Pictured: A typical classroom setup.
The Stuff of Growth
Ken Robinson on Education
This video appears elsewhere on this site, which tells you how important it must be to our work:
Every time I come back to this speech, another idea resonates with me. I’d like to know what resonates with you, especially as you continue in our classroom. My explicit goal is to make Robinson’s ideas actionable — to do more than just agree with him. I believe that grade abatement is the key. It helps, though, to consider another luminary:
Dan Pink on Motivation
This is another RSA Animate video:
Again, I find that different ideas in this speech resonate with me each time I watch it. I’m drawn to the idea of autonomy right now, because we’ll be attempting a Genius Hour from Q2 on. I’d like to know what resonates with you, too.
Talk to me in the comments below, and extend your own conversations to your specific course’s Google Classroom.
I think that having our own Genius Hour during school would be very beneficial to our learning. I believe that by doing this it could possibly simulate what we could possibly be doing in the future if we end up working for a research institute or work with a professor at college on research. We have to find something that we are interested in, and then immerse ourselves in it. Also, I think it would help us see how productive we can really be while doing something we like and then aim to be that productive and efficient while we are doing our normal work. Last year in Ms. McTigue’s class, me and some of my peers briefly experienced this during our editorial project and then characterization project. We could write on anything we wanted to, and I found that when we had unlimited options, I enjoyed the assignment much more and felt more comfortable writing how I wanted to. I’m looking forward to our own Genius Hour.
Definitely! A Genius Hour would be highly beneficial to most if not all of us as students. Again, relating to the editorial assignment we had last year (different teacher – Racic – same assignment), when we were given complete freedom to choose a topic, we (at least me, and I think a lot of my peers) enjoyed completing the assignment much more so than a regular writing assignment. When you give metacognitive/thoughtful people like us an environment like a Genius Hour, only positive thoughts and expressions will likely be realized.
I’m glad you all are excited about the prospect. Since we can apply writing to any creative process through reflection and metacognition, these Genius Hour projects won’t have to be ELA in nature. I’ll push (gently) in that direction, since it will help you in other ways in here; ultimately, however, I want to give you as much academic freedom as possible.