I teach an art option class in addition to my Humanities teaching load. I love teaching art. It's such a relaxing pause in the day, when I just get to help kids create.
This year, Covid has thrown a bit of wrench into option scheduling. Typically, students rank their option choices and get placed in courses they're interested in. Because we need to keep kids in their homeroom cohorts, we've moved to a wheel approach - the students stay in their homerooms and cycle through every option, spending about eight weeks in each one.
This made me reconsider how I taught art. Typically, I'd teach it in a project-based way, so everyone would work on drawing or pottery or printmaking at the same time, though they'd have choice in what the drew or made or printed. But now I would have students in my class who don't consider themselves artists, and very likely, some who are actually very anxious about making art.
I'd been considering the Teaching Artistic Behaviour (TAB) approach for a while, and this was just the push I needed to jump in. I read Engaging Learners Through Artmaking: Choice-Based Art Education in the Classroom (TAB)by Katherine M. Douglas and Diane B. Jaquith (Alberta teachers, hot tip! I borrowed this book from the ATA library!), and once I learned more about the practicalities of this approach, I was ready. I knew this approach would help everyone find an artform that felt good to them, regardless of their past artmaking experiences, and would meet them where they're at.
The TAB approach can be summarized in three sentences:
What do artists do?
The child is the artist.
The art room is the child's studio.
Being a teacher who lives every day and thrives in student choice, I'm starting at the far end of the choice spectrum. I am planning on having each student create at least one 2D and one 3D project over the course of the eight weeks, knowing many students will do more than this. Allowing them so much choice, I knew I needed to scaffold them through the idea-getting phase, experimentation and learning of the medium, creation, and reflection phases of a project. So I created a graphic that will guide them through the process, which is a morphing of studio art practice, creativity, and design thinking theories.
My plan is to have students conference quickly with me before they move to the next phase of the project, giving me an opportunity to guide their practice, and give feedback.
I know my students will need help with the inspiration phase, as well as learning new techniques and skills. In my Google classroom, I have assembled some resources they can use for Drawing, Pastels, Watercolour Painting, Acrylic Painting, Printmaking, Calligraphy, and Collage & Mixed Media. I'll work on doing the same for 3D artforms as well over the next couple of weeks.
Students are not restricted to these media. If a student has a digital tablet and wants to get better at digital art, sure! If a student wants to make comics, go for it! However, I want every artist to improve regardless of where they're starting from, and to do this, we'll be learning the Studio Habits of Mind vocabulary and what it means. This will play centre stage in assessment, as well.
Every day, I'll do a minilesson to teach a skill or technique. I'm thinking that
My biggest worry is that many students will need me at the same time, and with Covid precautions, we're avoiding movement as much as possible. So I'm making each kid a set of three cards, which I'll laminate. They'll leave the "Happily working" one on their desk unless they need me, in which they'll replace it with the "I need a conference" or "I need help." I've created a little form called "I need something," too, which they can fill out to let me know what they need.
As with anything, I'm sure this process will become refined in the hands of my students, so we'll see what happens!
A couple of years ago, we started our year in grade 8 Humanities by having the students create a user manual. It was good, but it missed the mark in a couple of ways, namely, the students didn't use them beyond the assignment. In an effort to more purposefully set students up for the work they would do throughout the year in Room to Breathe, we hacked it, and came up with From Safe to Brave.
The purposes of this beginning of the year task are:
We all learn more about the people in the room.
We can start to build trust in order to take creative risks. We want to become brave so we can do outrageously awesome things this year.
Students can hone in on the things that fascinate them, and their learning preferences, so they can make good decisions about what they want to read, write, speak, view, listen to, and represent about in Room to Breathe.
We know that establishing a culture of trust in a classroom is a prerequisite for creativity to flourish. Among one of the things my grade 8 team has done to establish a culture of trust at the beginning of the school year is to develop a set of grade 8 norms. We were inspired by a video we saw from Edutopia about a teacher in Maine who did something very similar with his students. We have developed a process that works well in working with our 100+ group of grade 8 students to create a list of ten norms that guide us through the year.
We explain norms to our students as what is "normal" in a given situation. Norms change based on the activity - what's normal in the stands of a major league hockey game is different from what's normal in a library. We explain that we want a set of norms that will serve us in whatever situations we might happen to be in.
