School is standardized. Learning is personal. How often is this true? After reading “School vs. Learning” by George Couros, it really gets you to think about the differences. If you remember Robinson’s TED talk about school kills creativity, this talk ties directly into this article. Are students able to express themselves through creativity in such a “demanding” environment? This all goes back to passion-based learning.
Passion-based learning is a way for students to learn threw expressing their passions. When expressing their passions, students are able to focus and participate in the lessons. Now, there can be some students that do not know what they are passionate about. I didn’t know until about 6th grade. If you want to use passion-based learning but have young students with no clue about passions, Ainissa Ramirez has two tips from the article “Passion-Based Learning” to help you out. The first tip is “finding out what each child is innately passionate about” and the second is “be an instructor that exudes passion for the topic, and infect your students with that excitement”. These tips are great and really show that students are going to follow by example. If you show passion in teaching, students will show passion in schoolwork.
The second article I picked is by Sage Briggs and it is about 25 ways to institute passion-based learning in the classroom. Students are going to follow by example but these are just some tips to ensure that you are participating in passion-based learning. Since there is 25, I am only going to talk about my favorite. The first I will talk about is “letting students express their passions”. This is so important. If a student feel that they can not be themselves or show their passions, this will take a huge toll on their confidence. This also allows the student freedom in their assignments as well as more effort put into the assignments. Something else Briggs wrote was “treat all passions equally”. The passion a student has is pretty much their personality, if you criticize their passion that is a major take down to their personality. This brings up the old saying “treat others how you want to be treated”. If someone came up to you and said something you loved doing was stupid or wrong, you would feel terrible for liking it. This is even worse with kids. In my opinion, the best thing you can do is treat all your students equally.
In conclusion, these articles were a good read for future teachers.
-Rachel
Rachel's Mind 