Why Not Genius Hour?

I have read and thought about the concept of 20% time since reading Daniel Pink's book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us in 2010 (see Pink's motivation TED Talk here).  In it, he talks about 3M and their practice of giving their engineers 15 percent of their week to work on a project of their choosing, out of which post-it notes among other products came.  Then Google followed with their 20% time.  And Atlasssian continued the idea, only allowing their people to work on any project they were passionate about, whether it was work related or not.  

In preparing for the first attempt at using one class period per week to pursue something students loved, I had to have a name for it.  Some of the names I had read online in Joy Kirr's Genius Hour Live Binder and elsewhere were: Googley Time, Innovation Time, Collaboratorium, Passion Time, 20% Time, and Genius Hour. 

I felt that when one hears "Genius," they think about Albert Einstein. When one hears "Passion," they think about Telenovelas and 20% time had no feel (like Tuesday according to Seinfeld).  I decided to go with the Einstein version. Finally, I considered the psychological priming effect of what they name would be and did some other research and discovered one of the most powerful means which create people’s beliefs is reading. As far back as the 1670’s, philosopher Benedict Baruch Spinoza  opined that people believe whatever they encounter. More recently, in 1993, Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues tested Spinoza’s idea in a series of experiments and found that people believe concepts seconds after reading them. 

I felt that Genius Hour is not just another name for the same old way of doing things. It is a time for people to connect their partially or fully formed ideas with others in a Google-type Innovation Time  for something education related.  Individuals’ ideas can be connected to make the whole better than the sum of the parts. These connections may come from people in the same school or from elsewhere in the district.  The goal is to combine ideas to create an innovative education version of revolutionary designs like the engineers at Google do.  Through the ability to follow their passions during Genius Hour, students will be driven to make themselves into the greatest people they can be. Some outcomes of a Genius Hour type of collaboration are:  students may have stronger relationships with adults and with each other;  they may become more inspired learners; they may become more skilled at asking questions and researching their answers; or an untold number of other outcomes depending on the groups and projects created through Genius Hour.

Think of the terms Evolution, Wall Street and Climate Change .  People can easily create a mental image of these short, power packed monikers.Ok, I was set on Genius Hour as the name