20Time Edventure

“When brought into the classroom, 20time immerses young people in a kind of laboratory playground of unsolved problems. It creates a learning environment where they can develop the radical, transformative, unexpected thinking they, too, need to change the world.” --Kevin Brookhouser, M.Ed. The 20time Project pg. 32

While at the GAFE Summit at the beginning of June, I got to see Kevin deliver his 20time keynote. Although I had heard of of 20time and Genius Hour, I hadn’t had the time, brain-space, or flexibility to explore the idea of applying it in my own classroom. After hearing Kevin speak, I also learned that I had never had the concept fully explained to me and therefore never fully understood it.

With all of the massive “wicked problems” out there, we need to change the way we prepare our young students for the future. We need to stop thinking that we know what their future will look like. The world is changing too quickly for us to guess what jobs will be available or problems will need to be solved when our students reach the workforce. As teachers, it is our responsibility to ensure that we are preparing our students for what their future holds; even if we don’t know what that is.

20time will be my answer to this responsibility in the upcoming year. I am excited to see what kinds of things my students will study and which problems they choose to tackle. Most of concern I have had in the past about a program like this is time. I barely have enough time to cover my content without setting aside 20% of it for student exploration. My district currently uses the SpringBoard curriculum by CollegeBoard. For the 8th grade, it contains 4 units of study. I have never been able to get through more than three. With the exception of this past year, I have always had a couple of weeks to loosely explore unit 4 but never enough time to get enough content covered to assess it. That is where I see the possibility for this time. Instead of using that extra time all at the end of the year to briefly cover material that students won’t take seriously anyways, I plan on spreading it out throughout the year and giving it to my students for their self-directed projects.

 

The way that Kevin Brookhouser lays out his program in his book makes it easy for my English/Language Arts class to incorporate this type of program. With a heavy base in writing and speaking skills, I can easily justify using time in my classroom to provide the exploration of any kind of content. Between the learning being tracked through blog posts and the end result being a memorized presentation, many of my 42 ELA Common Core Standards are met throughout the 20time process. I will continue to track my classroom’s progress through this new experience. Hopefully, I will have lots of fantastic projects to share in May!

I have create a HyperDoc to present this idea to my classes in August. Feel free to copy and tweak as needed to fit your needs as you start your Moonshot thinking takes hold of the classroom.

Introductory HyperDoc