Judy's Excellent Adventure

Thanks to Cathy S (Bloggess extraordinaire) for getting the blog ball rolling. But really thanks to Judy, with whom I had an awesome conversation (face to face, no less) this AM. Judy is a really passionate learner--she gets excited by sea slugs who store photosynthesis in their little bodies; color-blind monkeys; and DNA in strawberries. She is excited by any opportunity to learn, as evidenced by how stimulated she was by her recent classroom visit from David A, who offered her objective feedback from which she learned. And  that's the key--she knows how to be excited. Certainly, Judy's classes already offer the kids myriad activities to experiment and build and delight in that which they don't know, but he goal is to help them recognize HOW to turn on the excitement-for-learning switch at any time. But the end of the year, Judy's kids, when asked what they learned in Mrs.Bailey's class, will say, "I learned about seas slugs, and color blind monkeys, and cheek cells, but most importantly, I learned how to be excited about things I might have previously found boring." If that's not a 21st century skill, I don't know what is. These are the kids who, like Einstein, will stay with problems longer, delve into areas yet unprobed, and become the innovators of their generation. They are real Milo-Post-Tollbooth learners. They are the people who get interested in something simply because it's really cool and fascinating.

Judy is planning to start by identifying the essential elements in this skill. Clearly, we hope the kids get excited, but we can't just say to them, "Go get excited." Judy is going to teach them how to do so by helping them understand what tools they need to employ to do so. She's planning to attach these elements to a long-term project for which the task is simply--Go find a topic that makes you excited and once you've learned everything you can, teach us about it in a way that makes us excited as well. In order to help them kids along, she's going to help them find the entry point to the project, help them recognize how to research using inquiry and resources, and choose a presentation format that best fits their topic and their audience. After all, there is no way to know something entirely until you have to effectively teach it.

Some big questions that Judy's ideas brought up for me:
How do I balance having them do it themselves for ownership and helping them find what they need to by proving them with the resources?
What are the elements that go into excitement? Curiosity? Passion? How do I teach these things?
How do I assess the project and the process?
How does collaboration fit into this?
How do I build in check points?

I am, for one, pretty excited about Judy's vision of excitement.