DIY Meets PBL: Senior Capstone Projects come to Cajal!
Cajal Academy's Senior Capstone Projects prepare students for college and beyond by building the organizational, communication and self-management skills they need to turn their big ideas into innovations!
We founded Cajal as a “wall to wall” project-based learning school because we see that the methodology at its core provides an analytical framework and flexible design process that professionals use everyday in the real world to take on the kind of big, complicated problems that the bright and gifted kids we work with might find “fun.” Each of our projects follows the same process, learning as they go how to break down what may initially seem like an impossibly big idea into a series of individual problems to solve, strategies to find the information they need to solve it, tools to help them integrate large amounts of information together and then the organizational skills they need to turn that into something new. That’s a process they can use in college and beyond, to turn the unique perspectives that these unique thinkers have into new novels, products—or a PhD in molecular biology. Whatever is the right course for them.
Our Capstone Projects give our high school seniors the chance to take this process to the “next level,” by taking agency over the process and using it to design their own, independent project addressing a social or scientific problem of their own choosing. This new graduation requirement will be supported by Capstone Classes giving our seniors the ‘behind the scenes’ training we use with our own staff in how to design their own learning, along with the project management and self-direction skills that are essential college, professional and life skills!
DIY Meets PBL:
Each student will need to work through the same design process that our team uses to design each of the projects we do with the students over the year. This includes the following steps:
Setting the Standards: Each student will need to identify curriculum standards at a 12th grade or AP level, for which they have not yet demonstrated competency through their other curricular work. Each project must incorporate standards to be mastered from at least two of the following three disciplines: science, social studies and/or math. Additionally, all projects must include as one of its end products an explanatory essay meeting appropriate ELA standards.
Choosing a problem to solve: Each student will need to propose a “Driving Question” through a formal presentation to a committee of Cajal teachers whose disciplines will be relevant to the proposed work. The Driving Question cannot be answered by searching on Google, but rather must require at least one element of original research or a hard or social sciences experiment, and original analysis. The question must also require the mastery and integration of ALL the curriculum standards selected.
A medium for manifesting your solution: The joy of project-based learning is that you’re not just solving a real question, but manifesting in a “real world” way. This could be by creating a documentary, developing the prototype for a new product, writing a play…the possibilities are endless. Seniors will have curricular and staff support through their Capstone Classes for the executive function ‘olympics’ of making sure their projects are feasible with the time, materials and attainable skills available.
Need to Knows & Design Your Own Learning: Once the Driving Question has been approved, students will brainstorm what they will need to know to answer it, and set a plan for how they plan to seek out each of those answers. This is an iterative process that will be revisited frequently as they gain ever increasing layers of knowledge. Each learning plan must also include at least one in-industry expert or mentor that they will interview and/or incorporate into their project, ensuring the subject matter expertise required to push outside the Google box.
Investigate: Now comes the meat and potatoes! With support from staff advisors, students will work independently to execute on the learning plans they have designed, with dedicated in-school check in times and scaffolded support for executive function and other therapeutic needs to help student growth with respect to their “not yet skills.” Skills for monitoring how well they are staying on schedule, capturing and retaining detail and organizing their information will be targeted and supported through Senior Capstone Classes, developing students’ ‘meta’ awareness of the learning process, strengths and weaknesses that will need for college and beyond.
Integrate: As students accrue the information they need to answer their driving question, students will design their own scaffolding for integrating that information together into a solution to the problem they originally posed. Working with graphic organizers and other techniques for seeing how the pieces fit together, students will have scaffolded support from staff and peers to help them work through the information they’ve learned to develop an original solution.
Create: It’s time to bring it all together! Working off of their analysis, students will develop their proposed end product, while mastering engineering standards for how to create to a set of analytical requirements and specifications. Visual arts, ELA and other creative fields will be supported through staff advisors to help students master creative expression standards appropriate to their chosen work.
Present! Our Capstone Projects will culminate with a showcase of our seniors’ work for the community, encouraging our seniors to take the presentation skills they’ve been developing through our regular PBL program to the “prime time.”
Self-Assessments: Throughout their projects, students will be required to conduct self-assessments, assessing their own progress with respect to key project management and curricular skills. These assessments will be closely supported by Cajal staff, helping students to become more aware of the strengths they bring to the process, and pitfalls they will need to look out for as they move on to other settings. Formal assessments will also be conducted at the end of the projects, assessing the extent to which projects showed depth and mastery of the chosen standards.
We look forward to seeing our high school seniors kick their independent learning and problem-solving skills up to the next level!
Independent, Self-Directed Learning with Expert Support
Many of the bright and gifted kids we work with get big ideas, and can then get overwhelmed by how to bring them into reality. Having those big, out of the box ideas isn’t going to change as they travel through college and professional demands—it is, after all, what makes them innovators. And yet, for many students it requires skills where they may struggle, like organization, communication and resisting the temptation to be perfectionists. So if we don’t tackle those challenges now, our kids will carry them forward into college and other future settings.
Our Capstone Projects are designed to bridge this gap, by giving students agency over the process, along with a curriculum, coaching and the same expert, multi-disciplinary therapeutic approach that we infuse into our program as a whole. It is precisely because these processes may sound overwhelming to some students that we think they’re important to do, so we set them up to thrive in college, not just help them get there!
Know a student whom you think would benefit from our high school program? Contact us to learn more!