I’ve looked at the earlier in the year and absolutely love it. How can I get something like this started at my school?
Charles Tsai at Good sought to find out and did some fantastic work.
Interested to hear some feed back. These students are inspiring and ambitious. Would this format work for all (or even most) students?
Reblogged from Good:
Tsai, Charles. “What If Students Designed Their Own Schools?” GOOD. N.p., 14 Feb. 2013. Web. 20 Feb. 2013. <http://www.good.is/posts/what-if-students-designed-their-own-schools>.
The Creek Bed 
I’m so glad you watched the Independent Project. It’s great, isn’t it!? That is actually an inspiration and a shaper of our Innovation Diploma program. MV is doing this…and you get to be one of the first learners to go through it! So, my question is, what of the Independ. Project would work for you? What would you tweak? THIS will help in our joint effort to build a program that suits your needs. So what do you think!?
I don’t think we need to do the Question of the Week thing – at least not the same way they do it – because we already have our core classes taking care of what those questions are taking care of for them. I do think that it could be open to anyone who wants to do it, though. We could use it kind of like brain breaks, but longer. For example, when someone has been working on their main project for a long time and needs a break, they can research something different for a few days and present it at the end of the week.
I do really like the idea of one big project you work on for the whole semester (or, for us, a year or two). What if we had two of them? You gave the example one time of solving the problem of diseases carried by mosquitos (I’m going by vague memory here, so I may be wrong), but what if we also focused on something like learning how to play guitar? I think it would also be cool if we could work with others on one of our projects (probably something like the mosquito issue). The GMO and Land/Water use groups of last year proved that just one person working on solving a problem doesn’t work very well. You need at least one person to be researching while another is contacting someone and maybe another meeting with someone else. That’s how it worked in my group, anyway. However, if we do the two project thing, I think we need to have the whole year (or more) available to us, not just a semester. Someone could still choose to use only a semester on one thing, though.
Example:
Semester 1: learn how to play guitar and play a concert at the end of the semester
Semester 2: learn how to compose music and compose a piece to perform with the guitar at the end of the year
Whole year: Work to prevent diseases being spread by mosquitos.
I also thought that the one big project they all worked on in the last few weeks was cool, because as we are are a school of collaboration, it fits as something we would do. It’s kind of like the last hurrah before we go our separate ways for the summer (we could do one before winter break, too).
But we can talk more about this at Fuse.