Genius Hour: Opportunity to Explore
Put yourself in the shoes of a student, a middle school student. They come to school with the internet at their fingertips but they are forced and required to learn angles in math, civil war in social studies and descriptive writing in English. But you as the student are curious on how humans burp, why Alaska sometimes has sun for 24 hours straight and the reasons why Antartica in not able to host humans to live there. It would be super hard to focus just thinking about the scenario and not having to actually live out this idea.
There is something that is called Genius Hour, in which the educator can allow students to explore the internet to grasp their curiosity and answer some of their questions that they have about anything and everything. I have never heard about this idea, but after reading more about it on www.geniushour.com I really really love the idea of letting my students explore.
As an English teacher, I was thinking of some very cool ways to allow this to be used in my classroom. I could use this as a writing activity, where on Monday’s I have students write down a top 5 or 10 list of things they are curious about. Could be anything from sports, to school to America and etc. Then throughout the week, I could allow 15–20 minutes to just explore 1 or 2 of these questions and then write a paragraph or two on what they found out and what they now know about that certain subject or topic.
Imagine the possibilities that I could allow in my classroom, not only am I able to grade their writing and having them work on different types of writing strategies and grammar fundamentals. At the same time we as a class are exploring and learning things that could be relevant to their lives or something that really and truly interests them as an individual.
One of the negatives of an activity like this, which I sort of touched on in my first blog titled Standardized Testing I mentioned how we don’t have a ton of time to teach other items other than what is on the tests that schools are required to take. With something like Genius Hour, teachers may feel squeezed on time and freedom of how they can educate their students. As I thought of this, I noticed that my classroom wouldn’t be as affected as other classrooms like Science or Math because I can use it as a writing prompt but Math and Science classes would have to structure their schedule differently to fit all that the government asks schools and teachers to do.
Overall, a great idea for students that have many questions with all of the technology and websites at our fingertips. I will be using this at the beginning of the school year to help students be more open to finding out the answers to their questions.
