FOLLOWING YOUR PASSION A different way of learning
Last year, a class of Year 9 boys spent one English period a week doing something really different - choosing something they really wanted to learn about or to create, and setting about finding digital ways to make it happen.
English teacher Ms Marsh who was trialling the programme with her class, says she was delighted with the enthusiasm and the sense of ownership the boys had about their learning. The scheme is based on Genius Hour, which was used originally by Google. Its premise is that if you give employees 20% of their time to either learn something new or to create or find out about something, it can improve performance by 80%. “We are not talking about genius in the intelligence sense, but in terms of its original meaning of developing or creating something,’’ Ms Marsh says. “What I did was give the boys one period a week to create anything they were passionately keen to do.’’ Some of the tasks the boys chose included writing a book, developing an eco-friendly house which was easy to build in post-quake Christchurch, building a bike that runs on a chainsaw and learning to create digital music without any previous musical knowledge. Ms Marsh also took her own learning challenge – to find out more about gaming and how and why boys enjoy it so much. The first stage in the process was to teach the boys about the inquiry process, which is at the base of all English learning – forming a hypothesis, testing it, then finding out what is working and what is not.
“It was about trial and error. If the boys made a mistake, hit a hurdle or something didn’t work, it was how do we fix it, or how do we take it to the next level?’’ says Ms Marsh. “It gave ownership of learning to the boys rather than being teacher- driven or assessment-driven and they really loved it,’’ says Ms Marsh. “While I’m a technology geek, I am not a guru of everything, so my role was to facilitate and to help the boys to become the gurus. We had a collaborative learning environment in which they all used different programs, which they mastered and shared. “In Term 4, the boys taught the rest of us what they had been learning and so they became the teachers. They may be digital natives, but they still had plenty to learn, a lot
of which they did through trial and error. We had mini groups such as a Photoshop group and a blogging group.’’ The boys were doing authentic, meaningful learning, which engaged them at every level and spilled over into the rest of their subjects, Ms Marsh says. “As a teacher we can fight technology, or, by modelling, we can teach the boys to be responsible, savvy digital citizens. The boys found they all had something they were passionate about and were excited that they got to teach it to the rest of the class. They felt transformed that they had been given the freedom to learn what they wanted to and it is phenomenal to see where they have gone with this.’’
16
Christ’s College Canterbury
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