Support For The Senior Project
Some people feel a senior project is a far more useful investment of a students' time in a Language Arts classroom than the traditional literature approach. The expanded Graduation Project is centered in the English classroom but occurs across the four years of high school. This provides teachers of all disciplines the opportunity to incorporate the Graduation Project standards, defined by state constructed rubrics, into their classrooms. This division of labor will ultimately reduce the load upon the English faculty and allow for the re-introduction of literature.
The senior project provides students with an opportunity to explore career options through job shadowing, to see their mentors engaged in the day-to-day activities of their chosen careers. This allows students headed into the workforce a chance to observe how professionals handle their responsibilities, a lesson that many students do not learn in the forgiving and permissive atmosphere of a high school. The success of job shadowing, however, is dependent on specific mentor, many of who have been given little training or preparation in Senior Project mentoring, and the flexibility of the specific work force environment in which the student will be participating to accommodate an outside observer (e.g., privacy/confidentiality issues in healthcare or law).
By focusing on a student selected research component, the college-bound student is given his or her greatest opportunity to engage with a subject and topic related to his or her intended major. If properly developed with current information, the graduation project can provide a spring board for college term papers and undergraduate thesis. Utility of the Senior Project for non-college bound students has been less well articulated.
Perhaps most importantly, the senior project does force students to work beyond their anticipations; just as challenging courses like AP Calculus and Honors English can indicate to prospective schools and employers that the students take their academic responsibilities seriously, a high quality senior project should serve as the capstone to a rigorous high school career. Student complaints should never be marginalized or ridiculed, but educators would deserve to be charged with negligence if they capitulated to the students' demands for lower standards.
Read more about this topic: Senior Project
Famous quotes containing the words support, senior and/or project:
“The moral qualities are more apt to grow when a human being is useful, and they increase in the woman who helps to support the family rather than in the one who gives herself to idleness and fashionable frivolities.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“Adolescents have the right to be themselves. The fact that you were the belle of the ball, the captain of the lacrosse team, the president of your senior class, Phi Beta Kappa, or a political activist doesn’t mean that your teenager will be or should be the same....Likewise, the fact that you were a wallflower, uncoordinated, and a C student shouldn’t mean that you push your child to be everything you were not.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“Indigenous to Minnesota, and almost completely ignored by its people, are the stark, unornamented, functional clusters of concrete—Minnesota’s grain elevators. These may be said to express unconsciously all the principles of modernism, being built for use only, with little regard for the tenets of esthetic design.”
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)