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This post is for any student starting a new project, rebooting an old one, or joining the makerspace midway through the year. Passion projects, which are called Pareto Projects in this space, often go through changes over time — and they remain, regardless, an important part of student growth in a Humanities makerspace. This is why they are emphasized as early as the course syllabus and as late as the final exam.
Download a copy of the complete guide here: https://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-senior-talk. Download an updated copy of the final guide to presentations here: https://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-final-guide. For a combined and collated copy of all materials, use this: https://tinyurl.com/senior-talks-full-serif.
More resource links are embedded below in this interstitial instructional post. Review all directions and requirements. Up-to-date information and feedback will be posted to Google Classroom.
Like last time, there is a master schedule for the culmination of these projects.
All students are on this document. Find the sheet for your period, and then find your last name. That slot indicates your project deadline, whether or not you are presenting. If you are presenting, that is when you will present. Otherwise, that is when you will submit your project.
Refer to the original project guide (embedded below) and FAQ (also below) for more details. When in doubt, ask questions here or in class.
Notes on the provisional nature of the schedule:
Remember to cross-reference these deadlines with the calendar for the end of the year.
The details of the final self-assessment assignment are at the end. First, a review of the background for the Pareto Project.
The following screenshot was taken on December 7, 2018, but it will match the work of any Pareto Project undertaken at any point during any school year.
The complete guide is posted first. Students brainstorm, pitching their ideas according to the guide’s protocol. Then a blueprint is created, submitted, edited, resubmitted, etc., until it is given final approval.
After refining the project’s final goals and answering any frequently-asked questions, we are able to set final goals. These examples come again from 2018:
These projects, of course, are created under the auspices of the Humanities makerspace, which means they are assessed as part of the grade abatement process. No rubrics are necessary. Instead, we look to an authentic validation of student work, as seen here. And we look to the validation and feedback guided by a student’s own self-assessment, reflection, and metacognitive insight.
The blueprint step of this process requires students to set two goals: a learning goal and a product goal. The final self-assessment requires an accounting of those goals. Which goals were met? Which changed over time? In the end, what was created, and what was learned?
The blueprints are completed through Google Forms, which means that every student has a copy of the blueprint emailed to them. We can search through Gmail to find that copy to see what was written back before the project truly began.
For the final self-assessment, we can evaluate the extent to which those goals were met. The prompts are changed from predictive to reflective and metacognitive:
What did you create, develop, explore, experience, etc., through this project? How did the process evolve over time? How did your goals shift over time? What now exists for others to see, hear, experience, etc., and to what extent have you chosen to share that work? Will the project continue? If so, what are your future goals? Be specific, and evaluate yourself honestly and empathetically.
What did you learn through this project? What skills, traits, and knowledge did you gain? Use the specific, universal language of grade abatement, referring explicitly to the details in this handout. These questions can also be used to guide this work:
Whether these final self-assessments are bulleted or, more helpfully, written as essays, they serve as the capstone to the process.
Presentation and non-presentation schedules are saved in this Google Drive folder:
You can also load the documents individually:
Most student projects will be showcased through this Google Site:
For now, it contains projects, testimonials, etc., from previous years. As new projects come in, that site (and this one) will be redesigned to showcase what students have created.
The background and FAQ post for these projects are available below.
This guide has been adapted from the PDF and Google Doc used prior to 2018. The information here is most current and most correct. Those older guides might be interesting to some of you as examples of iterative instruction, though. You can see the evolution of ideas and language.
The Pareto Project is an iterative form of project-based learning that was inspired by 20Time and Genius Hour. It invites students to design and explore meaningful, personalized projects during the school year, with about 20% of the time we would otherwise dedicate to course work instead dedicated to Pareto Projects.
It’s never a bad idea or a waste of time to look over the instruction manual for something, even if you’ve already started using it. You might find some clarity you didn’t have or notice a function he didn’t see the first time. Here is the instruction manual1 for your Pareto Projects:
Click here to read the updated Google Doc.
When I built that guide, the goal was to split your projects into two rounds, which you can see in the original calendar. We also set “deliverable” deadlines, focusing on what you could create and present, in writing or in person, by certain dates.
A couple of months later, I’d like to shift the calendar for these projects. Here is the updated version, which you’ve seen in class and online already:
Course Calendar
Remember that our shift to a GAP score every three weeks shifted our specific lessons and assignments a little bit, and we’ll extend that soft reboot to your Pareto Projects. We will now take one Friday every three weeks to check in on your progress. On those days, you will be in the iLC, where you will be able to spread out and use those resources as you see fit.
