum, students had some interest in the process of making videos. They also got to choose what their videos were about -- so students interested in weather got to focus on weather.

Projects are very structured, and at the same time, in the ideal situation, many elements of the project -- how to execute it, what it looks like, etc., remain under student control. In other words, project work balances structure with freedom.

You may wish to group students, to further engage their motivation -- their obligation to the group, and their desire to relate to each other.

So projects motivate through interest (in the theme and in ideas your students bring to the table), through a balance of structure and freedom, and through social goals.

More about motivation theory

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Designing a project

These are the steps Diana uses to create projects (you can go back and forth between them as much as you like):

• Begin by thinking about the learning activities you wish to include in your projects. You may wish to use an alignment table to create these activities in the first place.
• Bring these activities together to create projects that look like adult work in the domain of the theme, as much as possible.Passion curriculum projects generally include a proposal phase, a development phase, and a presentation phase. Think about how these phases work in the projects adults do in this domain.

• Think about what your students already know and can do, and what they will need to know.
• Consider you will adjust to the needs of individual students.
• Decide whether you want your students to do this particular project individually, or as a group -- consider their skills, and consider their motivations.
• Make it happen: Put together the materials and the equipment your students will use for this project. Who can you bring in as an expert or telementor (note: this link takes you to an outside resource?

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