One significant challenge I encountered as an early career teacher was student engagement. My subject area, history, is notorious for creating disengaging, passive learning environments filled with dry lectures and hand-cramping pages of notes.

However, concerns about student disengagement are not limited to just history. Increasingly, disengagement characterizes much of a student’s experience in school. In fact, reports from Institute of Play and the Gallup Student Poll suggest that the Gallup Student Poll suggestwhile 80% of elementary school students feel engaged in their work, only 60% of middle school students report feeling engaged and a mere 40% of high school students are engaged. Importantly, research also suggests that high school students are more likely to feel engaged when the work they are doing has personal or social meaning attached to it.

Work by John Guthrie and Gay Ivey suggests that allowing students a choice in their reading material is critical for engaging readers in both informational and literary texts, respectively. The Connected Learning report also offers compelling examples of youths using digital media and online networks to learn more about topics of interest, to share ideas, and to take action in their communities. One recent teaching method that integrates text choice and technology is Genius Hour (aka 20-time), consisting of sustained, in school, interest-driven student inquiry projects, which culminate in a public presentation of learning. I worked recently with a middle school science teacher, Michele Austin of King Philip Middle School in Massachusetts, as she and 24 students embarked on a 20-time program.

Process

We framed our work loosely on Joy Kirr and Tom Driscoll’s 20-Time in Education model along with AJ Juliani’s helpful infographic, putting an emphasis on inquiry projects that would improve the community. We drew inspiration from Chris Rosati’s Big Ideas for the Greater Good initiative in which local students developed projects to improve their community and videotaped their process. We allowed students to choose their topic and refine its scope as necessary.

Our 20-time project was scheduled for one period per week over 12 weeks, with presentations to take place during the 13th week. Class periods ran approximately 50 minutes during the students’ study hall/lunch block, and all students had access to desktop computers. Students were not required to participate in the 20-time endeavor, but nearly 90% opted in to the program and even brought friends from other study halls to collaborate.

We began by giving students time to explore and search for websites to construct their own understandings of 20-time. From there, we broke up the program into three four-week segments: brainstorming, researching, and action. Although student autonomy was a primary feature of this project, we provided graphic organizers to help students organize their ideas and push into deeper inquiry, plan out logistics, and aid them in getting unstuck.

Students took on a wide variety of projects. Three groups chose to run events, including a lip-sync contest, a baseball clinic, and a baseball league Opening Day Walk for charitable foundations, which raised over $4,000 combined. Other groups chose to focus on the process of creating clubs in school, such as a peer tutoring club and a nursing home collaboration club. Others wanted to research how to make things such as Scratch video games, a slinky toy, and even a human hamster wheel. We held the presentations on May 8 to a crowd of more than 50 community members, and several of the projects were highlighted in local newspapers.

Takeaways for practice

From these experiences, four important observations emerged:

1. Students find 20-time to be an engaging learning experience
   Students thoroughly enjoyed the 20-time process. After ending the program in early May, some students wanted to start a new project while others carried on with their projects into the end of the school year. Students valued the opportunity to choose their learning topics and the ability to receive peer feedback and support when they made their work public. The vast majority of students worked on their projects outside of class time, although they were not asked to do so. One particular feature students enjoyed was receiving feedback instead of a “score” because “messing up” was perceived as an opportunity to fix a problem rather than a path to a lower grade.
2. Internet navigation + reading + communicating = work in progress
   Students entered into the project with some background in Internet navigation and critical evaluation of sources. They were taught the differences in top-level domain types (edu vs. com) and the importance of finding the author of Internet texts. However, locating the author of a website and identifying his or her perspective on an issue was still a challenge for students. Furthermore, professional e-communication norms such as e-mail inquiries were relatively new to students, compared with informal methods such as texting that they were used to. Minilessons on observed challenges along with just-in-time modeling to meet student needs effectively addressed some common gaps in digital literacy.
3. Mentors make a big difference
   Make no mistake about it—it is a challenge for the teacher to help guide students through all of their projects. The teacher’s role is especially tough when the action takes place outside of school or if the teacher has a limited background in the student’s area of interest. We found the most successful projects were those where students actively sought out adults to help mentor their projects, as these adults could help the students navigate unforeseen logistical issues.
4. Genius Hour can be discipline specific
   While we and many other teachers have made 20-time or Genius Hour open ended, they do not necessarily need to be that way. Brian Hodges, a history teacher in the Public School system in Massachusetts, also runs 20-time in his classroom. His class has the caveat of tying their inquiry to a topic in social studies. Despite the constraint, Brian’s students reported positive experiences with 20-time because they had the autonomy to choose both their topic and presentation method. These two tweets (tweet A and tweet B) offer additional examples of the types of 20-time projects possible within different content areas.

Dave Quinn is a doctoral student in URI/RIC PhD in Education program. Previously, he was a history teacher at King Philip Middle School in Norfolk, MA, and a member of the Seekonk School Committee.