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Students pitched out to myself and administrative staff. We had a 98% dress up rate as well! Not allowing them to utilize notecards and allowing more time to practice their speeches made these presentations very solid.

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There were multiple check ins throughout the process by me daily as this project exceeded over two weeks of class period time before Spring Break and us getting ready for the AP Exam. Students also performed the critical friends protocol halfway through the project and at the end to help groups develop and refine their ideas more. Lots of ideas were discussed among the groups and revision was a big part of refining the final product to ensure that the group's solution could answer the driving questions in a concise and feasible manner.

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Most of the ideas focused on making voting easier. Students narrowed their ideas down even more with the $100 test and the NUF test for further refinement and development. A lot of the ideas focused on early voting, voting by mail, same day or automatic voter registration, election day holiday, and incorporating community events/values to place an emphasis on civic duty and virtue.

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How can we reform the election process to encourage greater voter participation?

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Entry event showcased older generations of voters saying "Don't vote" and "Give me more power" in a few edited clips from advertisements and testimonies used over the years. The students got to see and understand what happens when voter turnout is low. Decisions are made by those who show up.

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I gave feedback to each group, asked questions with each group and allowed students to ask questions as well. Students also wrote down different things for each group including "I think..." and "I wonder" to help them prepare for future class presentations.

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Employability skills that are worked on in this project include collaboration, team work, digital and information literacy, problem solving, critical thinking, leadership, organization and public speaking.

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The students developed their ideas using the brain firing protocol. After generating lots of ideas, they narrowed it down to a collective top 10 for each individual. Then they did a group top 10, which evolved into a group top 3-6 ideas.

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"This was way better than any of the tests we've been taking. It's good to solve a problem, work with others and have a good time while doing it. I like projects if it's something that's interesting and the policy brief was very interesting to me."-Brian

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Groups were created using the website Flippity.net, using their group generation software to randomly assign students to groups. This simulates the real world since you will not always work with your friends and might have to make some compromises along the way. Students will be creating solutions to a tough problem to solve. This ensures lots of perspectives for students to share what they think on how to tackle this problem and the potential solutions associated with it. Two truths and a lie was an easy protocol early on to use to get the groups comfortable with each other.

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Show through pictures, videos, examples of student work to reflect on the check ins done throughout the project.  How did students reflect throughout the process? How did student critique and revise?

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Early on, students created a stakeholder map to get a more clearer picture at who is affected by this problem. It became apparent that everybody in some capacity is affected by our lawmakers at the national, state and local level. Pains and gains chart was also utilized as well. Need to knows were created as well with various topics examined, especially comparing and examining other countries. The US is very unique in its election process and looking outside the box helped tremendously. Causes and consequences of low voter turnout were also looked into by the students as well. Collaborative practices were utilized by the groups so research could be done in an effective and efficient manner. More information from a wider variety of sources was utilized as well. Most students used Google but some used AI tools as well. However, it was monitored by me to make sure the AI tools were not doing all the work of the project for them.

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This project went way better than expected. I think what worked well was that we did the project towards the end of the school year. The students all knew each other and it was easy to see that responsibilities were divided up pretty evenly among groups. If I run this project again, I will give a little more guidelines on the policy brief and less on the presentation aspect of it. This was one of the more better PBLs I have run in recent years.