Teacher 20% Time!

This semester I've been having a hard time getting some of my students to "buy in" to the 20 percent time idea.  When reading through student proposals, many students just used the ideas I gave as examples.  In response to the question, "Why are you excited about this project?" one student replied "I'm not excited.".  Clearly, there is a lack of enthusiasm.  When I first started Passion Projects it was with a high-beginning group of ESL students and they were thrilled to have the opportunity to pursue something they wanted to learn.  However, the class I am teaching now is a very advanced class with most of the students planning to attend college or workforce training in the very near future.  For them, they would rather study from a TOEFL textbook than create something of their own.  They don't see the relevance...yet.

I recently read AJ Juliani's post "What to do when Genius Hour fails...".  I now feel that all hope is not lost!  One thing he suggests in his post is to ask the student for help with your own project.  In the past I had always considered doing a project of my own alongside my students.  But I thought to myself, the students will need my help while working on their projects, I don't have enough time to do my own project, I have other things to work on, etc.  However, after reading AJ Juiliani's post, I have begun to reconsider.

My students are lacking enthusiasm for the project but by participating alongside the students I will be establishing credibility for the projects.  The students will see me working through the same process as they are and will hopefully become motivated.  I can ask students for advice, ideas, or support for my own project which will make the learning a two way street and build collaboration and community in the classroom.  And most importantly, by completing my own project I will be modeling.  Modeling is paramount in the ESL classroom.  By demonstrating how to ask questions, find answers, and overcome obstacles while completing my own project, students will have a better idea how to approach these ideas themselves.  With many of my students having limited formal education, the process of inquiry based learning is completely foreign.  Modeling is a key piece of this process that I realize I have been neglecting!

Blending Passion and Vocabulary Skills!

We have just started the Spring semester at my school and I was eager to get the Passion conversation going!  This semester I am teaching a high level Vocabulary class to about 15 adult students.  I found myself thinking how can I merge vocabulary instruction and Passion.  I came up with this great activity inspired by the PASSION acronym from The Passion Driven Classroom by Angela Maiers and Amy Sandvold.  The acronym goes like this:

                 Perseverance 

                 Action driven 

                 Strength building 

                 Sustainable 

                 Inquisitive 

                 Ownership 

                 Never-ending

According to the book, this language gives us the action and language to build a passion driven classroom.  In other words, to have passion and to work with passion, you need these things.  I wanted to convey this to my students however, I knew that the language would be unfamiliar to them so I turned it into a vocabulary activity.

I paired students and gave them each a different letter.  They had to define the word and then explain why or how this word relates to Passion.  Each group took turns explaining their letter while the other groups filled in the empty spaces.  It was a great collaborative class activity.  From there we went on to define Passion in our own words by explaining the who, what, when, where, and why as a class.

The combination of these two activities was a great way to kickoff our Passion Driven Classroom!  Below you can find links to the activities, if you try it out in your classroom let me know how it goes!

Passion Acronym 
Passion Grid