Scary but Successful: Student Choice

Honestly, over the years I have not done many student choice projects as a math teacher except for the statistics, math and art, and write your own song projects.  Even after this successful digital art project and my sincerest desire to do this more in math classes, I'm still not sure how, but that we'll save for another blog post.

For the unit on Typography in digital art, I decided to go all out!  Students would not only choose their subject matter but also the style for their unit project.  Scary!  What if they ask me how to do something on Photoshop that I don't know how to do? But I plowed on anyway believing in the tweets and blogs I've read over the last few months about the power of student choice.  

Week one I introduced the 'ask 1 before me' idea.  Week two we tried 'ask 2 before me'.  Now I was seeing collaboration, not just cooperation and helping but deliberation, experimentation and all before they even considered me in the equation.  However week three when we tried 'ask 3 before me' it didn't work so together we stuck with 'ask 2 before me' and since then haven't looked back.

At the time I thought that I was holding onto some ounce of control by guiding them from the beginning with certain videos but in hindsight, it was me simply setting up the groundwork, giving them confidence and ensuring they knew what they needed to achieve.  I did not need to control their learning, they were perfectly capable.  

That is not to say I didn't teach.  I have read many articles and blog posts suggesting that a teacher is redundant now that you can learn pretty much anything you want off of YouTube.  I am here to tell you that I have had tiring days teaching but to my surprise, the most tiring were during this process.  With every student tackling different subject matter and different techniques I was co-searcher, co-experimenter, co-creator exponentially.  Exhausting but so worth it.

We learned about David Carson and watched a PBS video on Graphic Designers who make a living with typography.  Then I showed them a lyric video (the one I really wanted to show them by Justin Timberlake, the best one I think out there right now, I couldn't because of the language but you should check it out).  For the next 20 minutes my students shared their ideas, commercials included, and together we scoured YouTube.  I put up many of their ideas on my website for the other classes.  We created a Pinterest Board together with examples of typography.  

Turn off the computers.  That threw everyone off, myself included.  It was time to create a Passion Poster.  I adapted Oprah's Find Your Passion to be more kid friendly though for next time they have already given me some suggestions on even more effective questions for middle school kids.  They picked their top 3 passions and found illustrations for them, a font type that represented each one and also a quote that spoke to that passion.  These posters were later scanned to .jpg files so the students could write about them in their final blog posts.

Smile has no disability. 

Everyone is smiling. 

Disability is a prejudice and they have

the same ability as we do. 

Working together we have each other

My students were purposefully wearing t-shirts with typography and emailing me more videos to watch.  A lovely 6th grader brought the image on the right from her Korean textbook to demonstrate the power of typography.

I then presented my students with 3 possible typographical effects in Photoshop.  I included my own examples with the step by step instructions in PDF.  And this is where the magic began.  Immediately hand's raised and asked if they could try other effects like 3D or glowing or something else they had seen that they wanted to try.  Students who were less comfortable followed the tutorials and then asked if they could mix and match ideas.  Students asked each other how to do certain effects and I got to spend time with the 30% of my students who have been learning English for less than 10 months.  Using hand signals, Google Translate and lots of trial and error they were all on board creating projects about what they are passionate about.

I got goose bumps reading their final blog posts with their work.  "This was the best art project I ever did because I was so passionate about it" wrote Sebastian.  Many students did 3 - 6 projects when only 1 was required.  Choice, Collaboration and Creativity - powerful classroom tools that I will be employing in every project from now on.  Well done students, you have taught me a lesson I will treasure and build on and try to incorporate them into my math classes.