Art, Books and Connections

The last few years I have been reading business, entrepreneur, psychology, leadership and education books almost exclusively.  Daniel Pink, Seth Godin, Robert Cialdini, Sir Kenneth Robinson, Malcolm Gladwell are among the many different authors whose books I have explored.

With each book I read, I start by putting a 4 x 6 inch post it note inside the front cover to keep track of interesting words, concepts, people, websites and books as I read.  I also take notes in the books and use colored coded post-its to mark the pages.  For whatever reason, I use orange to mark ordinary notes. I feel they are the ones I want to be able to refer to later, but are not mind blowing.  I use yellow for the mind blowing ideas.  Pink are specific quotes I want to be able to use in the future and blue indicates connections between ideas. 

Before I started to use different colors, I noticed that many authors refer to each other's books or at least to the same books during their discussion of ideas.  In fact, it happened often enough for me to specifically mark those incidents.   

One of the things I have long thought is, with all of the connections between books I have read, is there a theme that winds through all of them that ties them together?  

Today as I was doing my Austin Kleon Steal Like an Artist Journal, I chose one which is an unlabeled web. with the instructions "Start in the Middle."  For lack of a better term at the time, I chose "Art" as my central word. I am using the definition of art I derived from reading Steven Pressfield's book The War of Art. To me Pressfield is saying that art is beauty created through someone pursuing their passion.

After I chose my word, I started placing names of authors and books I have read in the last few years in the circles in the web.  Unfortunately, the names I put in the list do not always come from the circle which precedes it. I think my best bet is to take my books and go into an empty room and examine the blue post its to attempt to determine which books inspired the others and how they fit together. Possibly then I will finally be able to create  a singular idea that each book explored to some level.  

Genius Hour--Getting the Go Ahead

In considering steps necessary to begin Genius Hour, I felt I had to let my administration know about the projects as well as the parents. I used these ideas below in my letter to parents and my discussion with administrators:

We are excited to inform you that we are introducing the Genius Hour (GH) project in English 9 classes this semester.  We recognize that all students come to school with interests and talents which school typically may not acknowledge. This project is our way of applying those skills in a format which validates students' interests and is in tune with Angela Maiers’ saying,  “You are a genius and the world needs your contribution.”

The idea and logic behind Genius Hour is very simple:  allow people to work on something they are passionate about, and productivity will go up.  Engineers at corporate giant 3M have worked in this way for over 60 years, famously producing Post-It Notes among other products. Google is the most celebrated company to incorporate 20% time into the work week. Google is not alone. Across the globe, increasingly, companies are using 20% time to increase employee satisfaction and production. Research based data confirms this policy works so well that 50% of Google’s projects have been created and implemented during this creative period.  Ever heard of Gmail or Google News?  These projects were creations by passionate developers during their 20% time projects.  Our Genius Hour project is based on this Google philosophy.

Just like Google engineers, and countless students in schools across the country, our students will have one day a week in English class to devote to their passions. The benefits of Genius Hour within our curriculum are in line with Common Core State Standards and the findings of internationally renowned researcher and author Daniel Pink, who revealed that people worldwide are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose.  

Here is how we will promote those qualities:

Autonomy--Allow students an opportunity to discover and investigate one of their passions

Mastery--Help to promote, support, and model creative, innovative thinking, communication skills and inventiveness to make our students experts in their area of passion

Purpose--Provide an avenue for students to reflect on and share their learning with others on how they will each make the world a better place and at the same time provide a forum for parents, community and school to partner and to support students’ learning.

Ultimately, the goal of Genius Hour will be realized when students improve their community through real world application of their research and share their knowledge in the form of a culminating project, with you (the parent), and the community, at our open house.

For the next 7-weeks, your student will have assignments that will be due in conjunction with Genius Hour.  They will complete a brainstorming activity, submit a proposal of their topic, apply the elements of nonfiction writing to their research, contact an expert,  correctly cite their sources, and create a final presentation of their topic.  We strongly encourage you to mentor your student and check on their progress often.

Why Not Genius Hour?

I have read and thought about the concept of 20% time since reading Daniel Pink's book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us in 2010 (see Pink's motivation TED Talk here).  In it, he talks about 3M and their practice of giving their engineers 15 percent of their week to work on a project of their choosing, out of which post-it notes among other products came.  Then Google followed with their 20% time.  And Atlasssian continued the idea, only allowing their people to work on any project they were passionate about, whether it was work related or not.  

In preparing for the first attempt at using one class period per week to pursue something students loved, I had to have a name for it.  Some of the names I had read online in Joy Kirr's Genius Hour Live Binder and elsewhere were: Googley Time, Innovation Time, Collaboratorium, Passion Time, 20% Time, and Genius Hour. 

I felt that when one hears "Genius," they think about Albert Einstein. When one hears "Passion," they think about Telenovelas and 20% time had no feel (like Tuesday according to Seinfeld).  I decided to go with the Einstein version. Finally, I considered the psychological priming effect of what they name would be and did some other research and discovered one of the most powerful means which create people’s beliefs is reading. As far back as the 1670’s, philosopher Benedict Baruch Spinoza  opined that people believe whatever they encounter. More recently, in 1993, Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues tested Spinoza’s idea in a series of experiments and found that people believe concepts seconds after reading them. 

I felt that Genius Hour is not just another name for the same old way of doing things. It is a time for people to connect their partially or fully formed ideas with others in a Google-type Innovation Time  for something education related.  Individuals’ ideas can be connected to make the whole better than the sum of the parts. These connections may come from people in the same school or from elsewhere in the district.  The goal is to combine ideas to create an innovative education version of revolutionary designs like the engineers at Google do.  Through the ability to follow their passions during Genius Hour, students will be driven to make themselves into the greatest people they can be. Some outcomes of a Genius Hour type of collaboration are:  students may have stronger relationships with adults and with each other;  they may become more inspired learners; they may become more skilled at asking questions and researching their answers; or an untold number of other outcomes depending on the groups and projects created through Genius Hour.

