In which I change the class, to change the world. By Paul Carver

At this point in my class, I was closing out a rocky year, but looking positively at the year to come.  I felt that a shift in paradigm had happened in me where I was refocusing my attention back to being student centered.  I still had a major question to answer, who do I want the students to be when they leave my class.  

I’m not sure if, for some of you, this question is very easy to answer.  Perhaps, you feel that you don’t have a lot of say in it because of outside influences weighing on you.  For me, I had a lot of difficulty defining the answer.  It felt like the answer was out there, buried deep down, but also on the tip of my tongue.  It was disconcerting knowing that there were simple statements that would define the point of my class, the point of who I was as a teacher.  My training was spitting out answers left and right, but they were all surface answers.  You know the kind, “by the end of the year my students will be able to bla bla at an 80% accuracy bla bla bla.”  This is not who I am as a teacher.  I want to illicit change on a deeper and more meaningful level.

A bit conceited sounding, but remember, I want to put students first, I want the change to impact them deeply and positively, I want them to leave my room full of confidence, passionate about learning, joyful discovers, triers of new things, impervious to the shame of failed attempts.   The question for me became, how to instill in my students these qualities, without it being my preaching these qualities.  How can students self discover their power, their tenacity for learning, their ability to have a positive effect on the world, if only their immediate world.  

Again, with help from mentors, spending lots of time reflectively, interviewing students, letting go of hard-fast misnomers of education, I came up with my curriculum.  Students were to choose at least one of the following goals and develop a project that satisfies it.  

Curricular Goals:

1. Make your world a better place

2. Do what you love

3. Learn new things

4. Support others work

You see, I feel that if students do these things, they begin to become lifelong learners.  They begin to see how their interests affect those around them.  They understand that they can contribute to the betterment of themselves, their peers, and the world in general.  My expectation, stated to the students is:

Expectations:

Learn how to create projects that are meaningful to you, have merit, and work to benefit your life or the lives of others

If you’d like to see more, check out on my Piktochart info-graphic.  Look at the purpose section to see how it interacts with my philosophy and the curricular goals.