This week at Acton Academy has been quite motivating. It is a new session and we are creating new habits. On Monday morning, we introduced SMART goals: SMART goal is an acronym we use to help the learners creating goals for themselves. SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Tough. At the beginning of every Core Skills, each learner sets SMART goals for him/herself (in a proprietary platform called Journey Tracker), and their squad leaders make sure those goals are SMART. At the end of Core skills, the learners visit their goals to check which goal was completed successfully and get points for the completed work.
This week we continued having a lot of fun with team-building games. As our tribe gets closer, we can play more complicated games that strengthen the learners’ communication skills and trust in one another.
On Tuesday, we introduced the learners to this session’s writers workshop: “A Letter to a Hero.” Their first challenge was to brainstorm 3-5 heroes they would like to write a letter to and start exploring some interesting facts about those heroes.
In our morning launches, we had some exciting discussions about Bill Porter and Tatsuo Horiuchi. We saw a short video telling their story. Then we discussed hard questions like “What is more important about an excellent product: the circumstances or the product itself?” or “What is more important to a hero: courage or persistence?”
Our art project was creating a self-portrait, and our maker-space project was building a bridge from popsicle sticks only. The bridges were built in pairs, and we will test them next week to see how much weight each bridge can carry before it breaks.