Remember, too, that you have spent a considerable amount of time in this course working on organization. When we meet in the iLC on those designated Fridays, you are responsible for setting the agenda and being productive. You must bring your own device, for instance, since we will no longer have a class set of Chromebooks. You must plan in advance for anything else you’ll need.
To help get you in that frame of mind, we have reserved the iLC for every Friday in March. We need to explore that space and see what it offers us in terms of collaborative and innovative learning. That means that you should plan to bring everything you need directly to the iLC, not Room 210, on the following dates:
You will be able to choose to focus on anything course-related while we are in the iLC, but there are assignments and checkpoints associated with certain Fridays. It’s like everything else in here: There is tremendous freedom and a precise structure. You need both.
Your new deadline for these projects is June. Note that there is no date attached to that deadline. At the start of the month of June, we will use one of the designated Pareto Fridays to talk about presentations, publishing, final essays, final reports, and so on — the potential artifacts that will tie together the work you’ve been doing.
Because those artifacts will differ from student to student, we can’t set a specific deadline for everyone right now. We can only say that you will spend June finishing up these projects. In the meantime, you should revisit the original blueprint you completed for your project, noting that it has been updated to reflect our new calendar:
Pareto Project: Blueprint
What you “deliver” on each designated Pareto Friday will differ from project to project, but you should approach those deadlines with an eye toward producing something. The idea of “finishing” the projects will be refined as we move forward, too. For some of you, June will be about reviewing your goals and your success in meeting those goals. for others, this project will be a labor of love, and it will continue into the summer and into next year. in the latter case, “finishing” will mean something quite different.
For the first Friday after our shift — March 3 — you need to assess the state of your project. Answer the following questions:
Write your answers in a Google Doc and set it aside, using your new system of organization to keep track of it. Finish it over the weekend. You will be asked to submit those answers next week, and you will have only a portion of a single class to do that. You will go to Room 210, the assignment will be posted to Google Classroom after the bell rings, and then you will need to find your answers to those questions and submit them inside of five minutes or so. Among other things, this is a test of your ongoing organizational efforts and your ability to invest in these instructional posts enough to figure out what to do.
Ask questions about this work or the Pareto Project overall in the comments below.
For lack of a better metaphor. Orwell would disapprove. ↩
The most obvious changes below are to the calendar for your Pareto Projects, but you will need the definition of a “process update,” too, to help you plan for those checkpoints.
In the last version, the checkpoints occurred roughly every three weeks, but not on the same day of the week. That has been changed so that a process update happens every other Friday. In English 10, we will almost certainly set aside the period on those dates to work together; English 11 and AP students should not anticipate having that class period, however, since we will be using that time for exam prep.
You can load the updated Google Doc version of the calendar by clicking here. If you’d like to download and print a version, you can use this PDF copy of version 2.1:
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For all students, these biweekly updates should follow a similar format:
PARETO PROJECTS | Click that link to load the home of our eventual/hopeful Pareto Project publication. Your assignment for every required update is to write an essay that could hypothetically be published there. That essay should be a short, insightful response that blends the answers to three questions:
- What have you accomplished so far for your Pareto Project?
- What have you learned so far?
- What’s next?
Answer these in a way that makes sense for your project. Include whatever images, links, digressions, etc, you want. You will not automatically be published, and many of you haven’t yet set up a Medium account. That’s okay. The metacognitive stuff is more important, so it matters most that you monitor your progress and find something insightful to say about it.
When in doubt, use the instructional posts that are available online. Delving into those posts will hone your close reading ability, and you will get better at communicating your questions and concerns only if you’re fully informed.
After Monday, December 19, you should have a blueprint for your Pareto Project. If that’s not the case, you have the rest of this week to work with your teachers to finish this blueprint. You must have your work ready before the winter break. Use the complete guide to the project, focusing on Step #3:
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We will return to Step #4 as a class in January. You will also have approximately one day a week dedicated to the Pareto Project — the necessary 20%.
If you have any questions about what to do over the next two weeks, refer to the guide or ask questions below.
We will spend the rest of this week reinvigorating your emulation-through-analysis essays. You’ll need your copy of 100 Great Essays, and you’ll need this new post: