Maureen Mirabito’s Interview with Nicholas Provenzano
Genius Hour, INNOpod #3
Maureen: / Welcome to the Center on Innovations in Learning INNOpodcast. My name is Maureen Mirabito, and today I am talking to Nicholas Provenzano about Genius Hour. Nicholas, thank you for taking time out of your busy day to talk to us about how you came to understand, implement, and assess the impact of blended learning and digital technologies, specifically using Genius Hour to make learning more personal for your students.Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, where and what you teach, how long you've been teaching, and any interests you have outside of teaching?
Nicholas: / Yeah, no problem. My name is Nicholas Provenzano, and I have been teaching for 15 years at Grosse Pointe South High School in Grosse Pointe Michigan, so I've been very lucky to be in one building my entire career. High school English, primarily grades nine and ten. I also do educational consulting and writing on my website thenerdyteacher.com as well as edutopia.org and speaking at conferences and things like that on all sorts of educational technology and pedagogical practices.
When I'm not doing any of those fun things, I am tinkering with electronics, I'm making things in the nice warm weather of Michigan we get for I think two months of the year, out back working on a pond I built in my backyard. So that's my relaxing non-technology thing is to relax by my pond and watch my fish swim.
I'm married—have a five year old—and I’m learning the whole different world about learning by watching someone do it for the first time and that's really impacted my practice as well.
Maureen: / Before we get started Nicholas, you mentioned that you have a blog, and you also mentioned that we can also find you on Edutopia. Could you give us the site for your blog again for listeners who are interested in following you and in addition, any social media handles?
Nicholas: / Yeah, absolutely. It's thenerdyteacher.com, that's my personal site where I blog about whatever is on my mind. Sometimes it's education technology. Sometimes it's education across the country and sometime it's just a very nerdy take on some pop culture, educational things going on. You can also find my writings at edutopia.org, where again, I write about education, pedagogy, tools, and things of that nature. You can follow me on Twitter @thenerdyteacher and Instagram @thenerdyteacher if you want to see cool pictures of things I make.
Maureen: / Of your pond?
Nicholas: / Sometimes, yeah. You can find the pictures of my pond on there as well, and you can pick up my book, Your Starter Guide to Makerspaces, which is on Amazon right now and Barnes & Noble, so you can pick that up if looking at the maker movement is something you're interested in. I talk about how that fits with project based learning and Genius Hour and all that rolled into one.
Maureen: / It sounds like we may have a series of podcasts on our hands so stay tuned. That's terrific, and I'll make sure listeners know that all of this information will be included in the Resource Guide, so if you didn't quite catch Nicholas's verbal reflections, we'll make sure that you have them written as well.
So let's get started with the first question, Nicholas. First, can you describe what Genius Hour is and take us back to when you first learned about it. What were some of your early questions and impressions?
Nicholas: / Yeah, so Genius Hour or 20 Time, they're usually interchangeable. So what I understand it to be and how I implement it based on all the research I did is giving students an opportunity to explore things they're passionate about using class time. Now what type of time you give sometimes determines what you call it. So for example, 20 Time is derived from what Google did with its engineers where they gave them 20% of their time to work on an unassigned Google-based project. So things like Gmail and AdSense were projects that were created by engineers working on something on the side, but they were given 20% of their time to do that. So if you think about, that's one day a week.
So at the high school level, where our schedules are not flexible, one day a week is very easy to do. Genius hour on the other hand, fits really better with elementary and middle school because the teachers have more flexibility to essentially move that hour around throughout the day, each day of the week if they want to give them the opportunity to work within their schedule.
So that's the different names that people might encounter. Passion projects might be another one that they encounter. I encountered this four years ago, five years ago at a conference, and I heard about some elementary and middle schools doing it, and there were very few high school teachers doing it, because again, the way our schedule and curriculum is set, it's very just to take out one day a week of your curriculum all year or for a semester or something like that, but that's what I decided to do. I decided to do a mental experiment.
