There are things I’ve been trying to implement for years that are finally starting to work.

The projects are supposed to be customizable and fun to make. But they hadn’t been getting customized or much attention past getting copied.

Students need examples that they care about and scaffolding to get them there. But students need to be engaged to help develop those ideas.

The class culture should have been one of celebrating and creativity. That was a struggle without engaging projects and the scaffolding to get there.

Connecting and positive engagement with students is rough without a class culture or engagement.

Here is what I noticed today:

The inside of our ‘nametags’ is a project journal and students are to write their ‘plan for today and think about a few other reminders. It’s been a struggle for years. Today, I saw a nametag that looked like narrative story for the creation of an epic project. Then it hit me – all the things above came together because the others were there. One wasn’t going to do it. Any one missing, it wasn’t going to work.

How overwhelming of a thought- everything has to be working for this to work at all. But just like any soft skill that was ever invented – it has to be complex before it gets simple.