This year’s MYP project has been moved to second semester, among other big changes.

Crystal Sullivan, the Middle Years Program coordinator, decided to do this, as well as giving class time for the project because “ we were still in the hybrid model at that point and teachers and students were really working to just figure out this system,” Sullivan said. It just wasn’t appropriate to add something to it.” Sophomores now have 8 days of English class allotted for them to work, about 16 out of 25 hours they are supposed to work on the project.

The final project fair will be virtual to work around COVID restrictions. However, students in district wide connected learning courses will not have to participate. These courses have one teacher providing for hundreds of students across the four campuses. However, these are only on level classes. Honors and remedial classes stayed with DHS teachers and so those connected learners will be doing the project, but some will not. For those that are, all instructions must be available online. There’s been a canvas course for it for years, and the past schedules are still available on the MYP website.

However, this year there is a list of specific assignments and process journals to be turned in online, and a set daily schedule. English teachers have some control over this schedule for their students, and they will be the ones grading them, and either way they are giving a very clear outline to their students. For the project selection, there was a list of recommended topics and projects.

“We really try to avoid giving specifics like you can do this and do this and do that, because we want it to come from the students themselves, but this year we actually did that.” Sullivan said.

In addition to this, English teachers volunteered to simply be mentoring their own students as opposed to each student having unique mentors. In years past, teachers could choose from a list of students, or otherwise would be assigned one randomly. This takes time that they didn’t necessarily have with this year’s schedule and could be difficult for connected learners to manage.

“I personally felt like it was going to slow down the process for students and create extra work for teachers who may not even know what the MYP project was. So I wanted to keep it completely in the English classroom.” English teacher Alison Weaver said.