The Learning Opportunity

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! A little luck of the Irish from my 5% Irish heritage to you!

On Fridays, I am so lucky to spend an hour or so with a group of 6th graders at one of the schools I work in. During this block, students spend their time discovering and learning about a topic of their choice. We call this “Genius Hour” - others may refer to it as 20% Time or Passion Period.

During the first two years, we had so many budding-chefs or junior foodies. Each each seemed to have a popular topic and that always seemed to be one of them. Students would prep recipes, get inspired by other chefs, and head to the teacher’s lounge to use the oven/stove top. With pride and a spring in their step, they’d return to the classroom to showcase anything from cookies, small potatoes, cupcakes, fruit pizza, and others that have escaped my memory. By the way, those small golden potatoes that were stuff magically with cheese, bacon, and scallions were out of this world and something I’d consider serving at any dinner party.

Food, aside from lunch, has never been allowed in schools, at least for the last few years. This never stopped the students during genius hour to pursue their food-related passions. This year, however, there are no students diving into this topic. The lead teacher I work with during this time, Denise, and I debriefed today about their progress and reminisced about this. There is such a wide range of passions and interests this year, and although we miss taste-testing the food, we are thrilled with the new ventures they are taking. Students pick their objectives, and with the the abundant and ubiquitous library of information from technology, this access and time empowers each of them individually.

A student that is moving to a new school district after spring break pulled me aside as I entered the classroom and whispered, “Miss Tesmer, pretty soon I won’t be able to learn about DIY de-stress products anymore. I guess I’ll never be able to make bath bombs.” In that moment, I felt I had failed her. The goal of genius hour is to awaken student passions and develop a culture of risk takers as they share their interests. I felt I had failed her because her definitions of genius hour, I inferred, was that it is a single event that takes place for one hour every Friday. That for one hour, once a week, is the only time she can be insanely passionate about the topic of her choice. I followed this student to her table and pulled up a chair beside her.

“Emma,” I said, “one of my newest interests is sketchnoting.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I see you do it all the time. You show us some of your sketches during genius hour.”

“What would happen if the only time I sketchnote was from 1-2 PM on Fridays? How would that make me feel?” I asked her.

“Uh... that would be pretty sad. You would probably want to do that more often.”

“Exactly! And I do all the time! In fact, I did some last night and this morning.”

As our conversation continued, I opened the app I use to sketch on my iPad, Paper 53, and flipped through a few of my sketchnotes. I showed her the one I was working on this morning from a book that I’m reading called The Innovator’s Mindset by George Couros, and I pointed to the area that shows a box, and springing from it, it says, “Empowerment beyond a single event.”

“Emma, I hope that when you leave Woodridge, or even when you leave school today, that you know you can learn about your topic at any time... in any place! And if someone says to you, 'Thank you for making me this bath bomb, why does this help me relieve stress?' that if you don’t know, you can say, 'Hmmm, I don’t know why that works... yet.' Can you say that for me?”

“I don’t know why they relieve stress... yet!”

Her smile was wider and her eyes glimmered through her glasses in a way I hadn’t seen... yet. In that moment, I could see that what I saw was failure in understanding led to an amazing opportunity for learning.

Here's my sketchnote in progress that I showed to Emma: