Genius Hour
Genius Hour
At its most basic level, Genius Hour is student learning, which allows students to consider their interests and use them to explore the world through question-based learning. Through Genius Hour projects, students discover hidden skills and interests they didn’t know they had, and these discoveries can influence how they decide to succeed in the future. Genius Hour makes learning exciting by empowering students to take control of their education, increasing their intrinsic motivation and autonomy, and helping them become lifelong learners.
Based on practice 20 times better in the business world, the idea is that employees (in this case students) need more opportunities to explore their personal passions and use their imagination.
Teachers give students a set amount of time to work on their passion projects. If a teacher sets a certain number of times per week, day, or lesson time per week (one hour per day, every day) in a classroom, students can learn what they want to do.
Students are challenged to explore which projects they want to learn about. Students spend several weeks researching the topic before starting to develop a product that can be shared with the class, the school, and the world. Throughout the process, the teacher supports the students in their projects to ensure that they are up to scratch.
Students get to see how peers work and want to ensure that their project stands out from the rest of the class. Introduce students to Genius Hour projects so they can choose what they will learn and what product they will end up making to demonstrate their learning.
We strongly recommend that your students share their questions with the whole class to encourage each other to ask questions and advance the project. Juliani believes that we should not reject an issue from the outset because it is unusual or unknown to us, but that we need to learn more about it before we send students out to share their interests. How the Genius Hour community handles this is not up for debate, but Juliani recommends that teachers grade students who work through the entire process to get the final product.
Many students like to work together, so we enable partner projects that can be carried out at home. Think of Genius Hour as learning at home, where older students can use FaceTime, a text message program, or Google Drive to write in real-time. Other teachers use the designated library time during Genius Hour to work with the school librarian to support student exploration.
Genius Hour gives students the flexibility to choose a topic, study the content necessary to learn about their subject, solve problems, and present topics they are passionate about, without the constraints of typical teacher-driven classroom time.
Genius Hour is a classroom and workplace project where students and staff can explore their own passions and wonders for a set amount of time ranging from one hour a week to 20% of their teaching time. It’s called passion aspiration and is a student practice that allows students to choose what they learn over a set period of time outside of school. Genius Hour allows teachers to give their students the choice of what and how they learn, during specific periods outside school, any day of the week.
Providing one hour a week for students, question-based learning may seem difficult, but teachers who have done it before will see it as a worthwhile investment in time. At home, students can take their miracles aside and confine their many miracles and passions to a Genius Hour project. Planning, topic selection, research, presentation and reflection give students a foundation framework for their work and make Genius Hour a manageable project.
Re new to Genius Hour, now is the perfect time to get started, as most students have plenty of time to work on meaningful projects during the school year.
It is a learning opportunity that gives students time to pursue their passions, explore interesting ideas and create something to be proud of. Dawn Alexander, media specialist who works with Jessica Morelli, a fifth-grade teacher at East Side Elementary in Marietta, Ga. who organizes Genius Hour, said : ”a Itas is a form of enrichment that we offer a student community that is not normally enriched by our targeted programs. Genius Hour helps students explore possible future interests and find out what might interest them in the future.
In the style of a workshop, Genius Hour encourages collaboration, as students use their personal strengths, exchange expertise and advise each other. It is differentiation at its best, and when students work together independently of their teacher, we help challenge each of our learners to give their best in pace and ability. Genius Hour, called “Passion Pursuit,” gives students the opportunity to see the big, broad world around them and explore their own unique interests in a well-structured and supported way.
You need to create a framework for the Genius Hour to prevent it from becoming a free hour for everyone (for example, you need to make sure that students fill in project proposal forms and give them a deadline to complete and present their work). You can solve the problem of relating Genius Hour to what you teach by creating general teaching objectives that are integrated into the curriculum and allowing students to explore them as they see fit. The students not only complete their projects, but also present their learning, which leads them to new understandings and ideas.
