Empowering Students to Take the Lead

Every year my 8th graders complete a legacy project. This project is meant to help our community in some way. My goal with this project is always to put the students in charge, and I take on the role of facilitator. It is also a great way for me to get more practice with designing PBL, project based learning, units.

Students worked on creating a documentary of our academy, with the purpose of informing the public of what we do and using the documentary as an advertising tool on the academy website. It took roughly two thirds of the school year to complete and again, as in the Digital Badge Legacy Project, I facilitated the learning and work of 3 8th grade classes. The 3 classes, about 80 students, worked together to create this single product.

The best thing I love about these projects is the increased confidence students feel when empowered to take the reins and run the project themselves. 

So with a lot of patience and a clear vision of the big, overall picture, here's how we made a documentary.

October

I chose 3 "executive producers" from each of the 8th grade classes, who, with my guidance, would be in charge of producing the documentary, essentially running the whole show. These students would be responsible for figuring out what other jobs were needed, how to give those jobs to their peers, creating a timeline, monitoring the work, giving feedback, and approving the final product. After our initial meeting, we decided to use the group feature in our Schoology LMS as our primary communication tool, since students had to work across classes.

You can see the jobs they decided on by the group names.

       

They also decided that their peers should apply for the jobs and they would make the final decision on who got which job. The execs also wanted to have a "lead" in each group to be the primary communicator and those interested in that position would be interviewed by the execs. To be honest, I was quite taken aback by how "real life" my 8th grade execs were starting out. It was awesome! Check out our final job chart with responsibilities here. 

Executive producers interviewing peers to be potential leads.

November - December

All 8th graders received jobs and we began to learn about documentaries. First we analyzed some mentors and talked about what we thought our academy story was and how we might want to see it told through story. The execs came together to get a list of story board ideas so they could set their peers to work. I worked with them on developing a protocol to assign work.

Students used "orders" specific to their jobs to keep track of the work.

January - March

Students worked to film, create graphics, make music, etc. This was where my talents as a teacher shined through. I had to still teach content for my class, so I create a series of small, independent units that students could work through when they were not working on the documentary. This allowed me to facilitate documentary work and learning of our content.

Executive producer, camera operator, interviewer, and sound manager
filming an interview with the founders of our charter school.

April - May

All the video footage, music, and graphic pieces were handed over to the editors. It would be their job, with guidance from the execs, to piece together our academy's story based on the storyboard and all the pieces. During this process, editors often requested revisions from their peers. Since we had multiple editors, in multiple classes, we used 1 computer that I logged in and out of. The editors communicated on a google doc that was editable by the execs and myself. Once the editors had a working documentary, the execs and I watched it and gave feedback. This prompted a list of work for editors to complete by the end of May.

June

Though it was sometimes hard to manage all 80 students working towards creating 1 product and having the patience to help my students to think of their own solutions to the problems that arose, in the end all 80 8th graders learned to be better communicators and have pride in a job, no matter how small, that contributed to one large project. In the end the 5 minute documentary is perfect and is a great addition to our academy's website.

When students are empowered to take the lead they experience the kind of learning they need to be successful adult learners in a safe environment, with multiple opportunities to practice when at first they don't succeed. This was truly the first time I had been an equal partner with my students in designing an experience to create a single product. I was blown away by the maturity and willingness to grow outside their comfort zones. This documentary will live on for a few years, giving my now former 8th graders the opportunity to see their work serve a purpose.

Our Finished Documentary