Center for School Improvement
Abstract
The passion school concept is a model for comprehensive progressive education that uses deep learner interests to drive work on serious learning objectives. Conceived as a natural synthesis of Cognitive Apprenticeship and Goal-Based Scenario theory, the passion school model is meant to provide specific guidance for progressive pedagogy and for structuring learning environments centered in classrooms organized as communities of common personal interest (rather than age-based communities). The defining parameters for passion schools are: (1) that students are assigned to curricula on the basis of their interests; (2) that students learn through active engagement in meaningful works in interaction with expert adults and more and less advanced students; and (3) that through this work, learners grapple with important ideas, including adult-defined core competencies such as those found in state and national standards.
This line of inquiry and development is framed as a design experiment, a cycle of design, enactment, evaluation and redesign. The goal, ultimately, is to specify the parameters for a fully-fledged passion school, with these parameters grounded in several cycles of increasingly refined designs and tested by real-world enactments. The dissertation focuses on the most recent cycle of the passion curriculum design experiment. I propose a set of motivational “profiles” for passion curriculum students, and investigate, through case studies and analysis of patterns in student work, how students exhibiting particular profiles interacted with structures offered by the passion curriculum model. These patterns of interaction are used in formative evaluation to drive design decisions around the effective use of motivational constructs in the guidelines for passion curriculum enactment.
This dissertation represents the foundational work of developing a system for designing curricula in a passion school. The dissertation presents the passion curriculum design approach as a whole, including design principles, guidelines for enactment, and a thorough illustration of the approach in action, via an enacted prototype passion curriculum, the Video Crew.
Update: In Fall, 2003, the Video Curriculum began a new career as
an in-school curriculum in a small independent school in
For additional information, please contact Diana Joseph at: djoseph@mail.consortium-chicago.org, or Center for School Improvement,
References
Edelson, D., & Joseph, D. (in revision). Motivating active learning: A design framework for interest-driven learning.
Joseph, D. & Edelson, D. (in press).
Engineering motivation: Using research knowledge about motivation in the design
of learning environments. In P.
Joseph, D., Edwards, A., & Harris, A.D. (2002, April). Tools for building beyond the one-room progressive schoolhouse.
In J. Polman (Chair) Connecting the transformation of communities
and individuals through after school technology programs. Symposium at the annual meeting of the American Educational
Research Association,
Return to the John G. Nicholls Trust Page