My Genius Hour journey ended up somewhere very different from where I started. Having missed TEN classes with my students (2 weeks of sex ed, a full 6th grade PBL immersion week, me being on a trip for 12 days), I had no clue what I was going to do. In desperation, I emailed Dawn, who recommended trying the individualized learning/personal learning pathways type unit. Once I saw some examples of what that looked like, I was on-board.
After refining the resources I'd been collecting, I designed a hyperdoc for my students on Growth vs. Fixed Mindset. (What I had been planning on teaching anyway!) They have only started the journey this week, but here are some great things I'm seeing: they're engaged, they're motivated, and they are learning with a purpose in mind having found out what their mindsets were before beginning. Those with a fixed mindset are learning in hopes of becoming growth mindset thinkers, and those with growth mindsets are learning about why this matters so much in their lives as students and in their future lives and roles and careers. They are going at their own pace, and choosing the order of the activities they do. They don't feel like they're waiting around for their peers or being dragged along when they really wanted to spend more time diving into something.
What was tricky was not having foreseen how much technological difficulty I would face at the beginning. Some of the video links worked, others didn't. What was cool was that I got to say to my students: "Hey, PBL happening RIGHT HERE!" as I figured out other ways to share the video with them and learned a better way to provide personalized learning pathways via EdPuzzle. (You can make ANY video a lesson with questions, voiceovers, etc!!!) Another thing I'm wondering about is how it will be trying to get everyone to a somewhat approximate finish line when they work at their own pace....
For now, enjoying the process, and looking forward to learning more about PLP and using it in my classroom more frequently.
P.S. In my quest to wrap my head around Genius Hour, I joined the Master Course about it from AJ Juliani. Really good so far, but I'm only a third of the way through. Anyway, worth looking into, and I will definitely use this in my Character Ed class next semester! :)
Hi Rachael,
ReplyDeleteI am so glad to hear that the suggestions given in our last class meeting through the digital resources on personalized learning were helpful to you in designing a Genius Hour experience that was do-able given your time constraints. I loved reading your reflection about how you used a hyperdoc as a tool for your students to co-construct learning digitally regarding growth verses fixed mindset and you've intentionally built in different learning paths for students based on their own abilities and interests which gives them choice and ownership. I would love to be able to see some of the different examples of the student pathways in this project.
To answer your question about how to get everyone to the finish line of a unit when they are going at different paces is to provide clear expectations for what each person has to finish. I like to recommend a Must Do/ Can Do contract where students know the deadline and what components must be finished and then they are able to choose their options based on the non negotiables.
I am also glad that you've joined Juliani's Genius Hour. I want to recommend a book that is co-written by Juliani and Spencer called Empower which is about helping students take ownership over their learning. I have just started it but really like the ideas as they correlate with pbl and Genius Hour.
Thanks,
Dawn