Teacher and students create incredible ‘Uptown Funk’ video

Teacher and students create incredible ‘Uptown Funk’ video

Meet Scot Pankey, a theater arts teacher who has come up with a novel lesson plan: Learning can be fun.

As part of a class assignment, Pankey led his students in a choreographed dance to “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars. The dance, which was filmed by students, was completed in a single take.

“We are a project-based school… and that means you give the students a project, put them in teams, and they have to come up with solutions.” said Pankey of A. Maceo Smith New Tech High School in Dallas. “They had three weeks to work on it, then present as a group what they learned.”

Since being posted on YouTube and to Pankey’s Facebook page, the video has been viewed more than 334,000 times.  

One YouTube user commented, “I want to go back to school! Where were these kind of teachers when I was in school?!?”  

“So proud of my kids,” Pankey wrote on Facebook. “This is a great example of how a bunch of technology students dropped their fears, trusted their teacher and got down to Uptown Funk!!!!”

Bravo, Mr. Pankey! We can’t wait for the next music video.