Think Big! Do Something Important! Change the World!

We started doing Genius Hour 7th hour on Thursdays in the first semester of the Arete PBL Academy. It was a learning experience for everyone.  When one is passionate about something they will read, watch, ask questions and practice and in general find every means to learn about the topic.

Some kids knew what they wanted to do in the first thirty seconds. Others had a tough time finding a passion and joined with another person who was their friend, they thought would do all the work, or topic seemed interesting.  Needless to say, those who pursued a passion enjoyed the time they were given and used it well.  Those who weren't passionate about their topic usually were working in a group, generally with people they liked, but not necessarily with a topic they loved. That situation led to the one who was passionate about the topic feeling like the other person wasn't doing anything and the other person who wasn't really into it feeling like the passionate one was always bossing them around.

It took some of them awhile to figure out that each of them had skills they could leverage to push the project to success. For others, the main learning was that they didn't want to work on a project with a person who was not as passionate as they are, or that they didn't want to work on a project where they got to choose how to spend their time both in and outside of school, but didn't love.

At the beginning of the hour for each Genius Hour, we took the first three minutes and did a quick research tip, discussed a point where they should be in their project and waved the green flag by saying, "Think big, Do something important, Change the world." I used it was a touch point for everyone no matter which stage they were in with their project.  Another frequent saying was Oliver Schinkten's expression, "If you didn't fail, then you fail."  The expression fits into the Think Big portion of the project. By that I mean if you didn't think big enough for something not to work out, then you didn't think big enough.

Genius Hour--Getting the Go Ahead

In considering steps necessary to begin Genius Hour, I felt I had to let my administration know about the projects as well as the parents. I used these ideas below in my letter to parents and my discussion with administrators:

We are excited to inform you that we are introducing the Genius Hour (GH) project in English 9 classes this semester.  We recognize that all students come to school with interests and talents which school typically may not acknowledge. This project is our way of applying those skills in a format which validates students' interests and is in tune with Angela Maiers’ saying,  “You are a genius and the world needs your contribution.”

The idea and logic behind Genius Hour is very simple:  allow people to work on something they are passionate about, and productivity will go up.  Engineers at corporate giant 3M have worked in this way for over 60 years, famously producing Post-It Notes among other products. Google is the most celebrated company to incorporate 20% time into the work week. Google is not alone. Across the globe, increasingly, companies are using 20% time to increase employee satisfaction and production. Research based data confirms this policy works so well that 50% of Google’s projects have been created and implemented during this creative period.  Ever heard of Gmail or Google News?  These projects were creations by passionate developers during their 20% time projects.  Our Genius Hour project is based on this Google philosophy.

Just like Google engineers, and countless students in schools across the country, our students will have one day a week in English class to devote to their passions. The benefits of Genius Hour within our curriculum are in line with Common Core State Standards and the findings of internationally renowned researcher and author Daniel Pink, who revealed that people worldwide are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose.  

Here is how we will promote those qualities:

Autonomy--Allow students an opportunity to discover and investigate one of their passions

Mastery--Help to promote, support, and model creative, innovative thinking, communication skills and inventiveness to make our students experts in their area of passion

Purpose--Provide an avenue for students to reflect on and share their learning with others on how they will each make the world a better place and at the same time provide a forum for parents, community and school to partner and to support students’ learning.

Ultimately, the goal of Genius Hour will be realized when students improve their community through real world application of their research and share their knowledge in the form of a culminating project, with you (the parent), and the community, at our open house.

For the next 7-weeks, your student will have assignments that will be due in conjunction with Genius Hour.  They will complete a brainstorming activity, submit a proposal of their topic, apply the elements of nonfiction writing to their research, contact an expert,  correctly cite their sources, and create a final presentation of their topic.  We strongly encourage you to mentor your student and check on their progress often.

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

Kids, the Resistance and Genius Hour

Every kid, and probably every person no matter what their age, wants to be known for something. For all people, including school age kids, the choices to eat, wear, play and/or listen to something so often it becomes their own individual trademark goes a long way to inform us as to what school should offer--individualized choices for each person.

At school there is the kid who wears socks up to his knees and shorts everyday, the jersey kid, the hair kid, the shorts and sandals kid (living in Wisconsin, it gets to be a challenge in the winter), the no jacket kid, the kid with funny sayings on his shirt, the branded kid eg. (Nike, Under Armor). The list is so long and diverse that kids take their identity and notoriety from what happens at other times of the day--before school, on the bus, at lunch or after school.

Think of the power that choice of what to be known for, has for people. To be an individual, to choose their own path and to celebrate what makes them different from everyone else, kids will even go so far as to eat something like a frozen pizza everyday. Pizza is great, but eating one everyday? Yuck! Think of what must go through someone's head everyday when they know they face 40+ minutes at lunch standing on the playground in shorts and sandals with a foot of snow on the ground  just to keep their streak going!

Robert Cialdini, in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (see a summary here), gives this willingness to do the same thing over and over a specific name--consistency. It is one of the things which causes people to do many things they would not ordinarily do just to make it seem to others like we haven't changed.

Dan Ariely discusses the fact that people continually make choices not in their own best interest in his book, Predictably Irrational.

According to Steven Pressfield in his book The War of Art, the bad choices we make are a result of the Resistance trying to distract us from what is truly important to us.

I think everyoneDon't we owe it to them to give them a chance to defeat the Resistance by giving students dedicated time in class to work on something they are passionate about so they will be able to focus on something they really want to do like: growing tomatoes, welding, trapping animals, writing computer code or any other topic?  Through Genius Hour, every student has the chance to be known for how well they can do something. If you haven't ever heard of or have had your students do a Genius Hour project, check out Joy Kirr's LiveBinder for a plethora of information from many veterans in Genius Hour. Most of us have about 2-3 weeks of summer without professional development, committees, or grad classes. Consider doing Genius Hour next year. Better yet, have your class do one, and have your district allow teachers to do one.

I'm not saying kids still won't make sure they have a Hello Kitty item visible at all times, but when they are known for the passion they have about a topic and how they have used that topic to help others, maybe that will take over for Hello Kitty.

Ahhhh Summer!!

Contrary to what many people think, teachers do not take June, July and August off.

Here is my list of school related activities for the summer in the order I thought of them:

1. write weekly mindset lessons
2. Readers'/writers' workshop
3. Read Teaching Argument Writing
4. Blog daily
5. Plan week 1 Summer School
6. Plan for year 1 of Capstone seminar
7. English 9 Research
8. PBL Future plans
9. Compile quotes
10. Finish 1 Udemy Class per month
11. Redo Genius Hour project design using Shipit journal, Stanford d.School design ideas
12. Develop Socratic Seminar norms and prompts
13. Genius Hour blog subjects for each week?
14. Contact Kevin Ralofsky and George Brunell about partnerships for next year. 
15. altMBA