Yesterday our class was given the opportunity to visit Kindergarten teacher Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt at George Jay Elementary, where she has taught for 6 years. Mrs. Bathurst Hunt’s teaching philosophy is based around inquiry-based learning. She encourages her students to uncover what’s important to them by asking questions, and using tools and strategies that allow them to follow their passions. Because her students are Kindergarten-aged, she uses a very guided, scaffolded approach to inquiry-based learning. Rebecca stresses the importance of creating conditions that support questions and curiosity (humans are innately curious). She uses various materials and stations (such as the Wonder-wall) around her classroom, and books like Ada Twist Scientist to create these conditions, as without this curiosity, inquiry-based learning is very hard! Another thing she does is begin lessons/assessments/one-on-one check-ins with questions. For example, with a math lesson she might ask “If you walk outside, what patterns would you see?” She took us through the various types of inquiries, and expelled the myth that inquiry necessarily means that students have to pose all questions (as with a free inquiry).  She uses a gradual release approach, which starts with a very structured inquiry and progresses to give students more freedom – but only when they’re ready. She has only progressed to the free inquiry stage once in her 6 years at George Jay, spending most of her time in the “shallow” end of the pool (see pic above). This is because, without a strong base of literacy skills, it is hard to inquire freely. That said, a structured inquiry can still be very powerful. As for starter inquiry questions, she suggests questions like “Who am I?” or “Why am I me?” that are posed in a circular, rather than linear, sense (i.e. identify names, families, traditions, lands, etc.). After that, ways to honour questions include tactics called provocations – Wonder-walls, stations around the room, walking field trip, artifacts students bring in. She also explained that there are always 3 questions in provocations: what do you see. what do you know, and what do you wonder. I thought this was a valuable field trip, and I look forward to implementing some inquiry-based learning into my classroom!

P.S. Check out the “Kindness Ninjas” movement and the book “Ordinary Mary’s Extraordinary Deeds” to explore random acts of kindness and their effects with students!

More pictures from our visit:

Today in class we had good discussions about guest speaker Jessie Miller and our visit to PSII. Afterwards, we got down to a topic that I had been avoiding until now: Trello. I have nothing against the digital tool, it’s just that I saw exploring it as one more thing to do when I already had a lot on my plate. That said, up to this point in school I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants when it came to assignments. I’ve constantly been surprised by due dates because I haven’t really been keeping track, and have done a fair bit of last-minute scrambling as a result. So looking at Trello in today’s class was timely. A busy November is approaching, so I’ve decided to finally make use of the tool. I’ve begun adding assignments to my lists and calendar. Another thing I did was add the app to my phone. This way, I can add inquiry ideas or assignments to my to-do list when I’m away from my computer, thereby staying up to date while avoiding having to spend big amounts of time updating it. I look forward to learning more about Trello, exploring and utilizing the built-in inquiry tools, and determining whether or not it will work for me! See below for a tutorial:

Today, we also looked at Photoshop and Illustrator, industry leaders in graphic software. Photoshop is a pixel-based software option (little dots make up the images) and Illustrator is a vector-based software option (images are based on mathematical models that can be manipulated on the screen). I didn’t get to spend any time with either software, as I need to download Photoshop onto my computer, but it looks like a user-friendly tool. We also looked at PowerPoint (and the related tool SmartArt), a tool that is great for creating slide shows. But that’s not all it’s good for! Everything you create on PowerPoint can be exported as a picture or, if you hit ‘save-as’, you can choose to convert files to a bunch of different types (jpeg, etc.). If you don’t want to pay for these tools, there are free options out there, such as GIMP (like Photoshop) and Pixler (like PowerPoint). Needless to say, I have a lot of useful teaching tools to explore. See below for Photoshop and PowerPoint tutorials:

Last, we looked at some cool apps for the phone, such as Prisma (uses AI to turn photos into works of art), MirroLab (applies kaleidoscope effect tp photo), comica (makes picture look like it’s from a comic book). We also looked at BryanMathers.com, a creative commons site with a lot of cool images to choose from! (https://bryanmmathers.com/)