We work with our students over the course of the first week to take them through a divergent and convergent process to guide them through the norm creation.
Day 1: Brainstorming
At our school, we teach in teams, with two teachers sharing two classes. We have one Humanities teacher and one Math/Science teacher for each of these two homerooms. We have four homerooms in grade 8, and thus, four teachers. However, we work very closely as a team, and so we like to make time during the first week of school for all the grade 8 students to meet all the grade 8 teachers. We have thus designed the brainstorming round to have students rotate through with each of the grade 8 teachers. This year, amidst COVID, we did this brainstorming outside so students could easily distance from each other and we could have the students move around.
We begin with our own homeroom, and then rotate classes through each teacher. Round 1 begins with this prompt:
Question 1: Think about your best school year. Describe how it:
Looked like
Sounded like
Felt like
We type the words and phrases the students suggest in a shared Google doc. We rotate the students to the next teacher, and then tackle the second question:
Question 2: Think of when your learning is at its best. Describe how your learning space:
Looks like
Sounds like
Feels like
The students rotate to the third teacher, and respond to the third question:
Question 3: Think of the relationships with the people who impact your learning in a positive way. Describe how they:
Look
Sound
Feel
The last question is the most open. The students rotate to the fourth teacher, answering this question:
Question 4: What are your hopes and dreams for this school year?
By the end of the brainstorming round, we have four classes' worth of ideas for each of these four questions.
Day 2: Summarizing with Adjectives and Adverbs
On Day 2, working with our own homeroom, we print a copy of all the brainstorming - enough for one copy for two students. We explain that the students will see a lot of things in common between the four classes. Their first job is to look through the brainstorming and pick out themes. Once they have the themes identified, their next task is to assign an adjective or adverb to the theme. For example, if students found "collaboration" as a common theme, they might choose the adjective "collaborative." If they found a theme of "focus," "focused" would be an appropriate adjective/adverb. One way we teach our students what an appropriate word would be is if we can say "We are ____." Some themes are harder than others to find adjectives and adverbs for, like "growth mindset."
The homeroom teacher then asks the groups to share their adjectives and adverbs, compiling them in another Google Doc full of the adjectives and adverb mindsets the students brainstormed.
Day 3: Live Draft to Converge
One fun thing we often do in grade 8 is a live draft. If we are doing research projects in science, for example, and we want only one group to cover a topic, we do a live draft, so students don't all select the same topic. We've used this concept for our norms, asking each homeroom to narrow their list of adjectives and adverbs to 20 mindset words, with no repeats allowed. By the end of this live draft, we have 80 great words.
Our teaching team then sits down, and from here, we select 20 words we'd be happy living with. We do this because we can take the time to contemplate the words, and the situations in which we would use them. Some words are often very similar, and we can discuss the nuance of each word, selecting the most generous one.
Then our team created a Google form with these 20 words in checkbox voting style.
Day 4: The Vote
Our students get this Google form and every student gets to vote for their top 10 words.
Our teaching team looks at the results, taking the top 10 words as our final set of grade 8 norms.
The result is an incredibly diverse, thoughtful, and purposeful list of norms. We make a poster with the norms and display them in prominent spots in our classrooms.
Here are the norms our students chose in 2020:
Here are the norms from 2019:
It's interesting to see which words are the same both years and which ones are different.
How We Use Them
Before beginning a task, we will ask our students, "What norms would be important for this task?" Students will suggest 2-3 norms we will keep in mind for the activity. One of my colleagues has remarked how much smoother a task runs when she remembers to ask for norms versus when she forgets.
These norms replace classroom rules, because, really, who needs that? If something goes awry, we can talk about it using these norms: "Were you being inclusive just now? How might you change things up to be more inclusive?"
They do wonders to establish a culture where everyone agrees about what's normal in a given situation and help each other behave in expected ways.
My teaching partner Tara and I knew we needed to redesign the way we taught Language Arts to our grade 8 students this year. What we had been doing was okay, and we did some pretty neat things with our kids, but it certainly wasn't streamlined, and engagement was pretty variable, depending on the task. So we went away in the summer with lots of things to think about, good books to read, and ideas to percolate.
