Admiration & Joy Project

Student-driven iPad Project Sparks School-wide Community Building

Community has always played a big role in my thinking when it comes to education. A wise instructional coach once started our coaching year by asking, "What do you want your classroom to feel like?" I immediately erupted with warm and fuzzy adjectives... loving, empowered, inspired, fair, collaborative, safe, etc. Of course, this is an educators dream. But how do you tackle such high hopes in just a year?

Educators are constantly working against the grain. What goes on at home might not mirror what we hope will happen in the classroom. For example, in my classroom (and in my school) we empower students to use their words to express their feelings by using an "I message." Sounds a little granola to some parents, but it shouldn't have to be. No one is a mind-reader at home or at school, so expressing ourselves with words is productive and helpful. But, teaching families and students how to "use their words appropriately" takes time.

Time. There's never enough of it.

Formulating a Plan

So, how would I tackle all of this? Why was it so important to me? I realized part of the reason it was so important is because it feels so good when these traits are present in your space and I sincerely wanted my students' education and our time together to feel "right" so that my students loved learning. I sincerely feel that one teacher can spark the flame of a life-long learner. I wanted to spark that flame for each of my students... and maybe some students who were not even my students.

I knew that first I needed to help my students know why this community was so important and help them quickly understand how wonderful a loving, trusting, respectful, collaborative community could feel. So, I launched the Admiration & Joy project. And, it took off...

The First Steps

At the time, I was teaching first grade and as you may know, first graders rush through everything.They want to be first in line. First to recess. And, first to be done with every assignment. As a result, our work looked messy and our bulletin boards just didn't seem to represent the quality, rigorous learning I knew was taking place. In other grades, the work represented on bulletin boards seemed so...well? Pretty. 

I decided to bring my students on a tour of the school. We tackled one classroom at a time, observing the work of their peers. We brought clipboards and an observation sheet and spent some quality time sitting silently in the hallway in front of excellent work, simply observing everything that made it excellent. We didn't tell anyone we were doing this. It was our own little experiment. We drew about it, we wrote about it, and then we went back into the classroom and discussed it. The students were so excited to shout out about what they had observed. The room was erupting with admiration and joy... and I knew we were only scratching the surface.

Project Details

The last part of the observation sheet asks students to prepare a shout out and provides a few sentence starters. Students were asked to think carefully about all the reasons the work of their peers was truly excellent.

After they crafted their shout outs, a student recorded each of us talking about the excellent work we observed on our neighbor's bulletin board. They were saying things like, "Your work is excellent because you used a lot of detail." and "Your work is excellent because your creative ideas made me laugh out loud!" The smiles on their faces, though, told a bigger piece of the story.

Our community was... happy!

Giving Wings to Our Joy

Once the video recordings were complete, we worked as a class to choose a handful of videos to put into Animoto. Once our video was set, we had a red carpet viewing party of our class creation... complete with popcorn and "VIP seats." What happened next surprised me... the 'oohs and ahhs' of the video turned into compliments within our own classroom. I began hearing, "Your shout out was excellent because..." and "I love the way you..." from within our four walls. There were high fives galore after our video ended and my heart was full.

Without a doubt, we had achieved collaboration, teamwork, and respect.

A School-wide Success

We presented our video gift to our neighboring classroom... and our community grew. Soon, we had friends in other classrooms. And just as I had hoped, students in other classrooms were feeling our admiration and joy just by proximity to our project! So much so, that we were surprised and excited to have received a shout out video back from our neighbors. Our school was buzzing with admiration and joy projects as classrooms across grade levels began presenting each other with similar videos and projects. Not only that, but all of our work started becoming just a little more excellent and we weren't shy about talking about it.

We were connected. We were a community. It didn't take much time!

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