Seven years ago, I sat down in the back corner of a classroom at a conference expecting a teacher-led discussion on school financing and its impact on the classroom. As an accounting and finance teacher, I was pretty pumped! Within minutes I realized I was in the wrong room. I eyed the door, my path out, and came to the conclusion I wasn't going anywhere without causing a massive disruption... so I stayed. And, well, as it turned out, going into the wrong room was one of the coolest things to ever happen to my teaching career.

The presenters challenged educators to introduce Google's practice of '20% time' (also referred to as genius hour') in the classroom. 20% time is a workplace concept that's been around for decades but which was made most famous by Google. Embracing the idea that intrinsic motivation drives deep engagement, companies delegate a chunk of the employees' time each week to work on 'whatever they want', often referred to as a passion project. Translating that into an educational setting turns the learning over to the student. Like employees, when the student chooses what and how they learn, engagement skyrockets and the depth of learning reaches new levels.

The session wasn't very crowded, but the room was absolutely packed with passion and I felt out of place with nothing to add except excitement and apprehension. For every 'heck yeah moment, I had an equally strong 'yeah but...'; in the community of that room they welcomed my expression of both types. They helped me build on the 'heck yeahs' and we problem-solved the 'yeah buts' until I left with no choice, fully committed to giving 20% time" a go.

Why?

There are many reasons a career and technical educator might choose to implement 20% time in the classroom, but there are two in particular that led me to take that initial leap of faith for my students. They helped me solve problems with my teaching that I knew existed but didn't quite know how to begin to tackle.

1. I was spoon feeding content. I knew that students came into my classes with solid skills in the game of 'playing school,' but I needed a way to teach them how to learn. Leading 20% time with students focuses on the learning process just as much as, if not more than, the content itself. The evolution of my individual practice is extremely reflective of a shift to focus on the process and not the end result. Genuis hour projects remove the spoon (with which we so typically feed) from the teacher's hand and puts a shovel into the hands of each student for exploration.

2. I enjoyed the effortless enthusiasm from students when they were given options in the classroom, but it wasn't enough. I only created these opportunities in small bites through activities or short projects where students 'chose a company' or 'picked a favorite hobby' and then applied predetermined content to their choice. I knew there had to be more, a stronger way to scale this type of choice and natural student excitement in the classroom. With a 20% time philosophy in practice, students are not only given ownership of the non-content piece, but of the content as well. The only limitation is that their chosen topic has to have something to do with accounting or money.

I've never said no to a student proposal. With choice, especially content choice, in the hands of the students, their excitement levels grow stronger than from any other learning scenario in which I've seen students. And naturally, there is a direct correlation between excitement for and quality of learning.

How?

There are two triangles of success that must be leveraged in order to fully set ourselves, as educators, up for implementing new learning models. I don't think it's necessarily unique to 20% time, but it has been a solid frame of reference for me every year as I prepare to dive into another project with my students.

Triangle 1: You--Energy--Time

Leading a learning process requires a full commitment from the teacher, the learning leader in the room. Planning will involve more energy than normal, but--of course--what new endeavor doesn't. You're excited to take students on this type of adventure; the necessary energy will be there too. There will be days that demand you dig deep (maybe pound that rare afternoon cup of coffee) and find energy you weren't sure you had, but with excitement and drive you can achieve something great and new for your classroom and students.

Triangle 2: Students--Parents--Administrators

No matter how amazing your new idea might be, you still need to sell it. Selling so often feels like a dirty word, even to me as a former business major; over time, however, I've grown to realize its value and to understand that it doesn't need to be done in the stereotypical 'slimy salesperson' kind of way. To sell--or demonstrate the value of--20% time to your individual student/parent/administrator triangle will look very different from school to school, community to community, culture to culture. While I don't have the magic pill for success, what I have learned is this: The stronger your first triangle, the easier it will be to sell the second triangle.

Now What?

When I first began to implement 20% time in my classroom, I thought the idea was so amazing that I did not anticipate needing much of anything along the lines of tools for students to use during this process. I quickly realized that my practical brain was clouded by emotional excitement; if we are going to ask our students to do something they've never done before, we need to give them a framework under which they can do it. I did not do a good job with that during my first year or two of leading this type of learning. So, please learn from my mistakes.

There are a slew of tools and methods I've developed throughout my journey with 20% time projects. Some have worked quite well; some fizzled out, and I'm sure there are still many more to come as I continue to improve teaching and leading my students to learning. Remember: What I do and what works really well for me and my students may not work for every teacher and their respective students. I am not writing to tell anyone what to do, but to share what I do and let y'all decide what you want to take and try and what you need to leave behind.

