Fostering a sense of belonging is one of the most important things we can do in our classrooms. When students feel seen, known, and valued, they become free to take on new academic risks and challenges.
At Saklan we extend the importance of belonging beyond SEL curriculum, morning meeting, or advisory. In Project Based Learning students bring their authentic wonders and ideas to the academic day, peer feedback, and collaborative work.
Through showing the value of what they have to offer to the learning experience, students are reminded that we all have ways we can help support our community, ways our community can help us, and, most importantly, none of us alone is smarter than all of us together!
Shared power is a core equity lever of projects at Saklan. By sharing power the class takes ownership over their growing knowledge which deepens the students’ sense of belonging and purpose in the classroom.
Authentically incorporating students’ unique interests and talents, providing them options and agency in making decisions within the project, and creating a sense of interdependence among the teacher and students are all ways shared power show up in high quality project learning.
Here are a few examples of how students are bringing their own unique identities, ideas, and questions to support academic learning in our projects.
Owlets: Voice and Choice in Rainforest Representations
Choice is provided for even our youngest learners. In their rainforest project unit, Owlets have had the freedom to respond to their growing knowledge in a variety of ways. After a visit from a reptile expert, students created models to represent what they learned. They chose an element of the experience that was exciting to them and selected which materials they would use to create the representation of what they learned.
Owlets see the importance of their voice by developing their own wonders. The teachers reinforce student voice by making space to respond directly to these authentic student inquiries. One Owlet wondered how much rainfall there is in the rainforest each year. After some research the class discovered there is an average annual rainfall of 7 feet in the rainforest. They collaboratively made this chart to show 7 feet of rain! They even measured themselves (and their teachers) against all this rainfall!
We hope you can join the Owlets for their rainforest culmination celebration where you can see all they have learned about rainforests on May 31st after CLAS!
6th grade: Interdependence Through Critique, Revision, and Co-Creation of Rubrics
This PBL unit requires students to create a final product based on their own unique interpretation of the driving question, “How are we still connected to Ancient Greek culture, language, and mythology today?”
While building knowledge and pursuing individual research paths, students also develop a deep sense of belonging and shared power in the classroom through interdependence. One major aspect of this was co-writing their grading rubric for the project through generating, sorting, and refining criteria and rubric language together.
Throughout the project they receive feedback and support from peers and teachers through small group work and feedback protocols like Big Paper and a modified version of the Charrette Protocol.
This critique and revision cycle is designed specifically to show students that their ideas matter. These practices intentionally lift up student voices, ideas, and opinions within the guardrails of our content standards and teacher learning goals.
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