You sit in classrooms and carefully listen and there’s all manner of comments made by students. When you had an observer, particularly early in your career, you’d learn that you had to stay true to whatever culture you’d built, as the kids would ruthlessly call you out.

“And for homework…”

“Homework? We never have homework!”

But on Friday, we were having a conversation, and as I was facilitating the same old “why are we doing this” discussion, I heard a young man say, mostly under his breath:

“Can’t just do a project for no reason.”

Something is working, I think, if we’ve managed to establish that all project work has a purpose, a clear intention, a reason for doing it beyond a grade.