We are approaching Presentations...Finally!

We are one week away from presenting our Innovation Project, and it has proved to be really difficult to finish these products with exams right around the corner too. The students have steadily been working on business proposals, letters to our principal, speeches, designs, models, etc and I'm excited to see how they will all come together. Today, we are going to talk about how to create presentations/speeches and this is the part the students have been the most worried or scared about. There is something about speaking in front of the class that can completely cause a student to come undone. However, I am explained to them several times that if you no your stuff, then presenting is just like having a conversation with a group of friends. Hopefully that stick with them and ease their nerves a little. We shall see :)

Creating the product is proving to be really difficult!

Last week my classes moved into the actual "product creation" phase of the Innovation Project. Personally, I thought this would be the part of the project that would give them the most satisfaction. However, it has been the most difficult part of the project so far. My students appear to be frozen and unable to begin creating. Initially, I was very frustrated by our lack of progress but upon further thought I reminded myself what I was really asking them to do. I was asking my students to truly create something from scratch that I had not already set up for them with baby steps to follow. I had essentially turned their learning over to them and I should expect them to freeze.  How often as teachers do we really turn the learning over to our students? Usually, we have some controlling factor in the project and ultimately what we want them to create.

In today's class, we are going to try to "start again", and I am going to provide a little more guidance to get them going. I think by doing this I may be able to attempt to get them a little less stuck :)