[There are a few dozen blog entries I’ve been meaning to write, and now that I’m moving into "Summer Get Stuff Done" mode, as opposed to "Insane End of School Year" Mode, I’m hoping to carve out the time and head-space to go back to the "blog idea" pile and start putting word to thought. This is one of them.]

I spent the week of June 6th sitting in room after room at SLA, watching students present their Senior Capstones. The presentation itself is a twenty minute oral presentation about the project, idea, event, experiment… thing… they did. There is an overview of what the student did, often with either video or photo documentation of the event, or samples of writing, or the experiment itself, and often what students did was really quite awesome. A student figured out how to make shoes out of old tires. Another student ran a charity event that raised money to buy toys for underprivileged children. Another student work with professional musicians to write and record original songs. And then there was the zombie movie… in short, the projects were as diverse as the interests of the kids themselves.

But what made it amazing was the next part of the presentation. I listened to students talk about the process… kids talked about how the final product was so different than the original idea. Kids talked about what went wrong. Kids talked about when they succeeded and how they failed. And kids talked about how they used the five core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection for a project of their own design. I watched kids own their learning, own their ideas, own their passion, and own their successes and failures. It was amazing.

One of our students wrote on Twitter after his presentation: "When doing my reflection. I realized that I didn’t learn anything, but rather relearned everything SLA had taught me…. I’m certain I’ll use all of the lessons taught to me at SLA for the rest of my life." (It was two tweets, for those counting characters.) And for me, that was one of the most powerful moments of the year. I want our students to have the passion and skill to live lives of meaning. I want them to take the process of learning and apply it to all the things they will learn throughout their lives.

After spending a week watching them present their capstones, I know they will.