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Genius hour is a movement that allows students to explore their own passions and encourages creativity in the classroom. It provides students a choice in what they learn during a set period of time during school. Based partially from Daniel Pink’s work on motivation in his book Drive and Google’s 20% Time where employees are given 20% of their work week to work on their passions, the Genius Hour movement is growing. Traditionally this is done, like the business field, where employees are given one hour/week to pursue their passions.
I incorporate quite a bit of teacher-directed Project Based Learning so I wanted to incorporate Genius Hour this year, empowering students with choice. However, I couldn’t figure out how to manage a project one hour a week. I felt that if a week went by, students may lose their train of thought or direction and might spend much of the hour reviewing where they had been the previous week.
- Skit presented to explain how pets communicate
- Clothing designed and created with recyclable materials
- Educreations video created about the cardiovascular system
- Student demonstration how to teach a dog to skateboard
- Music lip sync (lyrics altered) video created to teach basketball fundamentals
- Telestory created on how technology is changing the way athletes train and recover from injury
A highlight for me was walking alongside a student who wanted to learn about space travel. A devout mathematician, he was amazed at how small the earth was in the solar system. He made chart after charts, recording distance and size of all of the planets in the solar system. As he researched, he became more interested in the planets than space travel and decided to make a model solar system to scale. While this may not be an out of the box driving question, the process he went through to complete his model, integrated learning into a meaningful whole. He persisted through difficult math and his depth of understanding as he constructed his knowledge was unmistakeable.
He started with a 30 cm piece of cardboard (2nd image after wonder wall above) to represent space. While I knew it was too small, I stayed silent. He then started to tackle the math to figure out diameter to scale. He started with 1,000 km = 1 cm but as he went through his chart of numbers, he soon realized he would not be able to construct models to that size. After much trial and error, he used the scale of 4,000 km = 1 cm and had to ditch his first 30 cm piece of cardboard. His project gave him a deep understanding of diameter, radius, scale, and how small the earth is while also learning how to use a compass. Check out his pictures above. As you can see, we ran out of paper when he started on the sun, so he had to combine many different pieces of paper. The journey was amazing and the aha moments during the process were priceless.
Whether you do Genius Hour the traditional way or as a culminating activity at the end of, the end result are students who are engaged, learning about their passion and sharing their expertise. What’s not to love about a classroom filled with a love of learning? Click here if you're interested in a starter kit for your first Genius Hour! :)