![\"\"](\"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/making-future-1-300x225.jpg\")
This scene is the culmination of Making a Future For All, a year-long, school-wide undertaking supported by a 2017 LRNG Innovators Challenge Grant<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe LRNG Innovators Challenge grants are the result of a partnership between LRNG, powered by Collective Shift<\/a>, the National Writing Project<\/a>, and John Legend\u2019s Show Me Campaign<\/a>. The grants support educators and projects that are expanding the time and space for connected learning, a theory of learning that aims to connect school work to students\u2019 passions, peers, and out-of-school worlds.<\/p>\n Making a Future For All weaves together authenticity, passion, public voice, autonomy, and peer support into a tapestry that has expanded the possibility of what school can be at Bath County Middle School. The project has created a space for both students and teachers to realize just how much students are capable of when they\u2019re allowed to pursue their passions, with a little support from their teachers, and a lot of support from each other.<\/p>\n Students spent the first third of the school year exploring their interests through a variety of activities across their core classes and electives. Using this as a springboard, students identified a particular area of interest, inquiring and experimenting their way to a passion project, which they then spent the rest of the year executing in preparation for display at the block party.<\/p>\n Supporting student passion projects is itself a passion project for the team of Morehead Writing Project (MWP) teacher-consultants spearheading the project: Assistant Principal Misty Johnson, 7th grade ELA teacher Vickie Moriarity, and MWP site director Deanna Mascle. Wholeheartedly embracing the ethos they were asking their students to embody, the team chose to dive in headfirst by bringing the project to every one of the school\u2019s classrooms in the first year.<\/p>\n Many teachers were initially reluctant to turn their students loose on relatively unstructured projects, particularly with the final results going on public display. Unused to letting go, they were concerned about hanging their students out to dry, or exposing them to failure.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the hardest thing…to grasp is that it is okay to fail the project, it is not okay to fail the process,\u201d says Moriarity. \u201cYou can have a project that doesn\u2019t work, but it\u2019s experiencing the process that is the success.\u201d Perfection is beside the point, adds Mascle. \u201cEven if the project was not completed, or perfect, [the student] accomplished a ton to get to that point. For some kids that was a huge, huge journey. For them to stand up there and be articulate about a topic, even if their project was not a perfect accomplishment, that is a tremendous thing.\u201d<\/p>\n And as the school year came to a close and the block party arrived, teachers were impressed by the quality of the work their students had produced. The project team credits this result to two main features of the project\u2019s structure: space for students to pursue an authentic passion for an authentic audience, and a robust structure of peer support.<\/p>\n \u201cIt comes back to the thing we know as Writing Project teachers: that you give them an authentic purpose and an authentic audience, and everything else just comes from that,\u201d says Mascle. \u201cSo they\u2019ve always hated public speaking because they were talking about something they didn’t care about. But now when they care about a thing that they did, so they know all the things, they didn\u2019t have to do research per se, because they knew it inside and out, the speaking is no big deal. And you could see that in the block party when you were going around talking to kids. They knew their stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n After the initial exploratory phase, students were divided into loose affinity groups, based on the topics they were beginning to pursue. With these peer groups in place, teachers were able to step back as \u201ca studio kind of process, where the kids were supporting each other\u201d took over, says Mascle.<\/p>\n Stepping into a position of peer leadership was transformative for the 8th-graders on the panel as well. The students \u201cowned it from the beginning, that whole pitch process,\u201d says Mascle, developing questions and a rubric for evaluating the projects. Several of the panel\u2019s quieter members blossomed over the course of the process as well, says Johnson. \u201cIt was really nice to see the panel because with those kids to see, over the weeks, skills come out in them that you might not see in a different situation, but in that situation, their leadership skills were very, very evident.\u201d<\/p>\n After a very successful year one, Making a Future For All is poised for even more success in year two. This year\u2019s 7th-graders are next year\u2019s 8th-graders, with a full project cycle and the experience of benefitting from peer review already under their belts. The team also expects that teachers, having seen the project through from start to finish, will be much more comfortable with letting go. \u201cUntil people have had the experience, it\u2019s really, really scary,\u201d says Moriarity.<\/p>\n Looking towards the long-term, spreading the project both vertically and horizontally is a major priority. The team hopes that their efforts to introduce the project to the local high school will be aided by successive cohorts of graduating 8th-graders, and aim to start inviting elementary students to the Middle School block party. They\u2019re also hoping to spread the concept to nearby communities through their Kentucky Writing Project network, already teaching a professional development session for primary and secondary teachers in another Eastern Kentucky School District.<\/p>\n Says Mascle: \u201cI wish we could spread the news broader, to the national community, that that kind of small investment is going to reap dividends for these kids for the rest of their education. And I really think it could change the trajectory of some of these kids lives. Getting them excited about school, and seeing possibilities for them of success in school that they didn\u2019t see before…It allows them to shine\u2026. That\u2019s what gets me excited about this project.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This 2017 LRNG Innovators challenge project provided space for students to pursue an authentic passion for an authentic audience, and a robust structure of peer support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":13220,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[518],"tags":[48,619,299,149],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13219"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/making-future-2-300x225.jpg\")
While this presented its fair share of challenges, embracing the messiness ultimately made for a stronger project. \u201cI like going in blind a little because it really forced us to think outside the box,\u201d says Moriarity. \u201cIf you think about it, everything we asked the kids to do, we just did. We modeled the process,\u201d she continues. \u201cIn the middle it\u2019s messy, and you just gotta keep working through\u2026. I think we taught perseverance through this, just by still being here, and not just saying \u2018oh this didn\u2019t work, so we\u2019re going to scrap it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/making-future-3-225x300.jpg\")
Later in the spring, the team convened a panel of 8th-graders to give feedback to the 6th- and 7th-graders. The impact these sessions had on her 7th-graders was profound, says Moriarity. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t anything different than what I had told them in class…but there was something about that panel that made it real. And those very same things I would tell them, they would come away from their panel and say \u2018I have to work harder on this,\u2019 or \u2018I better get busy.\u2019 The authenticity of it is amazing, it totally transformed some of my kids.\u201d<\/p>\n