Welcome to Season 4, episode 14 of Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers.

I'm your host Angela Watson and I'm here to speak life, encouragement, and truth

into the minds and hearts of educators and get you energized

for the week ahead. Today I'm going to be working with A.J. Giuliani to share

some thoughts on how Genius Hour can transform your student's motivation levels and ignite their

creativity. Visit truth for teachers.com to get the blog post, links to recommended resources,

and to share your thoughts on the show.

So Genius Hour is a movement in schools that allows students to explore their own passions.

The concept for Genius Hour is derived in part from the idea of 20% time.

So this is Google's work structure for its employees.

They're allowed to spend 20% of their time on projects that they design and are interested in.

So the idea is that when people are allowed to work on things they care about, their motivation

for the job as a whole will increase.

So that's sort of the idea with Genius Hour as well.

Empower kids to uncover their passions and skills and strengths.

They're genius, if you will, and their motivation and creativity and

achievement will then increase across the board. What I wanted to do here on the

show is to bring you the best of Genius Hour. I wanted to share what the most

effective teachers are doing in this area and how they're doing it so that you can

learn from their experiences. So I've invited A.J. Giuliani to share his

observations. You may remember A.J. from being a guest on Truth for

Teachers back in season 1 episode 10. He was here talking about how to overcome frustration due to constant change.

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