Archive for January 3rd, 2014

First Thoughts on Implementing Genius Hour

Posted January 3, 2014 By Dave Thomer

I’ve wanted to emphasize project-based learning in my teaching since before I knew that project-based learning was the term for what I wanted to emphasize. One challenge I have faced is that while my school has been supportive of the use of projects, they have not been a central focus of the administration’s pedagogical philosophy. Combined with the need to cover a certain amount of content to keep up with district’s planning timeline, I haven’t felt like I was tapping project-based learning’s potential to help students build their inquiry skills. This year, with the support of my principal, I’ve started to incorporate an idea I discovered through the educators’ community on Twitter: Genius Hour.

Genius Hour is based on the idea of 20% Time that has become fairly well known in the business world thanks to its use at tech companies such as Google. The idea is that employees are allowed to spend a certain amount of their time on the job using the company’s resources to work on projects that they developed and believe might benefit the company. Google products like Gmail were initially developed as independent 20% Time projects. Educators looked at the idea and figured that if getting to work on projects of their own design was good for employees, why wouldn’t it be good for students? So the idea is to spend one class period a week in which the students do exactly that.

I began keeping an eye on the weekly Genius Hour chats on Twitter, and looked at the Genius Hour wikispace set up by some of the participants. In November, at the start of the second marking period, I introduced the assignment to my students. To provide structure, I had the students complete a proposal that would tie their project area to one of four themes that we have been exploring this year: 1) military power; 2) economic power; 3) political power; or 4) cultural power. This gave students a lot of room, as the proposals I received indicated. One student wanted to explore the history of the Internet, another wanted to write raps about Barack Obama’s career, and another wanted to create a comic book about the Revolutionary War. Over the last couple of months, some of these projects have really developed into a deep exploration of a subject.

The biggest challenge that my students and I have encountered in implementing Genius Hour is that when you are not used to the independence and depth of inquiry that come with project-based learning, it’s easy to feel lost. I had prepared a couple of reference sheets that I thought would be helpful. The first week I asked students to come up with a week-by-week plan that would serve as a set of benchmarks along with the proposal. But a lot of students were not used to taking a big question and breaking it down into smaller questions, so they had trouble taking the big task of an independent project and breaking it down into smaller tasks that were more specific than “I will get information about my topic.”

So I need to raise my game in terms of helping the students form their initial questions and then proceed from there. I may even have a fairly structured week of lessons that leads up the start of the independent time. I’m going to go back to the Teaching for Understanding framework that I worked with when I was getting my certification, because I believe it will help both the students and me to work backwards from our goals to plotting the clearest path to those goals. I was also happy to see this graphic on Twitter:

The second reference sheet I created was to help students keep track of sources. With so many different sources of information accessible through search engines and other references, students often need help developing and navigating a network of trustworthy sources. What I think I will do next semester is combine these reference sheets and add some other resources to create an ongoing journal, and then have the journal turned in as part of the final project.

Overall, I’m pleased with our first attempt at Genius Hour, and looking forward to improving the process for students in the months to come.

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