If you’ve read my blog before, you know that I love to share sharing practical ways that we can empower our students to own the learning from day one. This is the core idea that AJ Juliani and I wrote about in our book Empower. It’s a journey I began in my second year of teaching middle school and continued for a decade. Each year, I experimented with new strategies, new ideas, and new protocols. For the last seven years, I’ve continued this journey as a professor with my students and watched as they implemented student-centered learning in their own classrooms. I’ve had the honor of leading workshops, giving keynotes, and doing in-depth coaching with teachers around the world and I continue to gain new insights and learn new strategies from them as well.
I’m still learning and growing in this area. Sometimes I give too much guidance and support. Others times, I don’t provide enough scaffolds. It continues to be a messy process and now, coming up on twenty years in education, I am feeling okay with the idea that this process will always be messy. Growth often happens as we learn from our mistakes. Today, I’d like to share one of my epic fails and how I modified my approach.
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The Shift Toward Student Empowerment
Right now, coming out of the pandemic, I’ve noticed that one of the biggest challenge teachers are facing isn’t student engagement so much as student empowerment. Many students are struggling to be self-directed learners who can self-start and self-manage.
Self-directed learners they don’t simply wait for an opportunity. They don’t hope to be called on. They don’t expect an instruction manual. They are self-starters who turn an idea into a reality. They write their own rules. They know what it means to experiment and to test new ideas, even if it seems difficult. They are driven by the question “why not?”
Students need to be self-starters.
It doesn’t end there. Starting something is one thing. However, many great ideas fizzle out within when people lose interest.
There’s an often overlooked gritty and difficult side of self-direction that shows up every time you hear people use the phrase “It’s a grind.” Whether you’re a social activist or an artist or an engineer or an entrepreneur, you will have moments when you have to push through the challenging parts and keep going. In these moments, you need to be a self-manager. If being a self-starter is all about sparking innovation in the midst of chaos, self-management is all about knowing how to stick to deadlines and routines.
Students need to be self-managers.
To be self-directed, students will need to be self-starters who can take the initiative to own their learning but also self-managers who are able to finish tasks and push through when things get difficult. However, this requires students to own their learning. The following video explores what happens when students own their learning.
If we want students to be creative, self-directed learners we need to go beyond student engagement and into empowerment. You can imagine it as a continuum of student agency moving from teacher-centered to student-centered.
Compliance is what happens when you do something because you have to do it. Engagement happens when you do something because you want to do it. Philip Schlechty defined is as both high attention and high commitment. Empowerment occurs when you do something out of a greater sense of buy-in. All three are necessary at different times and I learned the hard way that going toward empowerment from day one can lead to chaos and confusion.
My Epic Fail! Why Too Much Choice Can Feel Overwhelming
In my fourth of year of teaching, I read about Google’s 20% time and decided to implement personal passion projects. Later, I learned that there was an entire community of teachers doing Genius Hour (or 20% Time). Genius Hour begins with that same simple premise. Give your students 20% of their class time to learn what they want. They choose the content while also mastering skills and hitting the academic standards. With Genius Hour, students own the entire journey: They choose the topics based upon their own geeky interests. It doesn’t have to be a traditionally academic area. They might like fashion or food or sports or Legos or Minecraft or deep sea creatures They can then match these topics with topic-neutral standards. Students ask the questions and engage in their own research to find the answers. Along the way, they design their own plan of instruction. They decide on the resources and activities. Each student sets goals and engages in self-assessment. They work at their own pace and set their own deadlines. Students decide on the grouping. Some work alone. Others work in pairs or small groups. In the end, students figure out what they will make and how they will share their learning with the world.
Sounds great, right? Give students 20% of the time to work on passion projects and let them loose. See what kinds of amazing projects they’ll create. Watch them dive into new ideas and learn new skills. Get out of the way and watch them thrive. Except . . . actually, getting out of the way was the worst move I made.
It was the second week of school and my students had already chosen the class norms, negotiated the procedures, and worked through various team building activities. When students arrived that day, they looked up to the board to see the warm-up to read the single line, “Follow your interests.”
A brave student raised her hand and asked, “What does that mean?”
“You decide what you learn today,” I answered.
“But what are we supposed to decide?” another student asked.
I then launched into a description of 20% Time and explained that we would be doing our own version called Indie Fridays. Students could learn a new language, make a work of art, study up on some geeky interest, or design a product. Students seemed excited at the possibilities. But as we shift into our first official Genius Hour, I noticed that few of the students actually used it as intended. High achievers pulled out their homework and treated the period as a Study Hall. Others sat in in circles and talked about sports or tv shows or video games or the latest hallway gossip. They didn’t research anything, create anything, or learn anything new. It was a social hour.
In the next week, I asked students to choose their Indie Project topic and begin working. But, again, we had a repeat of the week before. After a third week with similar results, I quietly abandoned 20% Time. Looking back on it, this was too much choice and ownership without any actual guidance. I had failed to provide a vision for these projects or a road map for how we would get there. I hadn’t set out any parameters or guidelines. We didn’t have phases or stages in their projects. We had no rubrics, much less assessments of any kind. We had no accountability built into the process. I hadn’t provided any sort of accommodations for exceptional learners. It was too open and students responded to this openness with a sense of overwhelm and confusion.
The next summer, I reflected on our failed 20% Time experiment and realized that students actually needed some boundaries. In fact, constraint could function as the very starting point for creativity: