Planning with Quests and Collections
How does Quest Forward help students invest in, drive, and own their learning?
Setting the stage for all students to own, invest, and drive their learning means planning for the active, engaged learning and assessment that make it possible.
This kind of planning is connected with some important methods and concepts: differentiation, universal design for learning, personalized learning, and more. At the heart of all of these are a few key strategies:
- giving students choices about how, what, or at what pace they learn
- tailoring instruction to different kinds of learners, so that everyone is consistently moving forward from wherever they are, and
- putting students in the driver’s seat with inquiry or independent study, performance tasks and projects, and other student-centered activities.
Whether using and modifying the existing curriculum or creating quests from scratch, using quests can make this kind of planning and instruction more achievable.
For example, teachers can use quests to offer students choices: inviting them to choose from a selection of quests, from multiple formats of resources, or from options for artifacts (work products).
Additionally, the scaffolding, differentiation, and options built into quests tailor the instruction to the unique needs of each individual student. Beyond simply offering choices, quests can help build the bridge to the place where students can make choices – in a meaningful way – and feel connected to the class, content, and material so that they are willing to invest in their learning.
The table below includes several examples of how quests can support planning for a student-centered and student-driven classroom.
| Student Driven Learning in the Quest Forward Curriculum | |
| Choice in Work Products | In the quest What is Media Literacy?, students choose an example of media to analyze and evaluate. They share their evaluation on a blog they build progressively through the unit, and include a reflection that ties their analysis to the real-world impact of media. |
| In the final project for the unit Nature, students choose a medium for their final reflection. The Teacher Prep also provides suggested guidelines to help teachers assess artifacts no matter the medium. | |
| Differentiating Content and Process | In Night (Part 1), the Teacher Prep provides options for how students read the text and how they process their learning in a journal. It includes a framework of expectations based on the learning goals, so teachers can more easily decide how much choice and flexibility to provide to students. |
| Teacher Prep from Inside Revolutionaries: Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda supports effective planning in two ways: it sets up an evidence-based best practice – activating prior knowledge – and it provides multiple strategies for teachers to implement this practice, based on the needs of their students. | |
| Choice in Resources | Differentiating the ways that students access content – and allowing them to make choices about how they learn – is an important strategy, but a difficult one to implement. Finding multiple modalities of resources and thoroughly vetting them takes time, even with the assistance of AI to rewrite articles or find video alternatives.
Listed below are screenshots of two quests of the hundreds that encourage students to make choices about how they learn new information or provide students with multiple avenues for accessing their learning.
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| Active Learning in Activity Descriptions | In Activity 5 of Using Measurements and Tools, students use various measurement tools to make measurements of objects in a science classroom (meter stick, balance, graduated cylinder, and thermometer). Then, students make conversions among different units of measurement. |
| In Activity 5 of Ohm’s Law, students conduct experiments and use the relationship between voltage, current, and resistance to reach conclusions about the resistors. | |
| In Activity 3 of Plan Flute, students design a pan flute. They select the type of material, determine the length of each tube that will make a desired sound, and then make modifications to their pan flute. | |
| In Activity 2 of Night (Part 2), students participate in a Socratic seminar: they create and answer original questions, share and build on ideas, connect to prior knowledge, make comparisons, and extend their thinking. | |
| Student Choice with Choice Quests | In this playlist for Unit 3 of Advanced American Literature, students make choices about which quests they complete. (Want to make your own playlist? Check out this resource.) |
| Customizing Quests for Student-Driven Learning | |
Existing quests can also serve as a tool for planning and implementing additional opportunities for student-centered and student-driven learning. In Quest Forward, you can customize…
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| Designing a Quest for Student Driven Learning | |
| Designing your own quest in Quest Forward gives you a blank palette for planning student-driven learning.
Whether you design a quest to serve as a single lesson or to lead students through activities that span multiple class periods, it should be designed for discovery and exploration and include an artifact for students to create to demonstrate their learning. As you design the quest’s activities, resources, and artifact, think about how you can give students choices, tailor instruction and resources, and/or put students in the driver’s seat with inquiry, projects, or independent study. |
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