Last month our MYP5 students shared their Personal Projects with the school community during our PP Exhibition. Over eight months, our seventeen MYP5 students researched and produced their independent projects. Each student worked with a teacher-supervisor who acted as a mentor and a guide on the side. The students delved into issues of personal importance, and many of these projects had local and global significance, from mental health awareness to body-shaming to teenage pregnancy and period poverty. Personal Projects start with an individual inquiry; students come up with their own learning goals connected to their life-experiences, passions, interests, and skills. The students identify and apply Approaches To Learning (ATL) skills to help achieve their goals. The students set success criteria and then measure their projects against these criteria.
The Personal Project at XLIS connect with prior knowledge and experience from the MYP 1-4 META projects, where every student produces an individual passion project that they spend a full year designing, creating, and researching. The secondary school has embedded the UN global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) over the past six years. We embed SDGs into curriculum units, and we build student-led group projects around them every May (our SDG projects). We are committed to student-led learning and have carefully scaffolded these projects from MYP1 to the Diploma Programme (DP). Students demonstrate future-focused skills such as independent, critical, and creative thinking, problem-solving, innovation, entrepreneurship, and communication through these project-based learning opportunities. The Personal Projects are a culminating project for the MYP and are a brilliant lead-in to the culminating project for the DP that students will work on in the following year, the Extended Essays, that takes the form of a 4000- word research paper.
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Author:
Daun Yorke (MYP Coordinator and Secondary Principal)
