Bringing Genius Hour to Your School
Course
Introducing Genius Hour to Your Students [9:20]
- Learn how to prepare for students' confusion when you introduce free choice in research.
- Learn to relate your Genius Hour approach to life to students' topic selection.
- Learn the importance of laying down ground rules.
Now, get ready for some really confused faces when you introduce free choice in research for the first time. In many cases, students will have never had such a wide open opportunity to learn about what interests them at school. What's the best way to clarify the process? Start with a simple demonstration of how life creates learning opportunities. You might begin by sharing your own stories.
I bet you, like most educators, consider yourself to be a lifelong learner. Think about the following activities. If you do any of them, you've already adopted a Genius Hour approach to your life. Do you spend time traveling? Do you participate in cultural celebrations or special events? How about spending time learning new crafts, hobbies, or practical skills? What if you investigate things that you've never seen before, such as a natural disaster, severe weather, strange creatures, or rare astronomical events? Do you do research before making a major purchase?
All of these activities can inspire you to gain further understanding by going online, or referring to a book to build background knowledge. To demonstrate this approach to students, document something you've learned recently with photos, videos, artifacts, or statistics, then report your findings to them. Right off the bat, you're showing them the three components of a Genius Hour project. Let your students know that they will be allowed to learn about anything they want in school. Life demands explanations, right? Discuss this with your students and explain that they will be using what they've learned in school to explore what they've encountered in life.
Describe Genius Hour as a time that's going to be set aside for them so they can learn, explore, or create something in school about a subject in life that they're truly interested in. Bring out some specific examples to show them what you mean. Demonstrate how life brings opportunities to learn all the time. A family vacation experience is vastly improved with pre-planning and research into temperature, culture, food, and customs of the location that they're going to visit. How about learning a new hobby or sport? It requires knowledge and skills that you can acquire from experts.
What about that strange thing growing in the fridge? That's your chance to start the Genius Hour project. Really, almost anything, within reason, that happens to you or that you do in your free time is a potential topic for elementary students to learn about what Genius Hour is all about. For older students, you want to bring that challenge up a notch. It's not just about doing the research. It's about what you'll do with the research.
Add in a dimension of using research and ideas to make life better for the world, or their community, or their family. Does travel or exploration of one's cultural background break down barriers? Can cooking at home or learning how to fish enable people to live a sustainable lifestyle? How can my trip to the emergency room help to ease other people's fears of a hospital visit? Could we take that knowledge to make visits easier on children? Let's go back to the stories of your learning that you've shared. By sharing personal stories, you're conveying the most important criteria of Genius Hour. It's all about personal curiosity.
When a teacher gets up and shares openly, everyone gets permission to put themselves out there and reveal what's most important to them. What makes them tick, what has them worried, and what has them excited about life. Now, some people feel that there's a big risk of being vulnerable by revealing something that's deeply important to them. Well, when it comes to a passion project, taking risk is the key to project success. Opening up will let students know that their topics can be personal too. The more personal it is, the more invested the student will be in the research process, and subsequently, the better the result.
At this point, students will be raring to explore their passions, but it's important to lay down the ground rules and get everyone on the same page first. The rules of Genius Hour are few, but they are extremely important. There's three—and let's communicate them clearly. Rule number one, there must be an essential question to drive the research. Everyone needs to think in terms of answering the questions: who, what, when, where, why, or how. The second rule is, the question must be researched. If the question is just so simple that a dictionary or simple web search gives the answer in a short definition, then that's probably not a good topic. The third rule is this. The findings must be shared. Everyone, yes, everyone will give a brief presentation in some fashion.
Now, topic selection may be the single most difficult thing that students will do for their Genius Hour project. Because chances are that this is the very first time in their academic careers that anyone gave them a choice about what they're about to learn. Students are constantly being told to conform and fit in. The notion of being original or doing their own thing in school may result in a mental barrier that stops them from being creative, or pursuing interests that are personal to them at school. Because of this, chances are the first and second years of Genius Hour are going to require a fair amount of class time just to convince the kids that they have your full permission to explore any topic that they desire.
Well, almost. There is a catch. It has to be something that's worthy of focused and passionate commitment to learning for an extended period of time. A Genius Hour project isn't something that can be mastered in one class period. Now, there's no magic solutions to getting kids tapped into an idea for their project right away. It might depend on their own life experiences or their own level of creativity. You can be prepared for some students to know exactly what they want to do, and for others, it's probably going to take a bit more effort; but there are tools to help. You'll find more details about using them in the learning support materials, but here's a headline version. Provide journaling opportunities, including an interest inventory. Have them take a multiple intelligences quiz. Get them to take a parent-student survey with their guardian. Conduct a teacher-student interview. And let students help each other identify strengths through icebreaker activities. Or share some project ideas from books, or check your local magazines and newspapers for fun activities that are happening in your vicinity.
The key with all of these options is helping the student to discover what makes them say, "A-ha. I know what I want to know more about that." Whether you use one of these methods or all of them to get your students thinking, it's important to take the time to make sure that all the participants have a topic that's personal and meaningful. When students are invested in their research they have the very best reason to learn and that is to satisfy their own curiosity.
Providing your students free choice in their research may be exciting and overwhelming for them. Be prepared to help guide their focus towards the simple everyday activities they may already be doing that take on a Genius Hour approach to life.
In this lesson, Elizabeth Rush talks about presenting Genius Hour to your students and how to help them maintain focus when given the opportunity—perhaps for the first time—of free choice in research. Using page 8 of the Course Packet (in the Resources above) reflect on some of your own activities that take on a Genius Hour approach to life. Do you spend time traveling? Have you learned any new hobbies recently? Did you recently research making a large purchase? All of these things can inspire you to research. Brainstorm 3-4 activities and reflect on how they helped you be a lifelong learner and take a Genius Hour approach to life.
MLA Citation
Editorial Team, SLC. "Bringing Genius Hour to Your School: A Genius Hour Approach to Life." School Library Connection, September 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2264414?learningModuleId=2264392&topicCenterId=2253166.
Entry ID: 2268689
Every project needs guidelines to explain the goal and let students know what is expected of them. In addition to those basic guidelines, Genius Hour projects needs guidelines to help your students stay focused on the end product, given the wide-open possibilities of researching their passions.
Your students are now looking at an open-ended research project with endless possibilities. Your job is to keep their focus on the final product and what is expected of them. In the Resources above, you will find a Genius Hour Checklist from Elizabeth Rush's book, Bringing Genius Hour to Your Library. Read through the presentation requirements, scoring rubric, citation requirements and start to reflect on what you expect from your students and how this will affect their final grade. Using page 9 of the Course Packet (found in the Resources above), start to outline your Genius Hour Guidelines.
MLA Citation
Editorial Team, SLC. "Bringing Genius Hour to Your School: Genius Hour Guidelines." School Library Connection, September 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2264414?learningModuleId=2264392&topicCenterId=2253166.
Entry ID: 2268693
Additional Resources
About the Author
MLA Citation
Rush, Elizabeth Barrera. "Bringing Genius Hour to Your School. Introducing Genius Hour to Your Students [9:20]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, September 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2264414?learningModuleId=2264392&topicCenterId=2253166.
https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2264414?learningModuleId=2264392&topicCenterId=2253166
Entry ID: 2264414