This is my latest article in a series on owning your professional learning. Genius Hour (or 20% Time) projects begin with a simple idea: give students a dedicated period of time to pursue their passions, interests, and questions in a creative way. Made famous by…
Genius Hour (or 20% Time) projects begin with a simple idea: give students a dedicated period of time to pursue their passions, interests, and questions in a creative way. In this blog post and podcast, we explore the benefits of doing Genius Hour projects. This…
I have three kids ranging from older elementary to high school. Each one of them is handling distance learning differently. My daughter, who is also the youngest, initially felt overwhelmed at the list of assignments that popped up each Monday and the scheduled meetings twice…
Student engagement can be a real challenge in this sudden shift toward distance learning. But one way to improve engagement is by empowering students. In this article, we explore how to improve equity and access and how to shift toward student ownership. Listen to the…
If you think about your most powerful learning experiences, there’s a good chance at least one of these experiences involved a project. This is where you learned how to research, how to ideate, how to work with others, how to engage in productive struggle, and…
In my last article, I wrote about using a vintage innovation approach to create meaningful distance learning lessons. Being creative often means designing these activities and projects from scratch. However, creativity doesn’t always work this way. When we think of creativity, it’s easy to picture…
The last week has proven to society something that we, in education, already know. Teachers care deeply about their students. I’ve seen so many examples of teachers making phone calls to families, having class Zoom meetings to just do a pulse check on each child,…
In education, we often use a metaphor of content delivery. We use terms like “deliver a lesson.” We ask, “did the students get it?” But the last week and a half has proven that teachers are not merely content delivery machines. In my last post,…
A few days ago, we found out that all of the schools here in Oregon will be off until the start of April. Many of the universities have asked professors to switch their courses from face-to-face to online. This is a move that school districts…
The Vintage Innovation Toolkit is here! You can access it by filling out the form at the bottom of this page. This toolkit includes the eBook The Epic Guide to Vintage Innovation. There are also eleven resources that correspond to different chapters in my new…
So, it’s the beginning of the year and all around I’m hearing conversations about New Year’s Resolutions. One friend is going Paleo, another is doing Cross Fit, and still, another has decided she’s going to read 100 books in a year (which might be doable if you…
Don’t forget to scroll down to the bottom of this post to download the Creative Ways to End the Semester Resource Pack. This is a post I first wrote a decade ago, when I was teaching middle school. Each year, I have revised it and…
© 2020 John Spencer
