Genius Hour is evolving at Dayton.
This year they introduced Genius Hour to all middle school students. In these classes, students are self-organizing teams and delivering their projects, of their own selection, through sprints.
The first term is almost over. The teachers are finding that some of the students are losing their focus. The original framework worked well to introduce the experience of Learning Cycles. But they feel that the class needs to be re-imagined if it is going to be continued for the spring term.
They have decided to continue and call the second term class "Advanced Genius Hour". In this new class, they will start to apply this learning framework to content areas. Each three-week sprint will focus on a project in a specific content area, five areas in all.
There will then be a 6th sprint, in an area chosen by the students.
The hope is that by developing these skills of self-directed learning to content areas, students will be better prepared, when they get to Dayton's high school, to take advantage of the new independent study classes. These classes are using a similar sprint-based learning framework.
In a sense, then, Dayton is creating a three-step on-boarding process for self-directed Agile Learning.