Ever since I heard about 20% Time projects, Genius Hour, and Passion Projects I wanted to provide those opportunities to my students. The idea behind giving students class time to work on topics that truly interest them aligns with my views of education and schooling. While I do believe that kids should be exposed to a variety of learning experiences, what I will call the Classics or a Classical Education, I also believe we should offer students opportunities to learn or work on topics that they want to learn about. I think kids need to learn as much as they can, especially when they are young for two reasons.
- The more skills we expose our kids to, the more prepared they will be for whatever they end up doing in life.
- Maybe something new that we expose our kids to will be that one thing that excites them enough to pursue later in life! You really don’t know what you don’t know.
I fall somewhere between traditional schooling and home schooling or unschooling. While either extreme may be appropriate for some kids, I think most kids fall somewhere along the continuum. I try to offer my kids something in the middle and that is why I finally made the choice to implement a full 20% Time Project.
Here are some lessons I learned and some observations:
- As expected some students took full advantage of having every Friday to work on something they truly wanted to work on. Other students spent most of their Fridays socializing and maybe watching Youtube videos of things that interested them. Some students had to work on parts of their project at home because their passion was an outdoor activity such as sports or things like car racing and dirt bike riding.
- Because of #1, students really looked forward to Fridays in Science class, even if it was just to socialize!
- I learned a lot from students! As I walked around and watched what they were doing some students shared their passions with me. Many of them know a LOT about the topics they chose.
- Students were very, very independent on Fridays. I mean, more so than with most projects. It was as if I didn’t even need to be there.
- Some students chose to work on something new and a bunch of students changed topics once, twice, or more than twice.
- Providing students a planning document was recommended at a Genius Hour workshop I attended and it did help.
- Asking students to complete a Ted Talk style presentation on their topic was a good idea and I would do that again.
- Giving students every Friday for the whole year proved to be too long. Some students were done by the 1st semester and most were done by or before the end of the 3rd quarter.
- So in retrospect, I think having the projects for one semester, with presentations being due by the end of the semester, is a good plan. I think having this for the 2nd semester is also a good idea because not only is it a great way to end the year but it’s also nice to be able to prep students during the first half of the year.
- During the 1st semester I would give kids instruction and ideas on different ways to present or share their learning. Most of my 8th graders did Google Slides for their presentations. Even when given time, and even though most of them HAD the time, they still did Google Slides presentations.
- I need to set aside more time for presentations because we ran out of time, and since it was the end of the year some projects did NOT get presented!
- Looking back and comparing this past year to the year before, there was content in my curriculum that we didn’t get to because we ran out of time. Part of that was that I added a project to my Weather Unit that took a lot longer than I expected. So I really don’t know how much content I gave up to do 20% Time but you have to be ready to give up some things that you normally do with students.
- Most of the presentations were pretty good, some were done very poorly, showing that they did very little actual work, and a few were spectacular. Here are links to the top presentations, which were very good indeed:
This student presented a heart-felt desire for joining the FBI and becoming an agent. It was evident that she did her homework and is fully aware of what she needs to work on to fulfill her dreams.
This presentation was one that this student’s classmates were really looking forward to seeing all year. The student shares his Drag persona!
The last presentation I’m sharing is one that completely blew me away. She gives a History of Animation that I could totally see being an actual Ted Talk! Very well done indeed!
There it is. My first experience with 20% Time. Next year I will be teaching only 6th graders, not 8th graders, so I’m not even sure if I will be doing this again. If I do, which I would love to, I would consider number 7 above and only do it during the second semester. Having it only last one quarter and then give a few days to prepare the presentation might work, too. The thing is that I barely have enough time to do all the things I want to do with robotics and my environmental unit so giving up time would be tough. So it’s all up in the air. We’ll see how far the kids get after the first semester.