When we met over coffee in August, we came to the conclusion that we wanted to do a reading/writing workshop-style approach. In this initial conversation, we wondered about how we would teach the other strands that are a part of our curriculum: listening, speaking, viewing, and representing. We thought maybe we could do something with these on Fridays. I was just pulling out of the parking lot when Tara called me on handsfree saying, "Wait a minute. WHY would we only do these strands on Fridays?? Why not all the time?"
This is how Room to Breathe was born.
R2B In a Nutshell
Students self-design projects that include an Inhale (Reading, Listening, Viewing) - in other words, text interpretation - and an Exhale (Writing, Speaking, Representing) - in other words, text creation. When they design their projects, they associate "I Can" statements - our entire curriculum reworded in kid-friendly language. Students conference with their teacher before they begin, and again at the end of each Inhale and Exhale. This allows us to help set students up for success when they start, to identify skills that need to be taught, and what resources will be needed. It also allows us to collaboratively assess the student work with the students (more on that later!).
Room to Breathe is the bulk of our English Language Arts instruction time. In 2019-2020, we had time for two full rounds of R2B (that's six projects), a class novel, and a final project. The way Room to Breathe is designed, students achieve all the outcomes from the curriculum over the course of the year (sometimes many times over!).
If you'd prefer to see us explain it to you, we recorded a presentation that we presented at the Calgary City Teachers Convention, in which we share the logistics, practical considerations, and philosophy of our Room to Breathe approach.
The Logistics
We created a flowchart for the Room to Breathe processes to help students get the hang of it, at first. Once they get used to the process, they don't need to refer to the flowchart - it becomes a part of their muscle memory.
Students use a planning sheet to organize their idea before we conference. The planning sheet includes the "I Can" statements, as well as a spot for the student, teacher, and parent to sign when approved.
A selection of some of our "I Can" Statements
The very first set of conferences to get the first Inhale approved is fast and furious, but then meetings are spaced out. We learned that finding a way to stagger that first set of conferences is the way to go, and often have an assignment the students are working on prior. This year, we did a practice inhale-exhale with a shared article and some poems to practice together how to annotate a text during an Inhale, and then had the students write an Exhale their own in the style of one of the mentor texts. Students then signed up for a conference when they completed this initial assignment, spreading out the first round of conferences.
Students set their own due date for the completion of their task and write their name on our classroom calendar on the due date. That becomes their next conference date. As we progressed through the year, we found ways to streamline this. In the classroom, we used a big calendar on the whiteboard for students to write their due date on, which informed us of our conference schedule for the day. Students knew there could be a maximum of four conferences scheduled each day. During emergency online learning during the COVID lockdown, we used a Google Calendar with bookable appointment slots to scheduled one-on-one conferences.
We offer minilessons based on student needs and questions that we compile as we conference prior to beginning a task. Here is a slidedeck we are continually adding to based on our minilessons. These minilessons come organically from what the students need. Not all students are required to attend a minilesson, only those who the minilesson applies to. Why learn about how to analyze a song if you're working on creating a stop motion video? Sometimes this means we repeat minilessons throughout the year, and that's okay. This is about meeting the students' needs and helping them grow.
The Principles
Now that we've gotten the "what" out of the way, we want to dig in a bit deeper into the "why."
A few principles guide our work and have been designed to be heart and centre in R2B.
For student learning to be truly personalised, they need to be the ones making decisions about what to read, view, create, and share.
We have heard people bemoaning the idea that today's youth don't read and write anymore. This is simply not true. In fact, students are reading and write more than ever before using social media and other platforms. In addition to all this reading and writing, they are engaging in sophisticated forms of content creation through platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Tik Tok. The problem is that this kind of text interpretation and creation is sometimes not acknowledged or honoured in classrooms. Of course, we want our students to interpret and create in more critical and analytical ways. But by using the topics and ideas they already care about and allowing them to design their own tasks around these interests, student learning will be incredibly personalized and rich.
We were very inspired by the incredible book Beyond Literary Analysis as we designed R2B and their website Moving Writers has been instrumental as well. In both resources, Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O’Dell offer real strategies and methods for using topics that captivate our students and design tasks around them.
Assessment is teaching.