So over the summer, I said, okay. I would need to cut 32 days out of my curriculum to have kids work one day a week on a project they were passionate about. So I immediately just laughed and said, okay, well that's not possible. My first gut reaction was, there's no way, but when I sat down and started to do some spring cleaning of my lesson plans and curriculum and seriously take a look at what I do versus what I need to do, versus what I like to do and what students like, and I ended up finding those 34 days.
So I said, well I have no excuse now, and I hit the ground running and designated every Friday to be 20 Time, and the kids got really excited, and they chose their projects, and it's been magic ever since, with teaks here and there, like all teachers do.
Maureen: / I'm really struck by your methodical way of sitting down and looking at your curriculum and really understanding the math that was involved to make this happen in your classroom. I'm wondering, that first reaction was, "Well, there's no way I can do this," but then when you really take the time and sit down and look at what it will entail over the course of the year and found it to be very doable, that's pretty exciting.
What specific need were you looking to address through the implementation of Genius Hour?
Nicholas: / I wanted to give students more choice and one of the big things with Genius Hour that people said was, "Well, how's that fit your curriculum?" So I did some very simple things that made it completely feasible in an English language arts classroom. Students were doing research, they were writing, and then they were going to be speaking and presenting at the end of it. Reading, writing, and speaking are the core of any English program anywhere. So for me I had my students working on three core areas, but I was having them doing it with things that they were passionate about.
So it guaranteed that those students who might not necessarily want to do writing or want to do research or have a big exciting speech that they want to give about something that we've read, but kids will totally write and research and talk about things that they're passionate about. So what this allowed me to do was work on three core areas of my curriculum, just in a completely different way and letting kids choose what they were passionate about and what they wanted to work on, it's so powerful. That's what really drove this for me was I wanted to attack major areas of my curriculum in a different way that just wasn't me, read this, write about it, look it up and then talk about it, where it was really top down.
So this approach really brought my students together and they were very supportive of all their work and it just created a fun, exciting, loud, messy learning atmosphere that I can't imagine not having.
Maureen: / So tell us a little bit more about what the before and after looked like. So what kind of transformations did you see in your students and their learning experience as a result of implementing this instructional approach versus what their engagement and interest level looked like prior?
Nicholas: / Well, I saw increased engagement, I mean, just right off the bat. When you have students that, let's say for example, don't want to read a series of poems. The whole point of reading the poems is to understand certain things and then to learn to write and understand [inaudible 00:10:22] and all of that stuff. Well, we really just want kids to write sometimes. We want them to write to grow as writers, to grow as thinkers.
Allowing students to approach a project that they're excited about gets them writing, gets them researching and so what you see is that some people say, "Well, this is not possible for my struggling learners. They can't just choose a topic and work independently every single week." It's the opposite that's true. These are the kids that need us more than ever to give them an opportunity to write about what they're passionate about, research it.
You look at kids that are really into video games or skateboarding and watching a kid look at the physics of doing skateboard moves, and if he dives into this, he is so excited, and he's learning things about physics that might take a teacher months to get across to this kid, but because he's passionate about it, because it's something that interests him, he can dive into it. He can learn about research skills along the way and then I help him articulate the writing through blog posts or a formal paper or something to that nature.
So what I saw was this change from some of my struggling learners that the curriculum just doesn't speak to them. Now they were given an opportunity to explore what they cared about and the running joke I told the kids, I said, if you don't do this, the thing that you chose, I can't help you. Those kids that are just not doing work, not doing assignments, I go, if you don't do the own thing that you chose, I can't help you. I'm like, I'm out of it and the kids [inaudible 00:12:00] because they did. They realize that, "Wow, if I don't do the thing that I like, what hope do I have to accomplish anything?"
So it give them a sense of empowerment and so an increased engagement and those projects were fun. The kids buckled down and worked hard Monday through Thursday because they knew Friday was a chance to work on their project and to research and share with others. So it really helped bring the class together because everyone was doing something they were excited about, and everyone wanted to share.
So it was like another nicety where when kids are writing essays and doing projects, there's an air of competition for some reason. Like there's only so many good grades that can go out and so they feel or act like, "Well, I got this and you go that." With 20 Time, it's not competition at all. It's a celebration about what people are excited about and passionate about with their peers and I think that's another beautiful part of Genius Hour is that, I don't know, it's hard to explain unless you've witnessed it.
