72 Shaker Heights Students Finish Personal Projects

SHAKER HEIGHTS, OH - The Shaker Heights Schools pride themselves on the International Baccalauereate (IB) program. Officials throughout the district frequently tout the unique advantages of being an IB District. One of the features of the IB program is a focus on student-centered learning and growth. As part of the IB Middle Years Programme, students are asked to complete an IB Personal Project, a capstone-style project used to evaluate progress of 10th graders.

The IB Personal Project is not attached to any class or grade. Students are not required to complete a project. Students do a project simply because they want to. This year's projects ran the gamut and included a coloring book advocating for puppy adoption from animal shelters, a guidebook to surviving parental divorce, a published short story, and hitting a new record for benching.

John Moore, the Middle Years Programme Coordinator at Shaker Heights High School and District IB Coordinator, says 2017 is the third year the district has run the IB Personal Project program. In 2015, the district ran a very small pilot program that included only a few students. Last year, the district opened the program to all 10th graders. Thirty-eight students completed an IB Personal Project in 2016. In 2017, 72 students, nearly double 2016's number, completed a project.

"The most challenging aspect of the project is that it is not attached to any class or a grade. If a young person completes the project, they are doing it with their own intrinsic desire to do this great thing," Moore told Patch. "As I think about last year, we were banking on the motivation of the young people. We didn’t necessarily have everything as refined as we did this year."

This year's students were able to get advice from last year's IB Personal Project participants. Faculty were also able to refine and tweak the existing program to better meet student needs.

Students who complete the IB Personal Project are honored during a school rally that includes speeches from the student council and performances by the drum line. You can see the 2017 assembly below.

Besides completing the project, students must also complete a report and compile a journal detailing their journey. Each project takes about 25 hours to complete. Moore says some students come in a little under 25 hours, others come in "way, way, way over."

All students are paired with a faculty mentor to help them through the process. The faculty member does not tell the student what project to do or how to do it, but offers guidance and support as students complete their IB Personal Project.

Moore says he is seeing Personal Project programs cropping up in non-IB schools. He sees the program growing because it supports a student's independent inquiry and personal desires.

Photo from YouTube Screen Capture