Most of the most powerful work in R2B happens during conference times. We have a chance to sit, one-on-one, with our students and really talk about their learning. When we look at the work that they completed and talk about what they are proud of, and what their next steps are, they get immediate, actionable feedback about what to focus on next. Because this project is ongoing, the feedback they receive is immediately implementable.
Guess what this means? We don't take grading home. It means being intensely present during the one hour we work on R2B each day, but then our planning periods and after school time can be used to plan for student learning and respond to their needs.
Assessment happens here, not alone, on my couch.
We collaboratively assess and grade all work in R2B with our students, during conferences. In these assessment conversations, and following a conversation about what they learned and demonstrated in their work, we ask our students to suggest a grade for their work. In 99.9% of situations, students' perceptions of their own work are in line with our perceptions. We assess against the "I Can" statements the students selected, and if they can provide lots of evidence to show how they met the outcomes, there is no reason why they shouldn't receive a 4 (our school board uses a 1-4 indicator scale for assessment and reporting).
The conversation, however, has quickly shifted from one of evaluation and judgment to one of learning - how can we, together, help you improve the complexity of your thinking and learning? We had mentioned that we wanted to push our students into analytical and critical thinking, and to support our students, we created a continuum of thinking:
This document has proven very useful for assessment conversations because if they aren't finding themselves using analytical, evaluative, and creative thinking, they are not demonstrating mastery. It also helps the students when they're designing a task. If they propose they're going to watch the movie Mean Girls and then summarize the story, this isn't designed in such a way that they can access analytical thinking. In our conference, we'll help the students redesign this proposal so it takes a more critical stance. In that example, it might become "I'm going to watch the movie Mean Girls, and identify the character archetypes present. Then I'm going to create a short film using character archetypes to help build meaning." Or it might become, "I'm going to analyze the movie Mean Girls, and then write a review about the movie, answering the question 'Does this 2004 film hold up in 2020 in how it portrays teenagers?"."
Student choice and ownership leads to authentic text interpretation and creation.
The proof in this approach has been the incredible engagement of our students. Our students can't wait for the hour in their day when they can truly breathe and focus on something that they have designed to explicitly engage themselves in their own learning. We have had an incredible range of student projects, which you can check out on our blog.
A Special Note About COVID-19 and Online Teaching and Learning
Many of us have found ourselves in situations where we need to be designing work that students can complete at home and submit online. As we learned about schools being closed indefinitely in our province, we breathed a sigh of relief because R2B could continue, business as usual.
We continued R2B with our students during emergency online learning. Students used Google Drive to work on their projects, as they had done while at school. As mentioned, we moved all conferences to Google Meet, which students signed up for using Google Calendar. For those teachers who are finding themselves in interesting teaching scenarios, be that full online learning, a hybrid approach, or in the physical school with health precautions, Room to Breathe will work for you.
Resources:
Please borrow any of our resources if they are helpful to you. Make a copy. Hack them. Make them yours. And then tell us about it! Tweet at us: @luckybydesign (Erin) and @bestcircus (Tara).
"I Can" statements (aligned with the ELA 8 curriculum in Alberta, Canada). Alberta teachers of other grades, check out the Essential Learning Outcomes site made by the Alberta Regional Consortia. They have "I" statements for all grade levels.
A non-exhaustive menu of R2B project ideas to get them started in thinking of ideas for Inhales and Exhales across the strands..
Get in Touch
If any of these resources are useful to you, you've been inspired by our approach, or have any questions for us, please reach out to us! You can find us on Twitter at @luckybydesign (Erin) and @bestcircus (Tara), or you can e-mail the Creativity Collective at thecreativitycollective@gmail.com.
or How Do You Uncover 400 Years of History in 10 Months?
By Erin Quinn
One of the biggest struggles for a creative teacher is balancing the demands of packed curriculums with the desire to provide time and space for student creativity. I teach grade 7 Language Arts and Social Studies. Language Arts is no problem - it lends itself quite well to creative pursuits. But the grade 7 Social Studies curriculum is a beast of a curriculum. It focuses on pre- and post-Confederation Canadian history, basically spanning the years from 1600 to the mid 20th century. Pretty big for eleven-year-olds to swallow.
