If Students Designed Their Own School - Responds

The video “If Students Designed Their Own School”, was based on “The Independent Project”. This project gives students the freedom to learn what they want while still staying in the curriculum. They also still have the knowledge and support of the teachers if needed. By letting students learn want they want to, they are more interested to learn as much as possible on their topic. This leads to completing their project to the best of their ability. This video shows that even students who aren’t academically doing well in school, they can still get an education. But it isn’t just researching and presenting the whole time, it’s also about collaboration. At the last three weeks of this program, the group has to do a final project together. This means that the group has to an agreement of what the project will be about, and what the roles are for everyone. This was the main idea of what was shown in the video.

As great as this project sounds, many schools would be against this project. This is because of the lack of teacher supervision. It is a major concern that students will slack off or not even come to class. And yes this issue was mentioned in the video, but there were only nine students in the program. If there were say twenty students in this program, there would definitely be at least three or four students not trying or caring about what was accomplished in that semester. The whole program would be a waste for that three or four students and they would’ve just gotten through a whole semester without doing any work. It really depends on the type and amount of student that are in this project for it to be a success. “The Independent Project” a good was for students to teach themselves information they want to know. In my opinion, for this project to be effective, you would have to have a small class and students that are interested in exceeding in life.

When I first watched this video, the first thing that I thought of was genius hour. “The Independent Project” gave you the choice to research and learn anything that interest you, the same choices are given for genius too. The difference between them is that in genius hour, there is a teacher observing the process of your project and your final presentation. So if a student wasn’t making any progress, the teacher would know right away and fix the problem. Genius hour and the independent project are similar, but also very different.      

 If we were to start this program in our class, it would be a disaster. We are only grade 8, and at this point in our life, most of us haven’t decided what we’ll do in the future. And at this age, we wouldn’t get any work done. In the video the students in the program were all in grade 12, this resulted to completing their work. In grade 12, most students have their next steps of life planed out and are focused on one main interest. Therefore if “The Independent Project” were to come to Fraser Heights, it would be best to only involve grade 12 students.