Putting passion on the education agenda

ALL has been working on the importance of passion in education over a number of years.

Following its inaugural lecture Joy and Data 2015  All created The Passion Tool Kit ensure every student’s interests are known in a school.  It was trialled in six schools and evaluated by ACER.

The idea for an online Passion-Led Learning resource hub emerged because of last year’s lockdown where many teachers and students offered passion projects to engage students and enable them to undertake deep learning outside the classroom

However, an ALL survey discovered that there is a glaring lack of readily available well-developed, well-structured materials designed to inspire the ways teachers can support students in their passion pursuits.

As a result, ALL has commissioned global education thought leaders Charles Fadel and Bernie Trilling, from the Center for Curriculum Design in Boston, Massachusetts, to develop a world-class online repository of passion-led learning projects.

The aim of the website is to provide teachers with a range of passion project resources to allow a personal match between each student and his/her interest or passion. The resources are shaped to develop the capabilities that students need today.

The site will be easy to navigate, and designed to provide teachers with resources which are aligned to the capabilities they are being asked to deliver, and showcase how passion learning can be high quality deep learning and rigorous.

Each resource will offer different size projects – a Passion Investigation, a Passion Adventure, and a Passion Quest ranging from one hour to 50 hours, and suitable for all ages and stages of learning.

Work is now underway to create an online prototype which will be tested by schools across Australia.

Further work will include integrating the online resources with ALL’s Passion Toolkit.