Genius Hour Driving Questions for World Languages

I think one of the biggest problems my students had with Genius Hour this past semester was choosing a topic that would drive them. Sure, they picked things they were mildly curious about, but as I’ve said before, if you don’t feel like you’re getting away with something during Genius Hour, you’re doing it wrong.

And so I’ve resolved to spend more time on figuring out what they really need to be exploring, where their passions really lie, and then giving them the tools to share that passion with others in the target language. Because let’s face it, Genius Hour in the world language classroom should probably be less about breaking new ground than it should be about learning to communicate about topics that move them already. They need the prior knowledge of a familiar topic to build on, and the discovery is really more the language itself and the audience and resources that it opens up to them.

So my plan is to spend the first week of the new semester on a series of open-ended driving questions designed to get at what they would really enjoy studying. For addressing these questions, I’m going to try combining InfuseLearning with techniques I learned at #ACTFL13  in a session on organic language acquisition:

To this end, I have come up with a bunch of questions, grouped them, and decided on some basic verb vocabulary we’d need to discuss the responses:

What websites or type of websites do you like to see?

What type of videos do you like to see?

What TV shows or type of TV shows do you like to see?

What movies or type of movies do you like to see?

Vocabulary: sitios web, programas de tele, películas, te gusta, me gusta, le gusta, ves, veo, ve

Where do you go when you are not at school or at home?

You have $100: where do you use it?

Vocabulary: dónde, escuela, casa, tienes, cien dólares, vas, voy, va, usas, uso, usa