Pitch Day Results

Pitch Day has come and gone, and I would like to share some of the observations I made last class and about the Genius Hour project in general.

Authentic communication

My overall goal for this project is to provide opportunities for my students to write, present and converse spontaneously about something they’re interested in. Each student’s learning goal is different. For my French class, it doesn’t matter as much whether they achieve their goal as it does that they engage in our class blogging, conversation and presentational activities in French.

The fun “extra” that is coming out of offering a project which involves learning in multiple disciplines is that there are opportunities for students to seek out guidance from within our community and beyond, and dive into something that’s truly for the love of learning – because they chose what to learn about.

Pitch Day: a summary

I had 17 students presenting pitches during a 75 minute class. I told them in advance that they would have a maximum of 4 minutes to present and respond to questions and feedback. I supplied them with a google slides link so that they could include any visuals they wanted to aid their presentation and keep them on track with the 4 questions they were to answer during their presentation:

1. What they are doing
2. Why project is important to them
3. How they are going to do it
4. How will they measure success?

They could work from a blog post they had prepared at the end of the last class that looked like this:

Here is a sample audio recording of a student presentation

to give you an idea of how Pitch Day went. I was really excited about how well he spoke about his project as a result of all of his preparation, and the level of engagement from his peers following his presentation. The class continued to ask good questions and provide encouragement to their peers throughout the hour. I would definitely encourage language teachers to incorporate Pitch Day into their Genius Hour plans! So many great modes of communication at play.

Some students were not as prepared on Pitch Day. One of my students posted great ideas on his blog but he needed to practice more for the oral presentation format and fielding questions afterwards. We had a follow-up discussion about what he could have done differently prior to his presentation, and how this experience was a good practice round for his final presentation in May.

Another student’s goal and plan are not well aligned for the moment; right away I could see that we need to have further conversations about his project and I made him a priority the following class and got him thinking about re-working his goal over the weekend (I did not provide any solutions, but he has a better idea of the direction he needs to take).

Overall, even if some of their presentations required a bit more preparation, all of the students in my class have an idea of what they’d like to do and appear very motivated to accomplish their learning goals.

Moving Forward

At this point in our implementation of this project I’m feeling a bit sneaky. Three Genius Hour classes have happened and my students have written, conversed with me and each other, and presented formally about their passions, interests and learning goals. En français. Most have devoted time outside of class to work on their 20-Time project. This week, they will have their first chance to work on their project during class time. They will write a blog reflection following their work period, there will be one-on-one conversations with me, but mainly, they will have a chance to work on their own on a learning project for the sake of learning.

My next steps are to continue to engage in coaching conversations with my students and to reach out to our community when expert advice is needed that I can’t provide. Any input you have is welcome!