Tag Archives: culture

‘True Student and Teacher Agency’ – Podcast

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A huge thank you to Dean Shareski, who interviewed me for ‘The Canadian – Ed Leadership Show’.

Here is the description and contents time stamps:

Principal Dave Truss of Inquiry Hub and Coquitlam Open Learning as he discusses revolutionary approaches in education, student agency, and personalized, student-centered learning environments. Gain insights into the challenges and triumphs of running innovative educational models that support self-directed, passionate learners. Explore the impact of technology and AI in modern classrooms, and learn about fostering both student and teacher autonomy for effective teaching. Hear personal reflections on the importance of mentors, lifelong learning habits, and discover local hiking treasures like Bunsen Lake.

00:00 The Drum Set Decision
00:59 Defining the Ideal School
01:40 Introducing Principal Dave Truss
03:01 A Day in the Life of Principal Truss
03:47 The Birth of Inquiry Hub
05:10 Student Projects and Independent Studies
06:14 Collaborative Learning and Student Agency
09:09 Challenges and Opportunities in Alternative Education
17:55 Teacher Autonomy and Professional Development
21:20 The Evolution of Innovation and Technology in Education
29:00 Reflecting on Teaching Challenges
29:10 Embracing Technology in Education
30:18 Student Presentation Skills
31:15 The Role of AI in Learning
32:14 Teacher Comfort Zones
33:29 Leadership and Technology Integration
39:31 Balancing Leadership and Management
44:51 Personal Reflections and Advice
47:03 Hobbies and Interests
51:28 Hidden Gems in Coquitlam

Here is Dean’s LinkedIn post description:

I’m very excited to share this episode with my long time friend and colleague Dave Truss. Dave is the principal at the Inquiry Hub and Online Learning schools in School District No. 43 (Coquitlam) What he and his team have created is pretty special. Shout outs to Dave Sands and Stephen Whiffin who he credits for mentoring and leading this work as well.

Full episodes here:
🔵Apple
🟢Spotify
🔴Youtube

Thanks for the conversation, Dean. 🙏

(Excerpt video clip on fostering agency, on LinkedIn.) 

Building Community

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It takes thought and intentional action to build community in a classroom or a school. The chances of it happening organically are small, and even if it does build this way, it is likely to be uneven. Community building takes effort, it takes vision or at least cooperation in a focused direction… And even then it isn’t guaranteed.

It’s easy for students to form small groups and these groups can be open and accepting or they can be closed and cold. The art of community building is creating scenarios or activities where students must work together outside of these naturally forming groups. But that’s just the first step. The next step is to ensure that these scenarios or activities are ones where these organized groups can and will find success working together.

The next step is around expectations. It’s about explicitly showing and helping groups work together through conflict. Whether students or adults, there are times when we need to work with people who are a bit challenging to work with. They can be bossy, lazy, distracted, distracting, and even annoying. Not everyone is easy to work with. How is conflict handled? Are groups left alone to sort it out for themselves? Or is problem solving both provided and explicitly taught?

In teacher organized groups, are roles clearly defined? This can be done by the group, not just the teacher, but division of roles in a group help to provide the group with guide rails. This increases individual accountability and reduces the opportunity for conflict. And when groups of people can find mutual success in a project, that helps to build community.

Common goals, common practices, high expectations about how we treat each other, and planned opportunities to share common positive experiences all contribute to fostering and building good community. It doesn’t happen on its own. And if there’s one more thing that can help build community it’s food. Opportunities to eat together and celebrate together enrich the community’s familiarity and collegiality. Expecting community to build without consciously working to develop it will usually end in a disappointing way. And while the effort to build community may not always be rewarding, it is much more likely that the effort is rewarded far more than just expecting community to build organically.

Work ethic

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I sent my daughters a meme recently on instagram. It’s a guy buckled into the driver’s seat of a parked car and he’s hitting the passenger seat headrest with a side-fist. The caption reads:

“When your parents gave you work ethic instead of generational wealth.”

Both my kids have it. They are praised at work for doing an excellent job. They have always been that kid who gets asked to train someone coming up even though others have been at the job longer than them. And they take pride in doing an excellent job. It’s great to see them excel both at work and in the things they love to do.

With respect to my own job, education certainly is one of those fields where many people come into the profession with a solid work ethic. I see it time and again. My team really has some dedicated educators and support staff who show what a good work ethic looks like, and that has an incredible impact on the work and learning environment. It shines through in the pride people take in their work, and the praise they get for what they do.

I don’t think a good work ethic is innate. I think it is fostered and developed. I think it can be learned. I also think it can be contagious. Equally so, laziness can also be contagious. Years ago I worked on a factory floor for a soft drink company. My job was to feed a conveyor belt with crates of 12 used 750ml glass bottles to be washed and refilled. (You need to be a certain age to remember these bottles that out-date the plastic 2-litre ones.) This was a labour intensive job, with a fork lift driver bringing pallets of crates for two of us to unload.

When it was break time, another worker would relieve us one at a time, but this one guy, whose name I no longer remember, would send us both on break at the same time. It was a 15 minute break and he’d say, “take 20”, then he’d do the job of two people. I did this a couple times for my partner to take a quick washroom break, but I’d be huffing and puffing if I had to do it for 20.

