Blue: Declare Your Project
During one of our closing circles last week, one of the Blue Banders raised his hand to share an appreciation with the school. "I want to appreciate Amanda for turning our Declaration writing into a game! It's helped us all make better Declarations!"Without further adieu, I present: The Declaration Flowchart.
The Declaration Flowchart has been up in the Bandspace for the past two weeks. It accounted for every step of the process from brainstorming to drafting to revision to project starting, and it helped do two things:
- The Flowchart both tracked and displayed the student's progress to me and the rest of the Band.
- The Flowchart also helped the students remain independent and self-motivated as they drafted and refined their ideas.
Additionally, the Chart incorporated several opportunities for direct feedback from me and other people in the BWX Community. It allowed an audience to ask questions and challenge the student's ideas, and thus built INTO the process places for Blue to respond directly to holes in their logic and practice re-explaining and re-pitching their ideas before going to the Administration for approval.
The other really great part about the Declaration Flowchart was the day that we all sat down and created avatars to track our progress. I even drew myself and asked Blue to catch up to me on the Flowchart. Creating a visual that the kids had to look at everyday (as it took up A WHOLE WALL of the Bandspace) generated an external representation of a process that is usually largely done in abstract and nonrepresentational ways.After all, who really sees how many times you delete a sentence when drafting a letter?Who knows if you've gotten feedback from other people?Who is really going to know if you're revising writing?...especially if we're editing something in Google Docs. And everyone is independently working on their computer. And everyone in the Band is too anxious and focused on their own work to look up and realize that everyone else is struggling with the same thing they are.
Who really knows what we're working on if we can't all see it?To further cement the awesome progress that everyone made last week, on Friday, Blue did 2 minute / 8 slide pitches of their project to the Band. We got to see some more visuals and got to hear what people were thinking. In a lot of ways, this presentation was also a litmus test for understanding -- we all agreed, if you can't talk about your project to other people, you probably don't actually know what your project is.And with that, this week on Friday, we are doing a take two. Everyone can definitely pitch their project better, and we're gonna try it again.
Declarations aside, we also had some fun this week!
Screenprinting!
Fake Animal Ears!
Library Elevator Selfies!GO BLUE!