I had a great time visiting the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry yesterday. The high school, which has just under 100 students, replaces the traditional model, wherein subjects are separated neatly into blocks, with an interdisciplinary, inquiry-based model. Essentially, on day one students arrive at the school and begin to generate questions they’d like to answer. What may start as a single question often branches into many. These questions then become the foundation of their curriculum over the course of a school year. There is no formal homework, though as school founder Jeff Hopkins notes, students end up doing more work out of school than the average high school-er because they are engaged in emergent learning that they are genuinely passionate and curious about, and that they possess a great deal of agency over. According to Hopkins, staff manage to cover about 85-90% of the BC curriculum with any given student. This is thanks in part to the fact that teachers “nudge” students. That is, if they have gaps in what they are learning (i.e. if they are killing it at mathematics but not reading much) a teacher might have a conversation with them about perhaps picking up a little more non-fiction. The learning is all very collaborative and conversational, rather than being based around conventional, lecture-based interactions between teacher and student. The daily school schedule is a rich one, with students being offered periods in jam band practice, Japanese, baking, or creativity, among many other topics. A student will, on average, attend around 2 seminars a day, with the rest of the day being dedicated to their inquiry-based learning. In the brief time I was there, students were working on math with instructors one on one or in small groups, playing video games they designed, creating art, baking muffins, working quietly or immersed in a din of noise, and practicing guitar. The variety of focus was impressive, and I enjoyed the unique atmosphere the school offered. Jeff Hopkins made a convincing case that the inquiry, emergent model is feasible province-wide, based on factors including the costs of running such a school, the teacher to student ratio, and the benefits/salary/pension options available to instructors. As for the students,  says Hopkins, the effectiveness of such a model for students is proven in the results. Students are clearly prepared for life and learning after high-school, he says. Former students have gone on to accelerated entry at UVic, careers in neuroscience, and business start-ups. Overall, I found the whole thing very inspiring, though one thing I didn’t quite agree with was the idea that this school model would work for all students. Sure, maybe it is working for all or most of the students attending PSII today, but perhaps this is because the school is drawing kids who already possess the characteristics necessary to functioning well within its structure (or lack thereof). I imagine that to thrive at a school like PSII, a student would need to have a healthy degree of self-regulation, curiosity, and drive to learn. For some students, more structure might be needed. That said, I’m with Jeff Hopkins when he says that the single-course approach to learning is (often, in my opinion) the end to inquiry-based earning. For many students, as soon as you say “here’s the course”, they say “OK, what do I need to do to pass/get an A this course.” I know this was, and still is to a large extent, the unfortunate way I thought about most of my learning (or lack thereof) at university. Nevertheless, I think the important thing is to realize that different people learn in different ways. It’s important to give learners options, and I think it is great that a school like PSII exists. I think more students and societies in BC and around the globe would benefit greatly if more schools like this existed.

Below: I wish someone had asked me this when I was in high-school!

This past Friday we had a guest speaker come into class by the name of Jessie Miller.  Jessie, who has a fascinating background with the Vancouver PD in both their bait car and sex crimes units, now runs his own company, Mediated Reality. He travels around the world educating people on how to safely, and not so safely, navigate the world of social media and the internet. What I as a future teacher took most from his talk was the fact that educators are professionals who face a great amount of responsibility (and pressure) when it comes to our presence on social media and the internet in general. We cannot afford to forget a very important point that Jessie made: every product on the internet has a bi-product. That “private” video you tagged some friends in and sent out on Instagram? Yeah, someone used a third party app to share it. Now it’s out for everyone to see. That Snapchat account you “deleted”? Yeah, that still exists…and Snapchat still has all your videos – even the ones you deleted because they weren’t up to par. As teachers, it is important for us to carefully monitor our networked connections. That is, we must be very aware of who we let in to our social networks (think of the story of the guy with the bad back who live-streamed his day of skiing…his insurance guy saw that, and he was fined $200,000 and charged with fraud). It’s so easy to contaminate our security of self because we neglect to maintain our social channels. The point is not to make sure you can get away with cheating or lying. The point is that, as teachers, people (parents, employers,etc) will inevitably be looking into our internet presence and social media accounts to suss us out. It only takes one look  Google search of “teacher fired social media” to become very acutely aware of what can go wrong in this line of work. So we must be mindful of what we put out on the internet, and of who we let into our online worlds. One initial step I have personally taken to protect myself is to set my Instagram account to ‘private’. I know this provides minimal protection, but at least now I have some control over who sees what I post. It is also important to stay informed. As teachers, we must understand the school expectations and policies of the employers surrounding social media, balance our personal lives with professional expectations, facilitate an open dialogue of usage with students and colleagues, understand social media culture, develop empathetic and ethical users, and understand the value of information. Taking it upon ourselves to stay informed on these issues is so important because, as Jessie Miller put it, the internet is like a bathroom with glass doors: the privacy found within is largely an illusion.