"It starts with the students. They are the reason we teach and the future of our world. My daughter is four years old, and soon to be going through our public school system. I want her generation to have opportunities to explore, analyze and create projects that have unique meaning to each of them. Instead of answering a multiple choice test on The Great Gatsby, why can't my daughter have the opportunity to write, collaborate, sing and produce a song that explains in detail the major themes of the story. Through 20% time, we give our students a voice in their own learning path, and allow them to go into depth in subjects we may skim over in our curriculum." - A.J. Juliani
We often say, as educators and parents, that if we encourage students to pursue their passions they will find out what they want to do in life that will make them happy - yet their experiences are often our experiences as we offer them opportunities to play the sports we enjoy, or the musical instruments we are familiar with - even as we try to find alternatives that might pique their interest. In schools, we are guided by curriculum topics and the limits of available resources - including those parents work so hard to fundraise to provide. Finding ways to invite students to expand the parameters of their experiences within school helps us also encourage them to use tools of learning - like design thinking, reading, writing, using math skills - among many others - in real-life contexts.
The idea of inviting students to engage in learning about a topic of their choice is not a new one - teachers have been trying to work this concept into lessons for as many years as I've been teaching - and probably for thousands of years before that - I believe even Socrates sought to engage his followers with considering issues near and dear to the challenges of life in ancient Greece! Strategies like 'show and tell' or 'Student of the Week' or 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation' all offer opportunities for students to showcase their own personal experiences for their peers and friends. And students love being in the spotlight (usually!).
20% Time is an idea that originated with Google when the company invited their engineers to devote 20% of their time at work to focus on any project they liked, no questions asked. The idea was simply that if people worked on something that interested them rather than projects that were assigned, productivity would increase. The idea has worked so well for Google that about 50% of their most popular products - like Gmail and Google News - resulted from these 20%-time projects.
Several education researchers and teachers have co-opted the idea of 20% time as a way of deeply increasing student engagement in learning - and one name for the idea is 'Genius Hour'. We've named the concept 'Wonder Time' at EHS, and we believe providing students a designated time to delve into a topic, idea or experience they are really interested in extends into something with enhanced learning potential, and changes the focus of engaging in a personalized task into a personal pursuit of something that is significantly interesting to each child.
At Eric Harvie School, we launched this learning strategy this month - we've been exploring the idea for several months as we have engaged in using design thinking strategies in a variety of ways, and made the decision as a staff to pilot a 4-week project called 'Wonder Time' based on the premise of Genius Hour or 20% Time. We want to see how our students from Kindergarten to Grade 3 perceive the opportunity, what level of learning they will engage in and whether or not launching a Wonder Time extends student learning and invites them to explore their world from a different perspective.
For this pilot project, teachers and support staff each identified a possible area of interest they would be willing to support a multi-age group of students to investigate without much structure. This is a considerably different perspective from most of our daily teaching where we have specific targets and goals in mind as we work with students - as well as a much wider spread of student age/ability than teachers usually work with at the same time. It is a bit of a risk for all of us - students and teachers alike! Once the topic list was generated, a google doc was used for students to indicate their top 3 topic choices to explore and then we used a simple sorting system to place students in their categories of choice. And suddenly we had 15 groups all ready to begin exploring and investigating topics of choice.
Two weeks ago, on May 5th, Wonder Time began at Eric Harvie - all those groups of children ages 5 - 9 came together at various places in and out of the school to investigate and experience topics they were personally interested in. Cooking, design/building, space, fabric creations, Canada, photography - these are just a few of the topics children have begun investigating and experimenting with over the past two Fridays - and these experiences will continue each Friday through to June 2/17. By all accounts, these have been the 'best part of the week' for many of us!
So what is actually going on when we have Wonder Time?
Children are exploring in depth ideas they might not get opportunities to explore within the designated grade-level curriculum topics, while using the competencies and skills that are in the curriculum. They are coming together to help each other, inspire each other, coach each other and also travel different paths of investigation from each other as often as they investigate things together. There are no 'tasks' or 'assignments' in the sessions but there are plenty of things to do! Cooperation, collaboration and sharing are essential as they come together with resources and sources gathered onsite, or brought from homes, or mined from teacher homes - there were no special purchases made to support our projects. Students are using ipads, cameras, sketch books, egg cartons and artifacts they created themselves (including pizza) to document and gather evidence of their investigations and explorations. And ideas are flying all around the school - along with laughter, pride in new creations, children moving all around the school as they pursue their investigations and loads of questions, questions, questions!
Using the design thinking principles (discovery/empathy, interpreting/defining, ideation, experimenting/prototype, evaluate/test) provides students with a framework for thinking - yet there is no expectation that students proceed through the stages in a linear fashion, for Wonder Time is about experimenting, trying, exploring as much as it is about building a prototype or testing. Could happen but might not - and whatever happens is okay ;)
We've been tweeting out some of our experiences and documenting others on teacher blogs, but the greatest source of information about our Wonder Time are the students themselves - in the telling of their stories of wonder lie the seeds of curiosity and joy that spark imagination and invitations to lives forever filled with learning.
Lorraine Kinsman, Principal
Eric Harvie School
No comments:
Post a Comment