20time: Project-based learning
By Shannon Schinkel, teacher, Prince George I FELL IN LOVE with project-based learning a few years ago, when I went looking for a deeper way of doing project work with my English and humanities students. At that time, I was doing traditional project work with my classes: posters, PowerPoints, newspapers. I gave out interesting topics and lots of class time. These projects were fine and students enjoyed them, but I still relied on tests and final exams to assess students’ acquisition of the learning outcomes because that was custom. I felt a disconnect in my assessment process. Students would show me great work via the project and then do poorly on the test. I considered dropping tests, but worried about how to fit all the content into a project. That was then. With the revised curriculum’s 21st century skills focus, via curricular competencies and core competencies, I knew that students who could communicate, collaborate, and critically and creatively think would be those best served, and most of service, in the future.
The inspiration In Kevin Brookhouser’s book The 20time Project: How Educators Can Launch Google’s Formula for Future Ready Innovation (CreateSpace: 2015) he explains how Google pioneered the idea of encouraging their employees to use 20% of their work time on passion projects. The initiative caught on and others followed suit in a notable way: Gmail, Google Maps, Twitter, and Groupon all started as 20time projects. Brookhouser goes on to explain how the same philosophy can work in the classroom and how it positively affected his own students. 28 Teacher May/June 2020
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20time in the classroom Classroom 20time is the allocation of 20% of class time for students to work on a passion project. This project can be tied directly to a theme in the course, an inquiry question, or just something interesting and new a student wants to learn how to do, build, or create. In the case of my Grade 9 English class, for example, the course theme was compassion, so we used that as the platform for 20time compassion projects in which students highlighted a person or group who shows compassion. In my Humanities 8 class, students used 20time to answer a student-generated inquiry question from one of the social studies units studied. The key here is freedom to explore an idea of interest and projects that were 100% student driven. A student wants to learn to play the ukulele? Sure. Maybe build a robot? Why not? Start up a soup kitchen? Go for it. Explore what life would been like had the Black Plague not hit Europe? Awesome! The possibilities are endless. 20time is about giving students unlimited choice and 20% of class time to express their unlimited voice.