PBL: Let's Get Deep With It
A few years ago (I think it was before my third year of teaching), my district brought in a presenter who kicked off a PD day by talking about project-based learning and Genius Hour. It has stuck in my mind as one of (sadly) the few PD presentations that I actually felt applied in my classroom, and that year, after a few emails back and forth with the presenter, I took the leap into trying a Genius Hour unit with my students. On the end-of-year reflection form that I asked all of my classes to compete, Genius Hour was almost universally declared as the highlight of students' time in my class. From that point on, I made Genius Hour a consistent part of my curriculum plans, and it continued to be the most well-remembered part of students' years. In simplest terms, Genius Hour comes originally out of a practice at Google, where developers were allowed to spend 20% of their time working on 'passion projects' (I've also heard Genius H)our referred to as '20-time...