How Passion Projects can fire up a student-led conference
Julia is a student at Frederick H. Tuttle Middle School, in South Burlington VT. She’s an athlete and an artist. So for her Passion Project, she found a way to combine the two disciplines.
And embracing these two important parts of her identity gave her a lot more to talk about at her student-led conference than in years past.
For her Passion Project, Julia transformed a photo of herself at a gymnastics competition and reproduced it using buttons. She took Tuttle’s button mural, depicting their new mascot, as inspiration. In addition, her parents had worked on a portrait of Julia using spray-painted pennies. This too served as inspiration.
Once she’d completed her personal button mural, she discovered that she had much more to talk about at her student-led conference with her family.
As Julia herself puts it,
“When you enjoy doing something, you want to talk about it.”
Several teams at Tuttle Middle School are taking a project-based approach to Personal Learning Plans to “hook” students into the goal-setting, planning, and reflection cycle. Check out Julia’s project reflection sheet, below. There you can see how she documented her journey.
