Adventure Days is our middle grades special event where classes are canceled for two full days so students can pursue a project to advance skills of their individual choosing. 2023 was year 10 in our decade of prototyping and iterating on this big idea! I wrote about our very first year here, and wrote up the status as of Year 4 here at GettingSmart.com
The trajectory over all these years has been exciting! We've tweaked how we launch Adventure Days among both faculty and the kids. Working through Covid quarantine learning, for example, we discovered the value of short videos in disseminating instructional information.
We've also tweaked how we talk about Adventure Days to try to keep kids' minds really open on the kinds of projects they might undertake. Sometimes we've gone too far in keeping things open-ended... one year, the proposal form focused so much on "What skills do you want to develop?" that there was never a place where students actually explained what specifically they wanted to do!
A big realization we had recently was that, even though we have a brainstorming and drafting process for project proposals, students often felt overwhelmed at needing to turn in a single proposal for their first round of feedback - if felt too high-stakes since they had to choose only one idea to propose!
Last year, we tweaked the process so that the first document turned in for teacher feedback was instead a quadrant of four possible ideas. This reduced the feeling of high-stakes for the kids, since they didn't need to make a firm decision yet. It also gave us teachers more room to help steer their projects... given four different ideas, we had more options to give feedback on what would be feasible.
The quadrants were turned in digitally, so we could have asynchronous conversations with the kids around feedback, extensions, and other details.
This shift has led to a much cleaner second round of proposals, where students turn in the details of the one project they've chosen! Almost across the board, the final project ideas turned in are feasible, within budget, and are ready to begin the specific planning necessary to gather materials and prepare for the big days.
After receiving their final project proposals, the faculty team meets to create mixed-grade groups assigned to faculty "sponsors" who best match the support each kid needs to pursue their project! This is an all-hands-on-deck task - a group of teachers together manage the kitchen classroom, we juggle projects for which none of us have expertise, and we spread kids out as much as possible to give them maximum space! Our facilities team even joins in to support carpentry projects.
Probably the element we've iterated on the most has been how we gather materials and supplies, and it is also far from perfect! In our current iteration, we have
a large multi-tab spreadsheet where students can request materials and supplies from different teachers and can request planned time for using major equipment like the laser cutter or 3D printers.
Having everything digitally especially helps because we can tag students or other faculty for a whole variety of reasons. Do you already have this item? Did Kid A talk to you about this need? Of course, it also helps that we have the kids in the habit of checking and responding to email communication! In previous years, before that was a standard habit, it was much more challenging to confirm a given student's plan for their materials and tools needs.
After all this planning and preparation, the big days finally arrive! We set aside about an hour earlier in the week for students to meet with their assigned groups to plan out the days and confirm materials and tools. In the BIG Lab, we set aside work spaces, and gather materials into bins. Then, the full official Adventure Days are on Thursday and Friday!
Thursday often looks like chaos to an observer... walking down the hall, it seems like too many different things are happening to track. But, since we've been able to create very small groups, most teachers are able to relatively smoothly manage the 6 different projects under their supervision.
Friday afternoon is dedicated to Adventure Days Showcase! After lunch on Friday, middle schoolers transport their projects down to the gym and theater to showcase their accomplishment and explore their peers' accomplishments. We also invite the 4th and 5th graders to come explore, which gets them excited for their future Adventure Days! We're continuing to prototype elements of Showcase as well, such as how to feature live performance projects and how to support student reflection on their learning.
I have no doubt that the second decade of Adventure Days will continue to improve and support students in reaching for ever bigger and more exciting learning!
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