Genius Hour Teacher Resources

Genius hour

The Genius Hour concept was born out of Google's 80/20 principle, which allows its engineers to spend 20% of their time working on any pet project they want that can help develop the company. The idea is simple: allow people to work on something that interests them, and motivation and productivity will increase. The developers created Gmail and Google News during their 20% time.

I had been thinking about implementing this type of student-led learning work for some time, but I wasn't sure how to do it in the formative cycle of instruction that is a middle school reading and writing classroom. So I took the time to gather information and share ideas with someone.

The library media specialist and I did some research and found that teachers across the country were doing Genius Hour-type projects, simply calling them something else, like Passion Time or Project Inspiration. Regardless of name, they were all research-based and student-led projects. I learned more about what the Genius Hour process could be in my classroom through blogs, videos, and other online resources created by teachers who are doing what I wanted to do in my classroom.

Teachers were setting aside 20% of their instructional time each week for students to follow their own learning, and student engagement and learning outcomes improved significantly.

I also wanted this learning experience for my seventh grade students. There was no way I could get away from Genius Hour now.

Genius hour in education

The same nice time principles apply within the room as they are doing within the company surroundings. The teacher provides a collection quantity of your time for college students to figure on their passion comes. Students area unit then challenged to explore one thing to try to to a project they require to find out concerning. They pay many weeks researching the subject before getting down to produce a product to be shared with the category / college / world. Deadlines area unit restricted and ability is inspired. Throughout the method, the teacher facilitates student comes to confirm they're on task.

There area unit several educators leading the means with passion comes in their categories, however abundant of their inspiration came from the book The Passion-Driven Classroom: A Framework for Teaching & Learning by Angela Maiers and Amy Sandoval. A.J. Juliani additionally wrote a recent book on Genius Hour and 2 hundredth Time in education.

Many academics area unit excited concerning the autonomy that students area unit finding in their categories, as well as myself. This year I even have been guiding a bunch of sixth graders through the genius hour method and it's been terribly rewardful to visualize them learn. A goal of each teaching ought to be to form womb-to-tomb learners. Genius Hour comes area unit an excellent step towards that goal.

Genius Hour Teacher Resources

Resources:

• Genius Hour Journal: An interactive notebook and PPT for Genius Hour 
• The Complete Guide to Genius Hour and 20% Time Course
• What to do when Genius Hour fails? (How to handle those students that aren’t sure what to do their project on)
• 6 Simple Strategies to Find Your Passion
• The Research Behind Choice and Inquiry-Based Education (includes connection to State Standards)
• Genius Hour Wikispaces
• Joy Kirr Genius Hour LiveBinder

Origin

Genius Hour originated from the 80/20 idea of ​​many innovative companies, such as Google, where employees receive 20% of their time at work to work on their own projects. This system was very successful, with products like Gmail,

 Google News and 50% of Google's projects. This system was later adopted by teachers and used in the classroom to allow students to explore their passions.

Process of hour

A Genius Hour project begins with the selection of the topic and the essential or essential question. This question should be able to lead to a deeper investigation, invention and / or community project / initiative derived from its original theme. 

Some classes allow students to have many Genius Hour projects throughout the year while others ask students to choose something that interests them throughout the year. Then, an investigation is carried out on this topic to work towards the final product. The final product must be able to reflect on the results of the research and go further by analyzing the information found and providing the student's own discoveries. Finally, there may be a reflection task, be it an essay, a presentation, etc.

Goal of hour

There are numerous benefits of Genius Hour. With students conducting in-depth research on the topic that interests them, the student can learn more than in a traditional classroom and be more focused in a direction that may benefit them in the future. Second, teachers can learn more about their students, their passions, how they learn, and many different aspects of a student. Additionally,

 Genius Hour enables more interactive and engaging learning. Students are passionate about the topics they chose, and they will interact and participate more in the learning and research process, therefore they will get more than 20% of the time. Genius Hour can also help students explore potential future interests to learn about what they might be interested in pursuing in the future.Furthermore, Genius Hour is based on the belief that "the teacher is no longer a dispenser of all knowledge, but students must be entrusted to learn for themselves. Students must do the hard work of critical thinking, creation and contribution "