The Manifesto

As I began this year, I found myself trying to recreate almost every lesson I had to try to create this 21st century classroom using more tech and focusing on skills rather than content.

Problem #1: After teaching for 14 years, I found myself as exhausted as a 1st year teacher and burnt out by the end of September.

Problem #2: I had underestimated the quality of my past lessons. I didn't need to rework everything because I had created some great lessons that really only needed some tweaking.

Problems #3: The biggest problem that I had was that I underestimated my students. I think sometimes we tend to think our students need more hand holding than they really do.

The assignment that helped make me aware of these problems was a project I created called The Manifesto Project.

This is my new favorite project and one I will do every year. I did this project with my Junior English (American Literature) class AND my Senior English (Expository Reading and Writing class. I was able to take the same project for each class and tweak it just enough to fit the curriculum of each grade level class.

I learned more about my students than I ever had before, and most of my students told me they actually loved this project (there will always be the haters that hate any/every project, but I've had to get over trying to please everyone every time). Other teachers have used this project too and have shared their love for the project too.  One of my favorite tech mentors, Lisa Highfill, actually shares this project when she works with other schools and teaches teachers how to use hyperdocs. I get tweets from people I don't even know telling me they love this project-- so cool!

Here's how the project works:

The assignment has 2 main components:

1. a paragraph  that presents your manifesto in writing (your inspiration, your goals behind the manifesto, etc.)
2. visual/flyer/online components.

Students were graded on creativity & inspiration, content and written work (your paragraph).

Students were able to use cool tech to create their visual-- Canva, Google Slides, PPT, etc. It was up to them to choose what they were comfortable using. Everything was assigned and explained on a Google hyperdoc which had links to examples, How-To tech videos I had made, etc.

The results I received were unbelievable. My students far surpassed my expectations from learning new tech on their own, to creating some truly inspirational and personal projects. Most importantly, I learned more about my students than I had ever been able to learn about them before! This will be a project I do every year!