Julianna Lux PBL Course 2 Genius Hour Project

Genius Hour: Civil Rights Experts

I believe my Genius Hour assignment falls better into the category of Inquiry-Based-Learning than what I believe Genius Hour assignments should be.  I envision the creation of an object that someone learns how to do along the way.  My Genius Hour was incorporated into a new PBL created for this semester revolving around Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. For their Genius Hour, students would become experts on one aspect of civil rights, be it from the past or the present (it did not have to focus in on the African American Civil Rights Movement). I set out expecting my students to create something in the MakerSpace that would showcase knowledge they learned during a series of research sessions. In fact, after a few sessions of research, I met with the students in small groups to discuss the similarities of their topics (for example, childhood and adulthood of Dr. King, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Gandhi) and begin planning the final product.  We came up with some amazing ideas, too. Two boys who were researching Jackie Robinson planned to create a 3D model of a baseball field, complete with baseball players in the midst of a game; two students who researched King were going to create a version of the game of LIFE to showcase steps on his journey as a civil rights activist.  We made plans, but when it came time to actually create what would showcase our knowledge, my students were more concerned with socializing and pushing work off on someone else or not doing anything unless I was personally assisting them.  After one day in the MakerSpace, one group of three students only producing one letter outlined on a poster, three other groups producing not much more, and only one group really making any headway, I completely scratched the creative products as I deemed they would be a waste of resources and time.  Instead, we returned to the classroom to create individual research booklets using a basic template I provided. The students were more receptive and worked diligently for two days to find appropriate pictures and write what they knew in their own words. They enjoyed receiving printed and bound versions of their books.  Sample #1  Sample #2 Sample #3 Sample #4

While I’m proud of what my students accomplished, I’m wondering where I went wrong in the planning of the Genius Hour. Was it that I didn’t provide enough structure for my students? I initially had my students jotting down notes on notebook paper, but they weren’t writing down their sources anywhere. I provided them with a log to record where they visited during the sessions, but some still didn’t write down their sources.  Was it the topic? Many of my students began asking if the class had shifted to a history class, so they weren’t seeing the connection with ELA. One student even told me he just wasn’t interested in learning about the African American Civil Rights Movement; I guided him to the topic of the Little Rock Nine, and he showed a little more interest then.  Did I not give them enough time? During the six or seven days, they had about forty-five minutes to an hour to work on their research--generating questions, answering those questions, generating more questions, answering those questions. However, this was a somewhat open-ended task, and I did not give them a structured format to follow for recording these questions and answers.  I believe if I implement this again in the future, I will create a more definitive process that will limit the directions they can take but still be open-ended enough to grant them freedom to find the information they seek to find.  Perhaps this will allow them to better budget their time.  Did I have them doing too much at one time? We were studying King’s speech, writing our own speeches, learning new rhetorical strategies to incorporate into our own speeches, researching Civil Rights topics, and working on text-dependent analysis all in the matter of a couple of weeks.  Some of my students seemed lost from the beginning, while others appeared bored halfway through.

In the end, though, I call this a success. While I didn’t quite make it to everything I wanted to accomplish (students’ resources are listed as links instead of actual citations, which makes me cringe, but I ran out of time), they were proud of what they made and begged to take them home with them over break.  I only had to fuss at one student who tried to throw his in the trash.  Sample #3 was created by that student who just wasn’t interested in Civil Rights, and while his isn’t perfect (none of them were), this is more than he’s ever done for me before. Same deal for Sample #4 above; he typically does the bare minimum to coast by, but he worked hard on this book.  They learned how to insert pictures into a document; they learned how to change the font size and style; some learned how to cut and paste text from inside a table to outside of the table.  They learned how to use the binding machine and were fascinated as we used it.  And almost every one of them was excited to get it back and take it home with them.  They did a good job, and I’m proud of them. Even if my plans didn’t quite turn out the way I expected.