Senior Projects Overview

Menu of Choices

Here are the projects assigned required for 2024:

Senior Success Project | Originally exit-ticket TED Talks, now evolved to be part of the district’s Success Project focus.
Self-Prescribed Literature Project | Student-driven reading in Q3 or Q4 that most often culminates in a reader-response essay.
Addressing an Audience | Began as an emulation of commencement addresses; now most often a letter-writing project.

Here are two other projects that are often adapted or folded into the second semester of senior:

Pareto Project | One of the options for building toward a final project.
Research-Driven Essay | Most often incorporated into the final project.

Read on for other updated materials and a rundown of the projects.

The following process posts will be updated periodically as essential elements of the other projects:

Overview

Overview: Instruction

The most critical understanding is this: You can individualize all aspects of instruction. You have a responsibility to take an active role in advocating for yourself.

Each project will have its own instructional post with the necessary resources and directions. Further instruction will happen through face-to-face discussions and small-group work during the class period, either online or in person.

Review the form and function of a makerspace:

Overview: Creation

The most critical understanding is this: You can individualize all aspects of the work you do. You have a responsibility to take an active role in tailoring these projects to your interests.

Each project has multiple parts that will be explained in the relevant instructional post. In-class focus and your ongoing use of feedback will be the primary indicators of creative success, as they always are.

You should set a daily goal that is clear and specific. Every week, you must reflect clearly and insightfully on your progress.

The primary (but not sole) creative goal of the space is writing, so you should also keep the following handy:

Overview: Assessment

The most critical understanding is, again, this: You can individualize all aspects of the assessment process. You can set deadlines according to your needs, adjust requirements for each scoring panel, even implement a single profile score for an entire quarter — you just need to take the initiative.

Note especially that the language of Tier 4 profiles focuses on individualizing learning, collaborating with others, and a growth mindset. The most consistent indicators of success, however, will always be your in-class focus and feedback, which are also the two elements assessed first for a profile score.

Essentials Pack: Assessment

Overview: Feedback

Once more, the most critical understanding is this: You can individualize all aspects of the feedback you receive. You can meet as often as you like to discuss your projects. You can use any of the online elements to ask for feedback. And you have, each and every day, direct access to all the feedback elements of the classroom itself.

GAP scores will be posted every 15 days, providing you the most consistent and concrete form of feedback. You should also be familiar with the feedback philosophy of a makerspace, which is covered in the instructional posts below.

Perhaps the most useful post on feedback is this one, which will be used as often as necessary:

Feedback: In Shambles

That’s it for the overview of these projects. The rest of this post offers important background and context. Some of the above materials are emphasized again, alongside the educational purpose of this series of grade-abated projects. Read carefully.

Background: Against Grades

One of the primary goals of this makerspace is to minimize the destructive effects of grades on learning. We still have to collect and share information about student progress, per Alfie Kohn:

We need to collect information about how students are doing, and then we need to share that information (along with our judgments, perhaps) with the students and their parents. Gather and report — that’s pretty much it… Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.

The problem is that grades are ineluctable in a public high school, hence abatement here. We can mitigate the effects, but we can’t eliminate them entirely. We have to focus our energy differently. Here is insight from another Kohn article:

When kids are engaged in meaningful, active learning — for example, designing extended, interdisciplinary projects — teachers who watch and listen as those projects are being planned and carried out have access to, and actively interpret, a continuous stream of information about what each student is able to do and where he or she requires help.

Grade abatement profiles give shape to that “continuous stream of information.” A profile approach also prevents informational overload on either end of the learning process. The guide to GAP scoring covers this in detail. The printable instructions, available here (tinyurl.com/step-by-step-gap), emphasize the collaborative and ameliorative aspects — that we’re all in this together.

It’s also a clinical assessment: Most evidence of student learning is self-evident and cumulative, so it’s a matter of collecting and sorting. The student isn’t on trial for a grade whenever we pause to assess; the evidence is in a fixed state already, and we’re just examining and validating it.

Consider one particular calendar of assessment (from 2019-2020): tinyurl.com/gap-calendar-19. Approximately fifteen class days fall between GAP scores. That gives us a metaphorical triptych of evidentiary panels, as explained here and here.

Each of these panels is self-contained. We use fifteen-day frames because it fits the overall framework of school; it is possible, however, to stop and assess student progress at virtually any point. There has to be enough time to generate evidence, that’s all. Once a week is probably too often; once a quarter is often unwieldy. Both are possible, though.

The point is that if we have enough evidence to align with the universal skills, traits, and profiles that sit underneath and beside and on top of student learning, we can assess that learning without traditional grades.

Meaningful, Active Learning

The most important element of project-based learning in this space — so important that it’s been repeated and bolded multiple times in this post — is this: You can individualize almost every aspect of the work. You might even be able to take “almost” out of that sentence, because the exceptions are there in any classroom. You’re going to have to read and write, and there will be required texts and essays; after that relatively short list, though, every aspect is malleable, if not outright fungible.

Remember what a makerspace does: It poses problems, solves them with available resources, and evaluates the process in order to improve. In the Humanities, our problem-solving is focused on the skills of reading and writing, with a secondary focus on building a better self through what we read and write.

What Is a (Humanities) Makerspace?

Reading has its own set of rules and resources, and we focus on the prescriptive, transformative power of literature and nonfiction. Writing has its own set of rules and resources, too — not just a modular set of components that can be manipulated, but a philosophical “river” that creates authenticity.

Even the work of building a better self has its own set of rules and resources: the universal skills and traits that fit everything we do, especially the skill of empathy.

It’s all about the process, which means you can take risks and experiment with any of the major projects assigned to you. Keep circling back to this quotation:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.

~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death