This guy relieved us like this for almost a week, then our boss saw him and told him to stop. Not because he was going to hurt himself, but rather because he didn’t want the higher-ups to see that one person could do the job. The whole culture in the factory was ‘do the minimum’, ‘don’t show off’, ‘don’t do anything extra’. It wasn’t an environment I would have wanted to stay in any longer than the summer between school semesters. In fact, I didn’t go back the next year.

A good work ethic is often overlooked. It’s only when you come up against a bad work ethic in comparison that you begin to value what a good work ethic means to the culture of an organization. Remember to show value and appreciation to those around you with a good work ethic.

Digital distraction

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Last night we went out for a wonderful dinner. I’m the restaurant we had a booth next to a round table which had a mother and 3 daughters. I’d guess the kid’s ages to be about 7, 12, and 14. My youngest daughter was sitting next to me and whispered, “They are all on devices.”

When I looked, the 7 year old had an Anime video playing on her laptop, which was about 8-10 inches (20-25cm) from her face. The 12 year old had over-ear headphones on and was endlessly scrolling on social media. The 14 year old was opposite me and all I could see was that she had one earbud in, on the far side of her mom, and she was bouncing between drawing (she definitely had some art skills) and scrolling on her phone.

The whole table sat in what was mostly silence, eating slowly. This continued from the time they sat down until we left the restaurant.

My daughter then pointed out the table behind us where a boy, about 5, had his face over a tablet, his face lit up from the light off of it, since he was so close to it.

It’s the era of digital babysitting, digital distractions, but creating distraction from what? Mealtime, family time, conversation, social engagement? …All of the above.

I think this form of distraction is fundamentally changing the way we socialize and this will affect our sense of family, community, and culture.

What happens when our screens become more important than the people around us?

One world under God

Imagine a world where everyone who prayed believed that no matter what religion anyone practiced, that the higher being they prey to is The Creator. Can an all powerful God not manifest Him/Her/Itself in many ways to many peoples? Does this God need to share their understanding with every tribe, in every language, and in every culture identically? Would that even make sense?

If there is One God then could we not see the Good in all holy texts, and recognize our similarities? Recognize the kindness to strangers all these books profess? Recognize that living a spiritual life means spreading love and kindness rather than raising arms against our brothers, sisters, and other children of the same God?

If The Creator is the same creator, no matter the religion, then why would we be fighting? It can not be in God’s name. So it must be a weakness of our species that creates the hatred. It is the territorial animal in us that overpowers our humanity.

A spiritual, kind, and loving being does not attack fellow beings; does not send their children to war; does not treat children as pawns or collateral. Since religions can not bring our world together I have to wonder what can? What can bring our people, all of our tribes together?

I want to believe that we can see ourselves as a species that is kind. I want to believe that we can see ourselves as a species that is loving. I want to believe that we can see ourselves as a species that is peaceful. I want to believe that humanity is more powerful than our animal instincts and that we are wise enough to solve our problems without the need to kill our neighbours, here on this planet with so-called ‘intelligent’ life… that one God created.

To know, to think, to dream

“Savoir, penser, rêver.

Tout est là.” ~Victor Hugo

I saw this quote on a building in the city of Biarritz, in southern France. In English this translates to:

“To know, to think, to dream. That is all.“

This is such a beautiful phrase. I like that ‘know’ comes before ‘think’ and ‘dream’, this sets the imagination free from knowledge. It allows us to start with what we know then expand our thinking, our creativity… and that is all. That is what it means to be human. We are not just the sum of what we know, we are creative beings, designers, artists, admirers of creativity and beauty.

We have our own style, we develop our cultures, and then challenge the norms we create for ourselves, and adapt. We seek out entertainment, create and listen to music. We question our origins and seek new places to explore, and new discoveries that help us to know more… more about the the earth we live on, and the universe we live in.

“To know, to think, to dream. That is all.“

New norms needed

I was in a community of schools meeting yesterday morning, and it was quite insightful hearing some of the challenges that my colleagues are facing with respect to student behaviour. From elementary principals right up to high school, behavioural concerns of students has been concerning this year. Social-emotional dynamics are not as well managed by kids of all ages, as compared to just a few years ago.

Post-pandemic or endemic times are not the same as pre-pandemic times. Where this is most noted is in the social construct of what ‘normal‘ behaviour looks like. It’s different in Kindergarten classes when more students have been home with limited other-student interaction, especially when compared to a kindergarten class a few years ago where more than when 2/3rds of students had already spent 2-3 years in pre-school.

It’s different in middle schools where students can feel isolated not only in school, but also online. Or students showing behaviour that is usually something seen with much younger kids. High schools are noticing this too. Grade 12’s having social dynamic challenges normally seen with younger students, and behaviours that seem immature happening far more frequently.

We sometimes forget that ‘normal’ behaviour is learned. We don’t realize that an expected culture is no longer expected when it hasn’t been practiced for 2+ years. We aren’t just experiencing a blip in the norm, we are experiencing new norms, and if we don’t like what we see it’s going to take both time and effort to change. And if we don’t explicitly think about how we want things to change, and work on making those changes, then we probably aren’t going to see the results we are expecting or hoping for.

