Genius Hour

What's the deal with Genius Hour?

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.  It’s not easy to determine where the idea was originally created, but there are at least two events that have impacted genius hour. 

Google 20% Time

Google, a company you may have heard of, allows engineers to spend 20% of their work week developing a project that they are passionate about, provided that it has the possibility to improve the company. Google expects that if employees have autonomy and are able to work in an area that they are passionate about, that their productivity will also increase. This time has created some big things for Google, including Gmail, Google News, and more. Want to know more? Check out this video about Google's 20% Time. 

Drive by Daniel Pink

My interest in Genius Hour began when I read Drive by Daniel Pink. In his book, he discusses human motivation. In it, he address many issues, by discusses the idea of Genius Hour. Giving employees 60 minutes of autonomous time to develop something that they are interested in. He also discusses it in detail on this blog post here. 

Genius Hour in Education

So how does all of this apply to education? Though the ideas have spawned from large corporations, the ideals are applicable to our world in the classroom. Students are provided with a set amount of time to work on their passion projects. For our class, this is one ELA period, each Friday from now until Easter Break. Each student is challenged to explore something that they could do a project on. Once they have spent several weeks conducting their research, they create a product that will be shared with the class, school, or ideally, the world (via the internet of course). My job is to help facilitate students in their learning. Rather than dictate WHAT they are learning, my goal is to help them understand HOW they're learning, and how they can transform that knowledge into a presentation to help others. 

The main goal of Genius Hour is to ignite passion in students to "want" to learn, rather than "having" to learn.