Personal Interest Projects: How successful are they?

 Just worked with grade 6 and 7 students on a project that I call Personal Interest Projects....or Individual Projects. This is where students choose their own topic to research and create products of learning that demonstrate their understanding and passion of their area of study.

 For teachers in gifted education, a Personal Interest study is a project idea that we encourage classroom teachers to use.  I often tell teachers that it is a great way to extend the learning of their students... and I give them strategies on how to create this process in their class.

 However, I am not really sold on the idea of just handing over this process to a student, and I really wanted to experiment with this project to see how it worked in a span of only four days.

 Although the process is interesting, I think to get a really detailed and stellar project from students, there needs to be a huge teacher directed component to this endeavour.  This includes lots of scaffolding, breaking down the steps, and providing detailed feedback for students. 

 Still, it was challenging.  Although students were able to easily choose their topics, it was more challenging to refine the topic and push for deeper understanding, detail, and a well researched project.

 The topics chosen were:  aliens, photography, the French Revolution, aerodynamics, coca-cola, Theodore Roosevelt, the Hunger Games series, Secretariat (the horse), Hip Hop dance, Mars Exploration, John Lennon, Apollo 13, and chocolate.

 Each student had an interesting take on their subject; most students created powerpoint or PREZI presentations.  It was great to see how versed they were in making presentations using the smart board, researching their topics on line, and comfortably presenting their ideas to each other.

 Yet, I think that my unit on Images of Greatness was much more successful; simply because the topic range was not so huge.....in Images, a student chose an eminent person and I gave specific criteria that each student had to have in their project. 

 However, in this unit, the range was huge....in trying to find out about their topic, many students did not know where to start or what to include.  I met with each individually to help provide the structure and the format. 

The process of researching and presenting a topic of this nature is challenging for students. Some have never done this before, and for others, it is part of their regular curriculum...

 Over the years I have managed this process and the most successful Interest Projects where ones where I had lots of time to work with students.  I required a written report as part of the criteria, and I would spend weeks on teaching students how to take effective notes, how to make an outline, how to write a rough draft, how to edit first drafts, and how to reference resources.  Students would create detailed and well written projects, and then, I would have them make their presentations from here - using powerpoint, etc.  This is so I would at least be guaranteed a well written and detailed document about their project.

However, with only 3 days of work ( needed the last day to do presentations), it was hard to get detailed drafts and I had to shorten the process.

Overall, it was a great experience and the projects were interesting and wonderful!  Thanks PIPer's! 

Teachers, have you done Personal Interest Projects in your class? Did it work for you and for the students?  Was there valuable learning as a result?


I am very interested to know how this process works in other learning environments!