The 20 Years Project- Illuminating Standards Video
Format(s): Video
Topic(s): Spark Discussion
Audience: Educators
This video features an eighth-grade High Tech Middle Chula Vista project that shows how Common Core math standards can be addressed in work that is engaging and compelling for students and connects to real-life. The project asks students to imagine their life 20 years in the future. There is a literacy component (written sections), but the math work—the focus of this video—involves projecting future finances such as income, loans, expenses, and taxes.
This video examines how student work illuminates—and is illuminated by—the following standard: Mathematical standard Math.Content.7.EE.3.
THE ILLUMINATING STANDARDS PROJECT
In the last two decades of the ‘standards movement’ in American public education, many educators have concluded that ‘teaching to the standards’ and project-based learning are incompatible. Ron Berger (Expeditionary Learning) and Steve Seidel (Harvard Graduate School of Education), co-directors of The Illuminating Standards Project, wondered if this conclusion is true. Indeed, they speculated that long-term, interdisciplinary, arts-infused, community-connected projects may well be one of the best ways to actually see what state standards look like when fully realized in the things students make in school—to make the standards visible.
Three questions frame the work of The Illuminating Standards Project:
- What does it look like when state standards are met with integrity, depth, and imagination?
- How can we use standards to open up and enrich curriculum, rather than narrow and constrain it?
- How can we use student work to raise the level of our understanding of standards and our dialogue about them?
THE VIDEOS AND HOW TO USE THEM
Collaborating with Berger and Seidel on The Illuminating Standards Project, over 30 students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have explored these questions by choosing projects from the student work in Models of Excellence and considering the ways in which those projects did—and didn’t—meet specific state standards. Further, they examined how the student work illuminated the standards—and vice versa. Many of those students created short films and 12 of those films are presented here.
We invite you to watch these films, and we encourage you to use them as the catalyst for discussions with your colleagues about the relationship between your commitment to meet demanding state standards and approaches to designing powerful learning experiences for our students. See a suggested protocol for viewing linked below, along with selected videos from the series. (The complete list of videos in the series can be found here.)