Maureen: / What kind of feedback did you get from your students once they realized what was happening in your classroom and not just from students, but from families, from your colleagues? What was some of the feedback that you received directly or observed and you just shared a little bit of that now?
Nicholas: / For colleagues, it was skepticism. "Are you still teaching everything you're supposed to teach? What do you mean they get to choose whatever it is that they want? What does that have to do with teaching English?" So there was skepticism because it does, it sounds crazy. It's the, "So you don't teach on Fridays then? So you just basically have one day off?" There was that viewpoint where you're not doing anything when in fact, I'm busier on Fridays than any other day because I'm bouncing around from table to table, from student to student, tell me about your project. What can I do to help? I'm like, where are you at, what did you learn? Oh my God, that's so interesting. So on Fridays I'm busy, I log more miles on my Fitbit than any other day. So there's skepticism from the educational side of it and that's understandable.
Parents love it. The parent response on conference nights were, "My daughter hasn't asked for my help on a project in years and now all she can do is just talk about this every single night. No other class, this is what's driving her. Thank you so much. She has been excited. He hasn’t invested his time in a project like this since elementary school." So parents were 100% onboard. They see the landscape and how testing had overtaken everything and they just said, "Thank you for this." They're so tested and ground into the system that they even see the importance of giving these kids an opportunity to explore and learn.
Students, it's interesting because the very type A students, these honors kids, these kids that like things very structured, they struggle at first with the overall concept. They have an opinion of, "What do you mean I choose? What do you mean something I'm passionate about?" It's very sad because for many of them, they legitimately have never been asked this. The educational system doesn't ask that question, "What do you want to do?" They say, "What do you want to be when you grow up? Where do you want to go to college?" but, "What are you passionate about?" are very different questions.
So my type A honors kids really struggled with this concept because they're not used to it. My really artistic, free-flowing kids, I just introduced it and they were off and running. They had a billion ideas. They were ready to go, and we're going to do all these things. That was fun for them, but I really had to do a lot of hand holding for those high achieving kids because they just want to be told what to do, do it, get an A, move on to the next thing.
So the student opinions at the start were some frustration from the kids because it was such a new idea to them, but once they figured it out, they put all the energy in and did just amazing projects. So across the board, it's been great and the online community is huge with Genius Hour and 20 Time, so it's really grown over the years so that there's a nice strong support for a community that online, sometimes needs others to run ideas by.
Maureen: / That segues into a question I want to return to and you mentioned collegial skepticism, which is a very real thing and, as you mentioned, very understandable. But what sustains you or gives you the drive to keep going with your work even in spite of some of the skepticism that you receive, because that's a really tough challenge for people to navigate; so what sustains you? What anchors you and what is the prize that you have your eye on that keeps you going?
Nicholas: / I like what I do, and I've built a reputation within my building that I will do things differently, but I always have the kids' best interests at heart. I've always joked that I could do an entire book on all those things I've tried that have failed, and I could probably do multiple volumes of this book because we all can as teachers. We sometimes only talk about all the positive things that we do, and sometimes certain teachers in certain areas come off as perfect and everything they do is great, but I openly admit, yeah, I tried something, it totally blew up, it was awful. I'm sorry. I apologize to the kids and then we go and do something else.
20 Time easily could have blown up in my face that first year. It could have, but I was just like, we're going to try this. I think this is good for my kids. I think it's good for what I'm trying to do and my colleagues and the thing about my department, English department is just I'm biased, but the best department in the entire state of Michigan, if not all of education because we push each other. If we're going to do something different, we push each other to explain why. Like, walk us through that process because if you just say I want to do something new because it looks new and it's fun, but what's the reasoning behind it? Walk me through this.
So while it might come off as defensive as I have to respond, it does force me to articulate the things that I want to do and how it's going to be helpful to kids. Sometimes we know it in our head and we just hit the ground running, but we've never written it down or articulated it. So while there's skepticism, I think it comes from a good place, because we all are looking out for our students. Whether they're in your class or not, we all want what's best for kids.