We started our fourth theme today — creating learning communities. Today I gave them chart paper and charged them with thinking about how they would evaluate a community if they were given a huge grant to travel to schools and assess the learning communities.

Posters below:

One of our themes for our escape room is adolescence. After all, we’re a high school, and if we’re doing things right, our approach builds on an understanding of adolescence and how to structure a school such that we capitalize on the great parts of being a teenager and minimize the problems.

We first did some drawing. Adolescent surrounded by the traits of adolescence, radiating off as lines. Then, with each line, we wrote about how The Workshop School deals with that trait in positive ways and negative ways.

Example one

Example two

What was striking to me about the eventual list, with explanations, was that it was the same list that a group of experts in the field might have come up with:

Music
Tired
Independence
Doing things just because  
Poor decisions
Social media
Growth  
Sneaky  
Trying to find out identity
Who do you want to be?  
Risk-taking
Short attention span  
Thinking about the future
Style  
Overthinking and not thinking (DW: This is brilliant! Why can your mind be spinning and yet when someone asks you a question you’re like huh?)
What’s life?
Finding your purpose
Developing self-awareness
Social media  
Multitasking
Eros (life drive)  
New beginnings
Rebellious /defy
Finding who you are/figuring out who you are  
Wild
Takes risk  
Exploring limits

We’re building escape rooms. We’re thinking about what makes our school and what are the key concepts that we must build it around. Here’s how one student responded when I asked, “what’s at the heart of project based learning?”

It’s that they “give us space to make mistakes. They give us space to figure it out on our own.”

Brilliant.

Now we have to figure out how to make one of our escape room puzzles reflect this idea.