Using the Personal Project to Support CCSS and NGSS

Educators always have too much to do.  Balance is nearly impossible to achieve in the classroom.  That is a fact in our profession.  However, when we cannot give everything the attention it deserves, student learning must be our first priority.  Developing guidelines for student independent projects (in a SOLE kinda way) is a great way to put the learning into students' hands, build independence, and intrinsic desire to learn.

Here's the tough part: how do we encourage all of this and still have time to meet the needs of our new Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards?  In my work with Jarred Shell, we have seen that the way is through practices.  Here is a tool that we developed to help teachers, students, and parents.

Click here to see the bilingual pdf resource.

This tool helps teachers and parents see how an updated version of the science fair project is ripe with opportunities to support literacy, mathematical practices, and science & engineering practices.  Anything that supports deep learning spurred by student personal interest is a good way to go, right?

How will you support individual student learning AND support all the standards?  I'd love to hear your ideas!