Passion Based Learning

I think common sense tells us that students learn more when they are engaged and excited about school. Passion based learning is a great way to make sure that your students are indeed engaged and excited about you class, or subject. Finding what our students’ passions are will only help us to reach them.

After reading about passion based learning, I learned that it is important for teachers to understand how to find out what their students’ passions are. One article brought up the fact that we use surveys and questionnaires to learn about the students, as icebreakers, when we should be using them to get to know our students and find out what their passions are. If we can find out the things that our students love, we can tie that into our lesson plans, resulting in our kids being entirely engaged.

All this talk about passion based learning makes me think about the things I am passionate about. I have always loved sports. I played them for fun as a kid, was a three sport athlete in high school, and played football in college for a couple years. So, like I said, sports have always played a big role in my life, and I know that I will teach kids who I share that passion with. I have a feeling it would be a little difficult to get incorporate sports inside the classroom, but there are some things I think I could do.

One of the ideas I had was letting my students who are passionate about sports create their own 30/30 film, and present it to their classmates. I will be teaching english, and I think it could be kind of cool for my students to create some sort of short film, like an ESPN 30/30, as sort of a book report over something they have read. I know that not all of my students will be passionate about sports, so I will have to try to find ways to incorporate their passions into class, hopefully resulting more engaged students!