Genius hour is a concept I hadn’t heard of before diving in to research this new educational trend. Genius hour is basically a Google policy that allows workers twenty percent of their work time to work on a project of their own creation that has been incorporated into schools. According to a Business Insider article ( https://www.businessinsider.com/york-school-lets-kids-spend-20-on-anything-they-want-2016-5), a teacher by the name Kevin Brookhouser started the trend at his school in California. He allowed students to spend twenty of their school day working on their own project. Brookhouser says that he had students create products, video series, and green energy initiatives with the time they were given.
Another article (https://musicuentos.com/2014/01/novicegh/) discusses some of the issues with implementing the genius hour in schools. The article’s author, Sara Elizabeth Cottrell, talks about world language teachers trying to create a curriculum incorporating genius hour. Cottrell states that novice learners in a content area lack the depth of knowledge and vocabulary to really create at an advanced level. This is a good point, but she also mentions that some teachers involved in the process were able to modify the idea in a way to make it work for the curriculum.
While looking into ways that other teachers are using genius hour, I came across a We Are Teachers post by Elizabeth Mulvahill ( https://www.weareteachers.com/what-is-genius-hour/) that outlines some steps for implementing it in the classroom. The steps she mentions; topic selection, generating a “guiding question”, research, and finally creating something, remind me of a Project Lead the Way (PLTW) course that I taught when I first started teaching. The class was a capstone course that allowed seniors an opportunity to spend a whole year identifying a problem and working to solve it. After seeing something similar to this in action, I think it would be a very exciting thing for students to try, but would probably need to be limited to students with a strong passion or a high amount of self motivation. Based on this, to me it seems genius hour would be a great option for some students, but probably not beneficial for all students.
I would love to hear how some of you think genius hour could be implemented in your classrooms, or if you think it is even a positive use of time.
Scott's Education Blog 
That’s a good correlation between it and the capstone project. Those would definitely be a lot more involved from the student’s side as to the final product since it’s a full class length.
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