Career and technology education teacher Brittany Stevens found a new way to teach her students in Psychology of Marketing through unstructured work time, or 20 Time.

According to Stevens, this idea, which is sometimes called Genius Hour, was adapted from Google, which lets its employees devote 20 percent of their working time to their own projects that relate to Google’s ideals and goals.

“Things like Google Maps, Gmail, those were completed by people on their Genius Hour time, or their 20 Time,” Stevens said. “I thought that this related to what we do in school because there’s this whole discussion going on about shifting control from teachers to students, and I have students tell me all the time that they do these incredible things that they learned on their own outside of school.

And I was curious as to what would happen if we gave kids time inside of school to do things that mattered to them, thinking they would be motivated, they could do incredible things. It allows me to get to know students better and it allows them to see how what they’re interested in can apply to the content that we’re learning.”

The class, which meets E-block, has 20 Time every Friday. It will be wrapped up by students’ presentations about their projects.

“I made that promise to the students that even when I want to do other things that are more tied to our content, Friday is for them, for their 20 Time, for their pursuit,” Stevens said.

Stevens said she used Twitter as a teaching tool and discovered the idea of 20 Time for classroom use.

“I just started kind of stumbling into conversations with teachers in other parts of the country who are doing this in classes, and found some resources, and thought I might as well try it out,” Stevens said.

Stevens said 20 Time’s structure teaches her students independence.

“I think high school teaches you just to listen to your teacher for direction, for steps of how to complete a problem,” she said. “[20 Time] is really unstructured, so I give overall guidelines, but part of this is testing the students’ ability to set goals for themselves and move toward those goals, which are actually in the vocational technical frameworks that our state has determined for people in CTE.”

Stevens said the connections between 20 Time and the class’s curriculum are not outwardly obvious.

Stevens thinks the students don’t yet realize how much 20 Time ties to marketing.

“The content that they’re exploring has very little to do with what we’re doing on a week-to-week basis, but the process of what they’re doing is grounded in something called the employability strand of the career and tech ed. frameworks,” Stevens said. “Part of their final presentation will be speaking to their project through the lens of marketing, bringing the two things together.”

For her 20 Time project, junior Sofie Rosenberg founded a club that is part of a movement called Warm Up America. The club, which meets during X-block in room 145, assembles blankets out of knitted squares and plans to donate them to a homeless shelter or a hospital.

Rosenberg said she noticed a few connections between marketing and 20 Time.

“I think having a relationship with an organization, and learning how to present yourself in order to give them your product, and stuff like that, I think that that’s how it relates,” Rosenberg said.

Rosenberg said the project has taught her leadership skills.

“I know how to present myself now and start things, so if I have an idea, I know that I can share it,” she said. “If I was working in business, and I had a marketing idea, I feel like I could be able to pitch my product and help other people understand where I’m coming from and why I want my product to be sold.”

Junior Deirdre McPhee’s 20 Time project was inspired by the BBC television show “Sherlock.” Like the title character, she created a “mind palace” that involves mentally placing objects she wants to remember into familiar places in her mind. She said she used it to memorize the fifty states by visualizing them in her former house.

Because she has no physical project, she could not sell her mind palaces, but she could still apply ideas of marketing.

“I felt as though if I were to present it to a group of people, I could do promotion for it, which would just be spreading the idea and raising awareness of what it is, because it’s not really something you can sell,” McPhee said.

Stevens said she likes how the project allows her to get to know her students.

“I think the best part is that I’m learning all kinds of things about students, and that’s one of the reasons I think I’m here,” Stevens said. “Obviously, high school is about lots of things and learning and getting to college and all that stuff, but I think one of the most important things is figuring out who you are as a young person in these years of your life, and so it’s been really fun for me to get to know students and what they’re interested in.”

Emmanuel D’Agostino can be contacted at [email protected].