The exciting thing is that we don’t have to go back to how it used to be. The challenging thing is that we need to spend time developing the positive norms we want to see… Or we can get stuck just being reactionary to the negative behaviours we don’t want, but are happening while there is a void of positive norms being practiced.

The learning cliff

Whenever I am talking to new or potentially new employees of our online school I share the idea of a learning cliff. We all know about a learning curve… when you are learning something new, there is an effort you have to exert as you gain knowledge and learn how to use new systems and tools available to you. There’s a slow uphill climb to learn the new job. But some jobs have a few too many systems to learn just by doing things once. I call this the learning cliff.

In a new position you’ll inevitably get to a point where you don’t know how to do something and you need to ask for help: This is true for both the learning curve and the learning cliff… With the learning curve , you ask, you learn, and you don’t need to ask again. But in an organization where too many things are new, you try to absorb so much information at once that you don’t actually remember the help you got the next time you have to deal with the same situation… You asked, you got the help you needed, but you didn’t actually learn because your brain was taxed with too much new information to retain one more thing. So a few hours, days, or weeks later you have to ask the same question again.

You’ve left the learning curve and hit the learning cliff. I tell my new employees that with so many new systems to learn, we have all hit those cliffs and every one of us knows you will too. So, ask again. Ask a third time. We won’t judge. We remember hitting the cliff ourselves. We know you feel bad having to ask again when you feel you should know. We know you can’t, just like we couldn’t, remember everything and need to ask again. We expect it and want to assist you.

A learning cliff is not a scalable slope without help, so let us help you over the edge, and when you come back to the same issue, or a new one, and it’s still not a traversable slope… ask again. We are expecting it and happy to help.

Culture and kids

I was visiting the Philippines back in 2010, my kids were 8 and 10. We went to the beach and immediately they wanted to build sand castles with me. I spent about 25-30 minutes playing then told them I was going to sit with their mom for a bit. I’d had enough. They wanted me to play longer.

Then a family with a mom, dad, and 3 or 4 year old kid came and sat near us. The kid had a shovel and her dad had a spoon, and they started playing in the sand. We stayed on the beach for well over an hour, probably closer to 2 hours and that dad was on his hands and knees or squatting next to his kid playing in the sand the entire time. I think they were speaking Tagalog so I didn’t understand the conversations they weee having, but this dad was engaged with his kid the entire time. During that time, I played with my kids in the sand for another 20-25 minutes.

I remember telling my wife that this guy was making me feel like a crappy dad. I was amazed how his little girl was the center of his attention for so long. It makes me wonder about how our culture and our upbringing influences the raising of our kids?

Visiting Thailand around that same time we stayed for a few days in a resort with tree house rooms near a national forest. The first morning we went to breakfast and there was a makeshift playpen, for a kid who wasn’t quite walking age, near where we ate. When we arrived at the restaurant, the owner was sitting in the playpen with the kid. He left when another worker came to tend to the kid. Then later we saw his wife doing the same thing. We assumed it was their granddaughter. My wife asked if this was the case and we were told no. One of the cook’s mother’s was sick and couldn’t take care of her kid, and so she had to bring her baby to work… they were just all taking shifts when they could so the employee could do her job.

One of the best parts of travel is seeing how some cultures differ from our own, and appreciating that their lifestyles include little things that we can learn from. And I think you can learn a lot about people by watching how they care for their kids, and kids in their community.

Student led tours

After a long period without visitors to our school, we are slowly starting to get people visiting to learn more about Inquiry Hub again. When guests do the tour, I don’t go with them. I greet them, introduce them to a student, send them on their way, and encourage them to ask their tour guide and other students what it’s really like at the school. I’ll sometimes joke, like I did yesterday when I said, “Claire will show you around and after I leave you she can give you real dirt on the school.” Claire, in grade 11 and wanting to give tours since her no-visitor-mask–and-stay-separate-pandemic-grade-9-year, played right along, joking about how horrible it is to go to the school. Good for a laugh to break the ice and start the tour off relaxed.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t give Claire pointers to talk about, but there is no script. I want to make sure she talks about the inquiry courses, the supports provided, and the schedule, but I honestly don’t know exactly what Claire shared with the visitor. She gave her version of the school not mine.

And inevitably, whether it was Claire, or any of my previous guides, when the visitor comes back to the office, I hear what an amazing ambassador my tour guide was. I also encourage visitors to talk to other students about the school and their projects, and I know when they took my advice because they tell me they did ask, and how great our students are.

I had a similar experience as a visitor at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, and High Tech High in California. Both with engaged students, passionate about their schools, giving me the tours, and me talking to random students that would answer my questions.

The reality is that the tour would not be as good if I tried to provide the narrative. It wouldn’t be as authentic. Do the students miss sharing anything important? Probably. But visitors will ask questions, and learn what they need to, or they can ask me after the tour. But the magic happens when students are trusted to be the ambassadors and not just presenters… and when they are trusted to lead, without an adult present. After all, isn’t it their school?