In jumping into this curriculum, my team teachers and I wanted to start with a project that would allow students to spend a bit of time on the context of the curriculum. Really, the crux of the curriculum, as with most history, is “Who are we and how did we get here?” Put in another way, “What changes have occurred in Canada over the past four centuries, and why? And how do these changes impact us?” So we wanted to focus on present-day Canada for a bit to take a look at where we are now.
The Game of Canada
We started with the idea of doing some centres focused on different aspects of Canada today, and concepts that would underlie students’ understanding of being able to understand what has changed from 1600 to present. This went through a few iterations, but then I stumbled upon Q Learning from the Institute of Play. I knew about gamification of learning before, but hadn’t tried it, and the design packs from Q Learning really helped me wrap my brain around it. In a nutshell, gamification is applying concepts from game mechanics to non-game situations. To be clear, it is not using games in learning - that’s a totally different thing altogether.
I had spent the first couple of weeks of school learning about who these kids were, and knew many of them considered themselves gamers. So, I gamified the project. Each centre was turned into a quest. Students would be working in Guilds, and would create an identity for their guild by making a coat of arms and a motto. They would work cooperatively to learn together.
Some of the coats of arms with the badges they earned.
Teaching Like a Pirate
And here’s something silly but something profound. In order to permit your students from taking risks in learning, you need to do it too. This was one of my main takeaways from the short, but infinitely inspiring book by Dave Burgess called Teach Like a Pirate. So guess what I did? Called myself the QuestMaster and donned a cape. Whenever we are working on the quests, I am wearing my cape. Let me tell you, I have gotten plenty of strange looks in the hallway. And a million people have asked, “Ms. Quinn, why are you wearing a cape?” to which I reply, “Why not?!” But who cares? I’m doing this to give my students permission to do it too. I’m laying the building blocks that will allow for creative risk taking as our year progresses.
Me as the QuestMaster.
Gamification of Assessment
It just so happens that this project aligned quite well with my school’s current shift towards outcome-based assessment. Some of the actual quests do not really require creative skills. Looking at the three types of creative learning designs, some of the quests would qualify as Type 1 activities: skill and knowledge acquisition, such as the map quest and reading a news article about a significant Canadian story. Some are Type 2 activities, like redesigning the Canadian flag to reflect its modern identity, and writing/filming/drawing the story of an explorer coming to Canada. Both these types of tasks are necessary. I think the beauty of these quests, though, lie in their assessment. I pulled curricular outcomes from the curricular document and translated them into kid friendly “I can statements.” For example, “I can examine different ideas and points of view expressed in a media message,” or “I can choose symbols that represent Canada and support my choices with research.”
The Genius of Angry Birds
When the guild thinks they are ready and have achieved the outcomes for the quest, they call me over and we have a look. We discuss the learning and notice where evidence of the outcome is. Through discussion, we come up with a number of stars out the possible three. This gamification concept may be familiar to you if you’ve ever played Angry Birds:
In Angry Birds, it is possible to pass a level if you get one star out of three. But you can also go back and replay the level to earn more stars. Likewise, with the quests, students can choose whether they’d like to continue working on a quest to improve it, or move on to the next one. What’s been really surprising for me to see is how many guilds opt to go back and try again. I’d say probably 80% of guilds who get less than three stars go back to improve it.
Mastery of Learning
This scenario probably sounds familiar to you: In the past when I was younger and greener, I would assign students a writing assignment, take it in, mark it, give it back, and give them the opportunity to improve it to hand in for a better mark. Maybe one or two kids would take me up on this offer. This is a good step on the right path towards encouraging mastery of learning, but the way these quests are assessed has been so much better. In reflection, I think there’s a few differences between the way the quests are assessed and the hypothetical redo of a writing assignment. First, the gamification aspect gives kids an entry point that is familiar and fun to them. Second, and I can’t stress this enough: conversation is the most powerful form of assessment. Through conversation, I have a clear idea who knows what they’re talking about and who doesn’t. I scribble as they talk and write down evidence of learning. For some guilds, we quickly run into our dead end. The assessment conversation sometimes ends up being quite short the first time because it is obvious that the students aren’t ready to be assessed yet. They go back and try again. Third, specific, clear feedback was given during these chats. I told (and wrote) the guilds exactly what they needed to still learn to earn more stars, and the feedback was immediate. They didn’t have to go home, read what I wrote, improve their essay or story on their own time, and take the time to hand it back in.
