Band Swap - Psychology

The past month, the middle school and high school bands have been rotating between collaborators. Each member of the Upper School team wanted their kids to have access to certain similar elements of "human" - early civilizations, body systems and maintenance, civil rights, and psychology. These four subjects were decided on because, well, they're important (duh!) but also because the kids have explicitly expressed interest in these areas over the course of the year.Instead of the traditional single-collaborator dive into each one of these, it made more sense for each teacher to specialize in an area and have the kids cycle through.We designed a week-long crashcourse in each area, with a small culminating project at the end of each session. The notes, reflections, work, and projects would be physically entered into a portfolio due after the entire wheel. As it's Spring Break currently, the students are wrapping up each of their projects and getting them ready to submit.Once submitted, each project earns an individual button!Check out my button for psychology:

The course questions for psychology were amended for each particular age group, of course, but went as follows:

  • what is psychology? why is it hard to study or learn about?
  • what are "knowns" about psychology? what are trends enough they're truths? (focused on cognitive development and stages in developmental psychology!)
  • how do we learn these "truths"? is there anything we disagree with about them? what are the ethics of studying them?
  • how do we behave? what do we want to know? can we design a psychological study to figure it out?
The culminating project for the psychology course was to design an independent social study to answer a research question of interest to the student. Ideally, if one of the kids wants to turn it into an arc project, they now have the time to perform their study and analyze the data. But, if not, at least they have practice thinking critically about the ethics and development of a psychological study.
And, because the Exploratorium has an exhibit all about social studies (specifically, not the curricular arena) and sharing right now, we were even able to go and play out several of these experiments!
The other projects were: to create a full-scale ancient civilization with all the key components; to research and then write a civil rights bill that would impact groups of people today; to write a love letter to a system of the body and explain why it's so remarkable.
We get back to school on Monday! I can't wait to see their work.
Oh, and then we jump into sex ed. ~~