Genius Hour for French Immersion Schools
If you are a French Immersion teacher and would like to start Genius Hour, we've got the resources to assist you! Explore the resources below translated by Eric McCalmon and Erin St. Onge. These amazing teachers tirelessly translated documents so that Genius Hour could be conducted in French and were willing to share their hardwork with other French Immersion teachers. Thank you both so much for your efforts!
Getting Started with Genius Hour
The following document, for those individuals who can understand french, is a general overview of Genius Hour and the expectations for students.
What do You Want to Know? Exploring the Essential Question
Helping students determine their passion can be challenging. Helping students determine a question related to their passion, can be even more challenging. The key with Genius Hour is that it's not about exploring topics, but exploring "big" or essential questions. After that, as a teacher, our role is to help students find those answers, whether it's through research, experimentation, surveys... it's a reflective process. Students are expected to take the information they learn or gather and make sense of it. Take that information and connect it to what they already know and examine what other questions they might have that relate to that big question. An essential aspect of Genius Hour is giving students the opportunity to blog their reflections and how they are making sense of the information and share that with an authentic audience... that being their classmates. With the blogging platform, students can ask each other questions to help further this reflective process. In sharing via blogs, there is also an opportunity for students to also help spark ideas for other classmates in how they can take their research and learning further.
Pitch the Project!
Once the students have had the opportunity to reflect on their passions and explore an essential question. They need to create an "elevator pitch" and pitch their project. This means sharing with their peers and their teacher, their essential question and why the pursuit of this essential question is worth their time.
An "Elevator Pitch" can be summed up as follows...
The term comes from the notion that an innovator with a great idea might find herself in an elevator with a powerful investor. She has a very short period of time to convince this investor to buy into her idea. She needs to deliver an elevator pitch.
The Elevator Pitch can be further explained to students with the Elevator Pitch video.
Check out the resources below for introducing the concept and evaluating the pitches.
An "Elevator Pitch" can be summed up as follows...
The term comes from the notion that an innovator with a great idea might find herself in an elevator with a powerful investor. She has a very short period of time to convince this investor to buy into her idea. She needs to deliver an elevator pitch.
The Elevator Pitch can be further explained to students with the Elevator Pitch video.
Check out the resources below for introducing the concept and evaluating the pitches.
Genius Hour Log
In addition to students blogging about their learning, they will also log their learning as a way of taking ownership and accountability over their own learning. This log could be in paper or of course using a digital document. It all depends on the availability of devices.
Planning for the Genius Hour Project
Student Self Assessment of Genius Hour
One of the most important aspects of Genius Hour is giving students the opportunity to self assess their own learning. After all this is their passion project. It is driven by what they want to learn and explore. So of course it makes sense that a significant element of the learning be completed by students.
