Passion Driving Motivation Driving Learning

*Originally posted at the Blog ‘Feeding My ED-diction’

Having 10yo boys define and articulate passion can be a challenge. Having them demonstrate it…an attainable goal. My plan…Passion Week.

Year 5 Passion Week falls within our PYP ‘Who We Are’ Unit of Inquiry, which for our program this year focuses on how we make decisions and use self-awareness to determine our actions. Through an understanding of self, an engagement with multiple intelligences models and the opportunity to explore their own interests, students undertake a week-long passion project.

Students were provided with a frame for their Passion Project. Much like an academic research paper, students had to create a proposal to be presented to the teacher and peers for approval. The proposal had to include a ‘Driving Question’ on which to base their inquiry and a brief rationale of what made them decide to undertake the project. Students have been given the choice of how they intended to present the fruit of their inquiry and were asked to indicate this in their proposal. Students had to suggest activities that might form part of their inquiry, asking students to consider enhancing their inquiry with activities including literacy, numeracy, The Arts, ICT, Health as well as Science or SOSE. As part of the proposal students stated the likely resources needed for the inquiry as well as for the presentation.

The intent of the proposal process was to enable, not to restrict, with these proposals to guide their Passion Project direction and give them the platform for successful exploration of their personal interest.
On Friday, proposal submission day, I was amazed by the insightful questions offered for inquiry. Covering sports, video games, science, nature, history and current events and other fields of exploration.
Some of the most genuine and true passion-inspired questions came from boys who are not ‘high achievers’ and included some of the students who have a tendency to disengage. It has been interesting to see some students make very safe choices in topic and presentation and not looking to really extend their knowledge and skills, rather than just represent it. These have tended to be some of the more academically capable students in the group, but also not noted risk-takers.

As the process of inquiry and the project itself gets underway today, I look forward to seeing students in action and students of action. I know I will learn a lot about the students from observing their engagement in the activities, as well as the final product of their efforts, but I hope that they can learn about themselves as a learner as well.