And the end result of this 80% re-attempt at learning? Mastery. Better learning. Persistence, grit. High levels of achievement across the whole class. Who wouldn’t want that?!
This type of assessment would lend itself extremely well to type 2 and 3 tasks as well. In fact, the last quest of the game is called Boss Level. The instructions are quite simple, “Create something to show your understanding of the Big Question: “What does it mean to be Canadian?” Students will use their learning from the quests to help them formulate an answer to this question and create something, anything, that shows their ideas about this question. We’re veering into Type 3 territory here, since students will need to apply the creative process in order to create something new and answer a significant, open ended question.
Creativity Breeds Creativity
So now we come back to the topic of this article: how does a teacher in a heavy-content area allow for creativity in the classroom? Maybe I’m oversimplifying here, but it really just involves being creative yourself. Looking at your curriculum with a creative eye will allow for a project like this one, one where kids have fun learning content as well as important creative and higher level thinking skills.
Downloads
Please feel free to download the assignment and assessment sheets.
For several years our school has centered student learning, engagement and assessment around the Habits of Mind. These 16 habits which include “persisting”, “taking responsible risks”, “creating, imagining, innovating” “ remaining open to continuous learning” and “managing impulsivity” to name a few, function as a cornerstone of our program. They have become a point of reference to speak about students as whole learners and people instead of just assessing and reporting on their basic facts or ability to write a paragraph. This year I began to discover the role these habits play in creative development and creative practice.
In the first week of school homeroom teachers were charged with a beginning of the year task to create a class bulletin board presentation outlining one specific habit. 16 classrooms, 16 Habits of Mind, it worked out perfectly. Except, we only had 4 school days to pull it off and we were just getting to know our students. Not to mention the fact that the final product was essential and would be displayed for our whole school community. Talk about pressure to “create” on the spot. This is a task that could have taken an hour to do, which might include, a brief discussion, some quick ideas and slap it up on the board. However, I realized this could be an opportunity to set the tone of the class, to introduce students to the creative process and to come to understand the students as learners and collaborators. The Habit of Mind my class was designated was “Managing Impulsivity”.
To be totally honest, I was a bit disappointed. There are so many habits that seemed much more exciting to me, “responding with wonderment and awe” or “imagining, innovating and creating” or “finding humor”. After some initial thoughts my class actually entered a lively discussion about impulse shopping and thinking before you post online. Day one was complete and I started to become excited about the prospect of where our work might go.
My intention in the days that followed were to ensure every student felt heard, that each students ideas were valued and that every member of the class had a role in the creation of our board. I didn’t formally introduce my students to the 7 strands of creative development, I did however use them as a guide. I have to admit there were times when I had to ask myself, am I investing too much time into this “bulletin board”? I felt myself constantly evaluating the value of such an experience.
I didn’t fully realize it until our final product was displayed and the students gazed upon it with pride, but my class used the process of creating this bulletin board as an opportunity to practice managing their own impulsivity, which also opened the door to experiencing the creative process and creative development. It is so easy to go with our first ideas or dismiss the ideas of others when creating something original. The process of creating this board was quite the opposite. Students generated ideas, shared them with each other and generated some more ideas. They collaborated, re-evaluated, asked for opinions and created prototypes. Every decision was carefully thought out and considered prior to being executed. The final product resulted in a fully collaborated creative display of our class’s ideas about the habit “Managing Impulsivity” but it also served as a space to truly live the habit in action.
As mentioned in our Recipe section, creating a safe culture in your classroom is important for future creative work. I teach an option class for grade 7s called Creative Problem Solving. It’s a course that’s locally developed by my school board, and focuses on the creative process as a method of solving real life problems. I’m very excited for the opportunities this course is going to afford my students, but before we could get into really meaty issues, we needed to spend some time developing that collaborative, safe culture.
I started with a great activity I’ve used before from an organization called the Institute of Play, the GameKit. The Institute of Play is a fantastic organization that aims to bring play and games into schools. Being a strong believer that learning should feel like play, I am right on board with their mandate. It doesn’t hurt that they create top quality resources for teachers and school personnel.
