Genius Hour

I love the idea of Genius Hour. It encourages lateral, creative and critical thinking. It is an innovative way of meeting educational standards. It is fun because the students get to choose what they want to learn, research, modify, build, invent, and/or create do what interests them and not just do something they are required to. It allows them to find themselves in their creative work. They get to be in charge of their education. Too often we see students who grow bored because they don't enjoy what they are learning. Genius hour can be a great way to engage these students. It is differential learning as each student is working at their level.

Being a passionate art lover, I decided to tackle an art project that I haven't done before - a 3d mural. It was an interesting experience that I really loved. It was interesting to learn about the different types of materials available and experiment with some of them. What I didn’t take into account though was the cost and time involved. I had underestimated both. It was really frustrating when the clay I chose first time didn’t dry as it was supposed to. There were lots of cracks when it dried. Assuming it was because I used more water than needed; I redid again using the same clay and still ended up with the same result. I had to then change the clay and redo the work. Thankfully this time round it worked well. It was a great learning experience. It was exciting to learn new ways to create textures and play around with them. Also learnt the hard way that mistakes made are not easy to correct. It was challenging to work around these mistakes but at the same time it brought out the creativity in me to make the mistake work. The project is not completed yet. It now needs to be colored. I am hoping I should be able to complete it in a week. 

I would definitely want to use Genius Hour in my class. While browsing for ideas I came across this one that really interested me - Scaffolding Genius Hour. I have been following Dan Meyer on Twitter for some time and really like his ideas. So why not use Dan Meyer Three-Acts Math Tasks as a way of building up to a full scale Genius Hour project. Dan has put together a great list of problems where students could pick out a question that interests them or begin asking their own essential questions. Students can get used to thinking outside the box, working on problems that do not have a definitive start or end point at all while still working in the comfortable confines of just answering a math problem.