You know that feeling you get when you’re teacher brings up the word project? When you sulk in your chairs and give out a loan groan? Well, my teacher is trying to change that. Our project is basically, to create a project. We have to create a learning task for ourselves that will be highly engaging and motivating. There are two types of goals that we use in our everyday lives, performance goals and learning goals. A performance goal is normally considered “playing it safe.” With a performance goal you’re only using extrinsic motivations, and usually look for some kind of reward. With a learning goal you’re trying to increase your competence or in other words, trying to improve your knowledge.
With this project we’re imbedding learning goals in our plan, and we are given complete autonomy. We get to pick what we do, how we do it, when we do it and who we do it with. For my project, I’m proposing a sort of research project mixed with intrinsic motivations. Pick who you want to work with, then go to a museum, gallery, national park or something similar to visit. Then narrow your topic to a specific thing or person to research that you’d like to learn more about. If you don’t like research projects make sure you pick something you’re interested in. For my project I want to re-visit the museum of glass, where there are incredible glass sculptures created by Dale Chihuly. Then learn more about his work by researching him on the internet, watching documentaries or any other way you’d like.
You can also include autonomy by how you present your new found knowledge to your class. You can write a speech, create a power point, film a short movie, or in my case, bring in my pictures I’ve taken of Chihuly’s work. Last time I went to the museum, I took a couple pictures but would like to have much more that I could use as visual aids for my project and get more ideas for things to research. You’ll have two weeks to complete your final product.
My project is all about autonomy because you get to decided how many people are in your group, what kind of place you want to go to, what you want to research and how you will narrow down your topic, combining your hobbies while giving an insightful presentation, and when you work over a two week period of time. It also deals with learning goals more that performance goals because the object isn’t just to get a good grade. It’s about finding something you’re passionate about, learning more about it and sharing your knowledge with others.
