3 Brilliant Projects My 10th Grade English Teacher Used
By: Shawn Laib
Tags: Creativity, Schools, Education, Teaching, Writing

The best educator I’ve ever had was my 10th grade English teacher. There are too many reasons to name here for why I felt this way about him nearly a decade ago, and still feel impacted by him all this time later. All you need to know is that he is a very gifted instructor, someone who thought outside of the box, if you will.

What I want to share with you here is three of his most clever and ingenious projects that he had students complete throughout the school year. To connect with adolescents, to truly attempt to have them reach their potential, more teachers should take parts of these assignments and incorporate them into their own classrooms.

Non-verbal presentation

One of the first major projects of the school year, this assignment requires the class to make a slideshow presentation that shows peers all about who you are and what you represent. Sounds pretty basic. There’s a catch, though.

As already stated in the subtitle, the project is non-verbal. You cannot explain anything to the class that isn’t already laid out in the slideshow. No misunderstandings can be cleared up, and no points that were made too short can be elaborated on. Everything must be made crystal clear through the text, pictures, and choice of song in the background that plays along with the PowerPoint.

You know the saying “show, don’t tell”? This is the perfect scenario to teach students how to convey deeply personal anecdotes and storytelling skills to the class without just stating blah facts. It’s part ice-breaker, part narrative-driver, part visual essay.

I don’t know whether my teacher came up with it completely on his own, or whether parts of it were adopted from other classrooms, but it’s a very mature literary experience. It will make your students think about themselves in a more artistic manner, and allows them creativity and leeway that a normal personal narrative essay would not. It makes shy students give more of themselves to the class, and it forces loud students to carefully introspect in a new way.

Mask construction art project

This assignment saw each student take advantage of their painting skills, molding a mask out of clay and then painting it with topics and ideas that are deeply important to each student on a personal level. Don’t worry, nobody was graded on their art talent, so there is no requirement to emulate Picasso or DaVinci.

What you did need to do was convey things about yourself that you may not normally show, using the same symbolism that you access when discussing a book or piece of writing. My teacher wanted to demonstrate to the class that we all put on a “mask” each day depending on what mood we are in, who we are around, and what activity we are participating in.

Photo by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash

The physical mask that students create would represent and tell a story about you asking that you put the things about yourself that you usually reveal to the world on the outside of the mask, and then share some things that you normally wouldn’t on the inside of the mask. Literal and figurative literary skills are being tapped, and the personal element makes kids get much more involved and active in their own learning about the most important thing you can think of: yourself.

I will also note that you should not feel required to put anything on your mask that you are uncomfortable sharing with others. Keep everything reasonable and respectful if instituted in your own classroom.

Parent/teen role-reversal project

High school students not only have to adjust to the rigors of school, they also may be undergoing tumultuous relationships at home with their parents. This project asked each person to create a set of rules for how a parent should manage their teenager, presenting a sort of role reversal for students.

The literary aspect was added when you are asked to make the entire project in line with an analogy or metaphor. You choose a position of authority and who they preside over that is in line with a parent and child relationship, and then build the set of circumstances and rules around that comparison.

As a basketball fan, I chose the coach and player metaphor. I built what I thought the perfect player would be, the perfect coach, and the do’s and do not’s of each role, among other items. It was quite a revelation to see the overlap between the positive qualities of a great player and a great teenager, and then the same overlaps between coach and parent.

Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash

It truly is an immersive and life-changing activity for many students to see the way the world connects, and how many of the positive qualities we use when playing one role in our lives translate right over to another. Analysis skills and self-reflection are used heavily here, but in a much more practical manner than old books and poems.