Objectives:
Connect students and core content to organizations, professionals, and community members and provide rigorous authentic learning and career/life oriented experiences
Explore and unpack 21st-century skills and habits of mind to model and foster with today's learners
Grand Challenge Design (GCD) Quarter Summary
The first-quarter implementation of GCD was a mix of taking on an audacious class-wide goal, allowing students to self-direct their learning, and connecting students with mentors who could guide them in their technical and personal work. The blog post below reviews the big ideas, classroom management approaches used, and student successes in the first quarter.
Reflection
One major challenge with RWL is the production / learning balance. In companies, employees becoming highly specialized in order to more efficiently complete work, but in school, I want to ensure a broad exposure and range of opportunities. This makes it hard to "get things done" with measurable, high-quality output. There is also a lot of difficulty as a teacher in balancing the need to get certain tasks completed and the need to give students a challenge at their current level. Not all tasks can be easily modified to fit students' current skills.
Most GCD students have at least some background in CAD, electrical work, fabrication, or other relevant topic areas. This lowers the barrier to entry, but I'm not sure what factors enable students to stick with a hard problem long enough to figure it out. In its current state, engagement and structure are both too low to support many students. Workplace management solutions, such as OKRs (objectives and measurable key results) and Scrum (an approach to managing the most important work to get done and iterating), add clarity, focus, and accountability. A teacher with sufficient technical competence (something I am building up slowly as I learn our technologies better) also makes a huge difference in my ability to guide students when they hit complete walls. In the meantime, I am working on my ability to help students generically problem-solve any challenging situation, a skillset that can serve them regardless of what they go on to do after GCD.