What's Your Problem?

The first thing 20% time students need to do is define their project, their topic, their challenge, their problem they want to solve. This is the first and most foundational part of the whole process and cannot be stressed enough. Kids who are good at school' often don't value this piece at all. They aren't used to owning this task. Traditionally, we teachers give them the problems and ask them to solve. A kid's nature is to just 'solve the problem' because that's what they know.

Albert Einstein once said, "If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution."

I have never experienced a scenario after which I looked back and said, "They spent too much time defining their problem." To complete a topic and problem brainstorming activity, kids are provided structure to determine both the content and the context in which they want to explore that content. They are directed to look at their interests--related and unrelated to class--and then guided into a marriage between the two. From there, we look at the biggest problem that exists with the respective content in the chosen context and construct an "I will..." statement that defines their project.

What's Your Solution?

Once the student has identified a tight, very clear problem, they move into the solution stage. But before they start solving, they need to plan a bit more. They might roll their eyes and protest, but without project planning, they'll lose focus and direction and end up all over the place while trying to develop a solution.

In class I use a project management progress tracker template that asks them to:

(1.) Reverse-engineer checkpoints from the last day of the project, back to present day. This gives them pacing goals that THEY have set and THEY own.

(2.) Document every 15 minutes of classwork time they spend working. I parallel this to the business/consulting world and the requirement to document all minutes of work done for and billed to a client. This process also keeps them aware (through built-in reflection) of their productivity. It's fun to watch students learn so much about their efficiency of work when they have to document what they accomplish in 15-minute chunks.

(3.) Assess their own progress and determine what more needs to be done before the next time (usually a week apart) we work on our 20% time projects.

The progress tracker provides the framework in which they operate during all of their problem exploration, solution testing, and final creation stages. After a few years of working this way, I realized that they still needed more. The classroom is chaotic during genius hour days and the teacher will rarely be able to address every student's individual needs during the limited class time that day. As a solution I made a simple form, the 3 Ns Check-In, for my students to fill out. This form asks three quick questions to allow me to help them:

(1.) What do you NEED from me?

(2.) What is your NEWEST knowledge?

(3.) Tell me about your NEVER again.

These three questions not only give me a peek into each of their minds as the project progresses, but adds another layer of self-reflection to their learning process.

One final tool is a template for documenting their research. We use Google Docs and I lead the students through a quick tutorial to use the explore tool not only to search within the document, but also to leverage the built-in citation tool. This allows them to focus more on exploring their problem and creating a unique solution and not get caught up in and distracted by the minutia of MLA citation.

What's Your Grade?

I don't care about grades. Actually, that's a bit of a lie... I despise grades. Having said that, they are a reality in my world and an even bigger reality in my students' world. No matter how great the kid is or how excited they are about this new type of learning, they still need to know how they will be graded on the project. So, like everything else, I put that in their hands.

Using an online rubric creation tool, the students define (with guidance from me, of course) the categories for which they'll be graded. My favorite rubric creation tool, and the one we use for this project, RubiStar, offers several project categories from which students can choose. Once they choose a project category, the tool moves on to provide a rubric template with drop-down categories that autopopulate levels of learning into four columns for point allocation. All of these pieces can be edited and customized to meet exact needs of the project.

The creativity and genuine interest in learning that students bring to the 20% time projects are amazing. Watching them go through this process is truly a gift for any teacher who chooses to invest the energy and time. I was fortunate enough to be led into the wrong room at the right time; that experience turned into a true teaching treasure. Dave Grohl has said, "That's one of the greatest things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they'll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons" (Pattison, 2013). Within the structure of 20% time, I've learned, you can give a project to 85,000 different students and they'll turn it back to you for 85,000 different reasons.

Sean Crevier is in his 19th year teaching high school business in the Chicago-land area. He has been on the national Accounting Pilot & Bridge Project team since 2010, works as an educational consultant for the AICPA, is the co-founder of the monthly #BusEdu Twitter chat and is also a technology integration specialist, speaker and consultant. Email him at busedcrev@gmail.com.

REFERENCE

Pattison, L. (2013). Twenty years after In Utero, Nirvana's importance hasn't diminished. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/aug/31/nirvana-davegrohl-krist-novoselic-in-utero.

By Sean Crevier

EXPLORE MORE

20% Time Toolkit: bit.ly/20timetoolkit

RubiStar: http://rubistar.4teachers.org/

Getting Starts with Genius Hour:

geniushour.com

20-Time in Education:

20timeineducation.com