Citizen Schools WOW! A Celebration Of Students & Their Success
This year Citizen Schools hosted nine WOW! celebrations with thousands of students, parents, teachers, and community members to highlight students’ hard work from their apprenticeships. Despite the challenges of virtual and hybrid learning environments and surges of racial violence and injustice, our students have adapted and remained focused and engaged in their learning. We are so incredibly proud of their final work presentations, all of which took place virtually for a second year.
Extended Learning Time & Citizen Teachers
Statistics show that students who are exposed to project based learning and career pathway opportunities are more likely to finish school and continue on to higher education or a more engaging career journey. As a part of the Citizen Schools’ Extended Learning Time model (ELT), students engage with Citizen Teachers AND Teaching Fellows who help students dive into their interests and unlock their creativity. Citizen Teachers partner with Teaching Fellows to run apprenticeship classes, in which students and Citizen Teachers form socio emotional connections with one another while learning about Coding, Carbon FootPrint, Mock Trial, 3D Printing, Solving Global Issues, and more.
Each Teaching Fellow helps the Citizen Teacher volunteer build genuine connections with students by focusing on common interests and community building while learning about a new exciting topic and making connections for the students that make the content culturally and age relevant, as well as engaging and FUN! Our Citizen Teachers commit to ten weeks of apprenticeship classes and our students commit as well. They build their own partnership as they collaboratively prepare a WOW! Presentation Project!
What Is A WOW!?
A WOW! Celebration is where our students from CA and MA showcase the projects they have been working on the whole 10 weeks! Those projects can be:
3D Printed Models
Campaigns to solve world problems/better the local community
Court Cases
Our WOW! Projects all correlate with the class curriculum and represent the unique interests and personalities of each student and community space.
Who Participates In A WOW!?
WOW!s are a time for the whole community to come together and celebrate. Teachers, students, Teaching Fellows, Citizen Teachers (volunteers), community members, parents, students, extended families and friends are welcome to each of the events.
How Many WOW!s Are There?
Within the Citizen Schools ELT community we have volunteers at seven locations in California and two locations in Massachusetts. WOW! Celebrations happen at all campuses in different capacities.
How Do Students Experience A WOW!?
Students get super excited to show off their hard work when WOW! time approaches. Students host and lead the event, and they really enjoy that autonomy and experience. Some students prepare scripts and others prefer to only “improv” during the event. It is truly what they make of it. To students this is a time to laugh, smile and show off their work. Every campus chose to display that work differently during our virtual climate this year!
Check out what some of our students had to share this year:
The students of Winter Hill in Somerville, MA share some of their apprenticeship highlights.