Hello bloggers! I am here to talk to you about education
for one last time. This past week my fellow classmates and I participated in
something called genius hour I would like to share my experience about it. Genius
hour by definition is a movement that allows students
to explore their own passions and encourages creativity in the classroom. It
provides students a choice in what they learn during a set period of time
during school. In other words, genius hour is when a student will come
up with their own topic of interest to learn about and it is up to them to find
the answers by using whatever resources necessary to come to a conclusion. My Education
classroom took on genius hour, students could get into small groups, come up
with a question, and it was their job to answer it or find a solution. Although
I have not heard my peer’s perspectives on the genius hour I would like to
share my personal experience with it.
First of all, my group and I knew
from the beginning that we wanted to pick a question that did not have a
straight answer. We wanted to ask a question relevant to us and where we are in
our lives. We also wanted to research in a format that was unique from the
traditional ways, meaning we did not want to have to search the library
resources for peer reviewed articles to give us insight on what we were trying
to answer. This is when we began to ask ourselves questions. What is relevant
to us now? What would we like to know? As potential future teachers we realize
that the real world is not too far from us. Meaning very shortly we will be
graduating Brock University and will be heading out into the real world to be
teachers. Then we thought will we be ready for the real world? Will I know how
to handle kids when I am being challenged or questions? Will I know how to
appropriately manage my class and build strong, mutually respecting
relationships with my students? I have always been inspired to be a physical
education teacher because my teachers in the past have influenced me to be a
better person and I would hope I can do the same for future students of my own.
I realize this could only be done by having strong and positive relationships
with my students. I also want to make an impact on my student’s lives. I chose
physical education because I realize the need for students to learn to love physical
activity and gain a sense of physical literacy that they can use through out
their lifespan. I would also want to
yeach my students how important a healthy active lifestyle is and motivate them
to be the best they can be. This makes me come to my other questions, will I be
prepared to teach my students and motivate my students to be the best they can
be? Will I be able to help them reach their full potential? All of these
questions make me realize that I have a lot of learning to do before I can be
the teacher I want to be.
Through discussions with my peers,
they agreed that this was a mutual concern between all of us. We all have a lot
to learn before we become the teachers we want to be. Then we wondered to other
students have this concern? Is this concern mostly in students who want to be
future teachers? Well, this is when we realized we had our genius our question.
Our question was: as a brock student,
do you feel prepared entering into the real world when you graduate? From this
question we generated some further discussion questions such as: how much
effort have you put into school? Do you agree with that method of teaching that
Brock provides? We decided to collect our data by interviewing Brock students
and getting their opinions. We tried to get a range of students in concurrent
education and other programs. We also got one student from Niagara College to
hear a college perspective on their education. Now, I could go on about the
many different answers we got but I think it would be easier just to show you
the video that we came up with of our interviews.
That was our completed genius our
assignment, but I would like to discuss what we took away from the experience. First
of all we got to choose what we wanted to discover. This made the research and
the assignment very enjoyable. I was motivated to work on the assignment and I
even tried to learn new skills such as editing a video in iMovie. I did not
become frustrated when things did not work out rather; it was more about the
experience of producing a video that answered a question we were truly
passionate about. This assignment also got us to test some skills we had never
worked on. For example personally, I have never conducted any interviews or
recorded any videos for a class assignment. This was something new and exciting
for us and we definitely learned a lot about the interviewing process by
throwing ourselves into this assignment. Overall, this assignment was something
I was very proud of, we challenged ourselves to use new technologies and
methods we had never played around with before and we got great results.
Now, as
much as I absolutely hate to admit when I'm wrong, I have a confession. In a previous
blog I had a rant about chapter
four from Interweaving Curriculum and Classroom Assessment: Engaging
the 21st century learner by Susan Drake, Joanne Reid and Wendy Kolohon because it mentions students having the freedom to
learn what ever they want it and they called it inquiry based learning. I
strongly disagreed with this in my previous blog because I thought. How can we ensure students are learning the things they need to be
successful in their future? How can we monitor what students know or what they
don't know if they are all learning different things? A student searching for
answers takes a lot longer than traditional learning so how do students have
time to learn enough things? How do we know students are even coming across the
right answers? After learning through this genius hour I can see how
productive student self-motivated learning or inquiry-based learning can truly
be. It is surprising to see the difference of motivation behind a topic that
the students themselves get to choose compared to a topic or assignment chosen
by the teacher. I still believe that students must learn set criteria of things
to be successful in life but after this experience I am a lot more open to the
idea the students choosing what they get to learn from time to time with a set
criteria. Genius hour was a great opportunity to step outside of the
traditional teaching and learning styles and explore something that truly
matters to us and this is something I will remember and take with me for many
years ahead. If you are still not convinced, here are a few videos you can
watch to get a better understanding and see how it works.
No comments:
Post a Comment