In which I shoot for the stars, and fail, again and again. By Paul Carver

A couple years ago, an opportunity arose for me to move from my very comfortable elementary classroom and boldly go where no one has ever wanted to go: Middle School.  My new class was to be providing an opportunity to enrich our high functioning students, give a space for our gifted students to show off their, well, gifts, and to provide an innovative model for students to excel and be celebrated in academics like they are in athletics.  

I was partnered with a gifted facilitator and after a few meetings with the superintendent to see his dream for the program set off for the local coffee shop where all great dreams are hatched. After a summer of planning, we felt we had a viable program.  We focused on 3 categories from which students were to choose a project that paralleled what they were naturally passionate about.   

As per the focus of our district, we wanted students to become college, career and citizenship ready, so we structured the class based on those ideas.  We wanted students to work on projects that were highly educational, partner with community members and pick something where they could increase their skills in an area of interest to them.  

Needless to say, it was a challenge at best to get students to find passionate areas of study and harder still to connect with outside experts to aid them along the way.

Over the course of the next two years, we battled finding ways to get students to commit to a project, work at it long enough to push through the hardest parts, and to choose project that had merit.  Students wanted to recreate Pinterest projects, or make frivolous movies that they put together last minute to have something to show, some would work really hard on something until it got tough and simply quit.  

We had jumped too quickly into a much needed, but largely unexplored territory.  A “space” in which no one had shed light on the challenges, the hurdles, and the paranoia that comes from exploration.  Additionally, we left our safe spaces and jumped without locking in a few necessary parts of education that would have acted as our anchor, our guidance systems… the ship...you get the point.