21st-Century Project Learning: The Bootstrapping Checklist
Written by Rich Baxter
What Is The Bootstrapping Checklist for Public Schools*?
The Bootstrapping Checklist for Public Schools* teaches 21st-century skills, including communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. The workflow introduces students to project management, innovation and entrepreneurship and engages students in experiential learning activities related to the STEAM curriculum.
The power of guided iterative design such as The Bootstrapping Checklist is that it provides the seamless integration between pedagogy and technology needed to accelerate technology adoption by students and facilitate sustained entrepreneurial and socially innovative student projects. It is inherently mobile, social, and cloud based, and it demands that students use validated data to make design decisions.
The Bootstrapping Checklist provides a real and authentic reason to learn skills like coding and computer science at a younger age, and an incentive to keep at it. Student projects initiated in a public middle school classroom now have the potential to develop further than ever before.
The Bootstrapping Checklist challenges the way public schools engage and evaluate student success – entrepreneurial education of this type gives real authenticity to student projects and collaborations that break down age and ability barriers present for so long in our customary public education models.
The Bootstrapping Checklist for Public Schools* teaches 21st century skills, including communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. The workflow introduces students to project management, innovation and entrepreneurship and engages students in experiential learning activities related to the STEAM curriculum.
The power of guided iterative design such as The Bootstrapping Checklist is that it provides the seamless integration between pedagogy and technology needed to accelerate technology adoption by students and facilitate sustained entrepreneurial and socially innovative student projects. It is inherently mobile, social, and cloud based, and it demands that students use validated data to make design decisions.
The Bootstrapping Checklist provides a real and authentic reason to learn skills like coding and computer science at a younger age, and an incentive to keep at it. Student projects initiated in a public middle school classroom now have the potential to develop further than ever before.
The Bootstrapping Checklist challenges the way public schools engage and evaluate student success – entrepreneurial education of this type gives real authenticity to student projects and collaborations that break down age and ability barriers present for so long in our customary public education models.
Why Was The Bootstrapping Checklist Created?
I created the Bootstrapping Checklist as an entrepreneurial program for teens in the form of cyclical guided inquiry and because it is deeply simple and non-proprietary, it is immensely scalable.
Fundamentally, the Bootstrapping Checklist relies more on a cyclical philosophy of engaging with our world – this I borrowed from First Nations holistic ideals of sustainability, and also from Eastern philosophy (Buddhism primarily, and the Japanese concept of Kaizen, or continuous improvement).
There is also change management theory and social engineering mixed with business concepts, in the form of fully interdisciplinary project-based learning – which the kids love because they are practicing real business culture in a sustainable ‘service learning’ and socially innovative context – school is now ‘real’ for them.
The Bootstrapping Checklist is a shift away from too many ‘linear’ assignments for students, to a more holistic cyclical method of inquiry-and the Bootstrapping cycle lasts 5 months-we do it every Friday for 5 months (roughly 1 stage in the cycle/month). For the kids, they feel a sense of support knowing that they will have the time to work through a very deep inquiry, and still be able to work through the myriad of other assignments they encounter throughout the school year.
The program was put together with the hard work and commitment of myself and my students, and with support from global mentors with whom I constantly look to for guidance and support. This means that the Bootstrapping Checklist (and guided cyclical inquiry, however the form it takes), is immensely scalable, as long as a community has access to WiFi, cloud-based computing, mobile devices/computers, and adventurous teachers.
The Bootstrapping Checklist: The Future
The program will become a registered charity once a suitable investor is found, and will develop into an Artificial Intelligence enabled module that will very quickly allow remote communities to ‘self-learn’ project management to solve local challenges and engage with the global community-but the teacher/coach/mentor/elder must always be present to facilitate any community learning, this is always critical.
About Rich
About: Rich Baxter is an educator and advocate for social innovation, the arts, and entrepreneurial education in our public schools. The Bootstrapping Checklist was presented on December 5, 2016 in Philadelphia at the Reimagine Education Awards and exists in the Creative Commons as an open innovation project. You can read more of his work at Social Innovation in Public Education.