Think of the terms Evolution, Wall Street and Climate Change .  People can easily create a mental image of these short, power packed monikers.Ok, I was set on Genius Hour as the name

Summer Reading: Be Inspired

Inspirational and useful books to consider reading this summer:

1. Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink is my favorite book ever. His assessment of bonuses, rewards and their counterintuitive effects is shocking. He breaks motivation into easy to understand explanations using vignettes.

2. Stop Stealing Dreams by Seth Godin (pdf) This book is incendiary.  Godin examines what is needed for success in the 21st Century and how schools, as currently structured, are irrelevant.

3. Poke the Box by Seth Godin  Have you ever had a personal cheerleader encouraging you to pursue the idea that has always captivated you?  Now you have one.

4. Writing the Standard for Project Based Learning by John Larmer, John Mergendoller & Suzie Boss discusses Gold Standard PBL practices with examples of how they are used.

5. Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess  Use creative and consistently great ideas to generate enough interest that you have to sell tickets to your class.

6. Learn Like a Pirate by Paul Solarz Restructure your classroom environment to put the kids in charge of their learning and daily operations of the class.

7. Most Likely to Succeed by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith A companion to the documentary of the same name, Succeed builds the case for examining the guiding principles of education and gives necessities, suggestions, and examples of how a forward minded education must operate to give students a school career which truly prepares them for the future.The final two chapters provide teachers, principals and superintendents with specific ideas and actions which will transform their classrooms, schools and districts immediately.

8. Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner This book should be read by every parent and teacher.  Wagner uses examples of Millennials who used their passion to create something extraordinary and how their parents planted the seed to pursue their passion.

9. Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon Funny, creative look at how being creative is not limited to coming up with ideas no one has ever thought of before. In effect he says, “Steal them,” meaning apply and combine ideas from varied sources in a new way.

10. Creative Thinkering  by Mike Michalko From one of the leaders on creativity, Creative Thinkering contains many exercises to boost creativity.

11. Creative Schools by Sir Kenneth Robinson This is my favorite of Robinson’s books.  A departure from some of his other books, he gives some specifics as to how schools should be run.

12. Role Reversal by Mark Barnes  Ditch grades and encourage students to learn for learning’s sake and the rest will work itself out. Barnes teaches English Language Arts in the middle school and gives many of the tips and tricks as to how he pulls off not giving grades, but giving grades (at least on report cards)

Inquire by Rob King Do you love the 4 C’s?  King breaks down Collaboration, Communication, Creative and Critical Thinking and so much more into this handbook for students.

PBL and The Matrix

"Let me tell you why you are here. You have come because you know something. What you know you can't explain but you feel it. You've felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world. You don't know what, but it's there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?" While speaking to Neo, Morpheus obliquely describes the feeling Neo has had through the first quarter of the 1999 film, The Matrix, and the one I had for years as a teacher.  

For the longest time I was unsatisfied with the way school was being run.  Something wasn't right, but I wasn't exactly sure what it was or how to fix it. It would wake up at night only to catch a fleeting glimpse of the idea disappearing the more awake I became.  In 2010 or so, I read Daniel Pink's (@DanielPink) book Drive (which I highly recommend) and followed its ideas to see where they went. As I combined Drive with Seth Godin's (@thisissethsblog)  Stop Stealing Dreams, suddenly it all became so clear. It was as if Daniel Pink and Seth Godin had spoken collectively to me with the sentiment expressed by Morpheus. It was too late for me to turn back, I had taken the red pill.

And I began my journey down the rabbit hole of Project Based Learning. I then knew it is the true path for education. Everything else in education I had seen is a fake world created by an oppressive force which has been in place for over a century. The whole time the solution was so close, but I was not able to see it.  I am far from being "The One," but it sure felt like I was when I first recognized the truth of what education and learning should be.

Education was so contrived.  "Mary has a red dress. If she is walking 2 miles per hour and Agent Smith starts .5 miles behind her and walks 3 miles per hour, when will he catch her?" It is obvious that the teacher has come up with the problem of the lady in the red dress and can easily find the answer, which doesn't matter anyway. 

Whether it was math, science, social studies or any other subject, concepts did not transfer between them. Even though a student may have learned about reading a line graph in Math class and then immediately walked 40 feet down the hall to the next class classroom and used line graphs in Social Studies, students either replied, "This isn't math class," or "How am I supposed to do this?" Obviously students weren't learning.  To me, once one "learns" something, it means they know it and can call upon it when necessary. That wasn't happening. 

Fortunately, the rabbit hole has led Lynn Heyn, Tara Meinke, Suzy Weisgerber, Emily Bennett and I to found the Arete PBL Academy at Neenah High School (@nhsarete).   Our  two years of experiences have shown that real learning is happening now.  By combining English, Math, Science and Social Studies in a regular public high school, Arete PBL  allows students to participate in a meaningful, authentic experience which drives their learning everyday and not solely in our four classes. One of the most surprising revelations from our students is that they take the interconnected way of thinking we teach everyday in our classes and even connect their learning to their non-PBL classes.  Our students are now so passionate about their learning, they are looking to rescue as many students as possible from the Matrix of regular education. They figuratively hold the two pills, and say, "This is your last chance (at our school). After this, there is no going back. Youtake the blue pill and the storyends. You wake in your bed andyou believe whatever you want tobelieve. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you howdeep the rabbit-hole goes."