I used the first activity in the GameKit called Find Play in Things. On a table, I laid out several supplies: a bunch of red plastic cups, some elastic bands, paper clips, yarn, two-sided math tokens, and twelve sided dice. I asked the students to get into groups of about three or four students. Then I asked them to come up and select three items - they could take as much or as little of the three items as they wanted. Now came the fun part: Invent a game using all three items.
An important thing to note is that these are the only instructions I gave them. I didn’t say, “you must have at least three rules in your game, you HAVE to write them down, and NO MAKING A MESS! AND NO MAKING NOISE! AND NO HAVING FUN!!!!” Okay, I’m being a little facetious right now, but some teachers’ instinct would be to put limitations on the games. Resist this urge and just let the kids go with it.
My students happily set about this task. What happened at that point was something pretty remarkable, and one of the hallmarks of design thinking: the students biased toward action. Instead of spending time discussing what they might do, the students took their materials and started prototyping right away. They lined up cups in rows. They drew game boards on the whiteboard desks. They rigged up slingshots using paper clips and elastic bands. And when the sling shots didn’t work, they tried another approach.
My students spent a good part of an hour prototyping their games, adjusting as things didn’t work, and trying again. Without knowing it, the students experienced the divergent-convergent pulse: when something didn’t work as planned, students had to go back to the drawing table, come up with other possibilities (diverging), and then deciding on another route to try (converging).
Next class, we are going to try playing each others’ games to see how they work and if they’re fun. Feedback from users may cause them to have to go back again to try something new. If a game is too hard, or too easy, their players will tell them this, and the game designers will need to try another approach.
What’s great about this activity is that it is such a simple activity that gives students a taste of the creative process, and many of the seven strands of creativity.
Genius Hour is an idea that’s catching like wildfire lately in the field of education. Genius Hour goes by many names - 20% time, Innovation Week, Fed Ex Days, Passion Projects - but all these monikers essentially mean the same thing: passion-based, self-directed learning. Students choose what they want to learn about, investigate, and create something to show for their learning.
My teaching partner Kate Steinfeld and I decided to embark on the journey of Genius Hour together this year. We introduced the concept to our grade 7 students on Friday. Plenty of other educators have gone before us, so we relied on them to show us the way, and borrowed parts of the way other educators have introduced Genius Hour.
We started with this brilliant video, which was thoughtfully shared by Drew Minockhere.
Then we showed a modified version of this Prezi, made by Crystal Wilson.
We were inspired by EspoLearn’s brilliant questions from her kickoff slideshow.
We borrowed EspoLearn’s words when she said that Genius Hour projects are about:
You being in charge of your own learning
Finding your genius
Asking questions and working to answer an Ungoogleable question
Finding a problem and working to solve it
A little about the product and a lot about the process
Learning it’s okay to fail
After the Prezi, we posed these questions to our students:
If you could learn anything in school, what would it be?
If you could solve any problem in the world, what problem would you solve? What breaks your heart?
If you could make anything in the world, what would you make?
What would you do if you weren't afraid?
What will you create to make the world more awesome?
Finally, we watched this short TED Talk of Jack Andraka, a 15 year old who invented a promising, cheap, and shockingly effective test for pancreatic cancer in his spare time.
We asked our students to ponder these questions over the course of the week, and come back next Friday with as many answers to the questions as they could. I could already see the students were intrigued by these questions. One girl said, “Ms. Quinn. If I’ve already filled up my page, what do I do?” I answered, “Go on to the next page!”
The best, most hopeful comment I overheard was,
“I can’t WAIT until next Friday!”
Genius Hour will allow the students to fully experience all seven strands of creative development in context. With their answers to the five questions, the students began to experience the phase of Self-Instigation. What's great about Genius Hour is it's one of the only experiences in a classroom where students will be able to truly self-instigage without curricular content interfering. Students get to pick a topic about whatever they want.
Next Friday, we are planning to have the students share their ideas with their classmates. We hope that by sharing, students will continue to add to their own list of ideas. Only after they’ve spent a good chunk of time on self-instigation can they move on to narrowing down their ideas to something good.
I will continue to write about our journey through Genius Hour as we go!
For more educators’ great ideas about Genius Hour, please check our Joy Kirr’s comprehensive Livebinder on the topic.
Erin Quinn
