Tag Archives: inquiry

The best questions

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There is a cliche saying that, ‘There is no such thing as a dumb question.” Tell that to a teacher who has just started an engaging discussion in a class and a kid undermines the flow of the conversation with a dumb, often unrelated question. The reality is that questions have innate and even measurable value and there is depth and quality to good question asking.

Think about how important good questioning is in the new world of AI. We need not look far on social media these days to find a post about how to generate intelligent prompts… intelligent questions, well posed, and designed to give you back optimum responses. Design the right question and you increase the chances of an ideal answer.

What’s the best way to promote good questioning in schools? How do we teach ‘Asking good questions?’

At Inquiry Hub we have students design their own inquiries. They take a course developed around the students figuring out what their inquiry question is, then answering it. And they don’t do this once, they do this several times over the year for their first two years, then in Grade 11 they design a full year course.

All the while, students are asking questions, then seeking answers. It’s the practice of asking the questions and not just seeking the answers that makes this process special. They aren’t just asking questions Google or AI can produce answers to. They are not answering a question the teacher asked. They are forming the questions and thus the direction of the learning.

You don’t start asking better and better questions just by answering other people’s questions. You don’t ask better and better questions without practicing forming the questions yourself. Students need to be designing the questions. Because if they are only in charge of answering them, there will be tools and upcoming technologies that will find the same or better answers, faster. The future innovators of the world will be better at writing the best questions, not just answering them.

Authentically empowered

In a recent post. Process, product, and purpose, I shared that there are some teachers coming to learn about our self-directed, inquiry based school. And that our students will be planning and presenting to these teachers. I wanted to expand a bit on the process.

One of our teachers shared this diagram with the students to help them:

Then yesterday they pulled me into their meeting to ask a few questions, (the teacher I mentioned above was teaching or he would have joined us too). The students asked me what my vision for the presentation was.

I said I would like it to be story based. That there are two stories to tell:

1. What’s the experience of a student – both their experience in a school day, and moving from Grade 9 to Grade 12.

2. What is their story? How can they share their personal stories of doing progressively more challenging inquiries?

I also made sure to ask questions about how they would do this and not just make suggestions. My talk with them was a discussion not a one-way sharing. They invited me to the conversation. My final suggestion was that I knew what they were planning was going to answer all the questions the educators asked in advance… So rather than addressing those questions directly, which would disrupt the flow of their narrative, they should end the presentation with a slide of their questions and ask if they missed anything or needed to answer any of them with more depth. They liked this idea as a way to start off their Q&A at the end.

That’s all the direction they got. I was in the room with them for about 15-20 minutes. They will create the presentation and they will want to show it to us before presenting. We won’t have to ask them to see it, they will ask us for feedback and input. That’s part of the process they’ve learned. Further to this, there are 6 of them and we didn’t pick a leader, we didn’t tell them how to organize themselves or the presentation. I did mention that the presentation should be cohesive and not look like 6 different presentations, but I gave no examples of what I meant by this. They didn’t ask, they understood.

If these were a group of Grade 9’s & 10’s we would have scaffolded this a bit more, but these four Grade 11’s and two Grade 12’s are now seasoned presenters. At least one of them will inject some humour into the conversation, any one of could will ‘wow’ the guests with the depth of their inquires, all of them will be incredible ambassadors.

And one final note: none of them are doing this for extra credit. All 6 of them are coming in on a professional development day when all their peers are off school, and they are doing this voluntarily. Why? Because we asked. Because they get to design it, and because they know they go to a pretty unique school and they want to share their story. If they didn’t get the chance to be authentically empowered in this way, it would have been unlikely that the first 6 students I asked all agreed to volunteer. They are six awesome ambassadors, sharing their stories, in their own way, and still meeting the goals of the presentation.

Our guests are going to have a great experience learning about our school from our students, while we will be in a room next door doing our own professional development.

Process, product, and purpose

I love this quote from David Jakes:

“Design creates useful things. Much has been written by various educators about valuing process over product, but in the real world, people create things. It’s easy to value process over product when the product is a grade or points on a test. In your classroom, shift from a transactional approach to a design-based transformational one where the product has value and meaning to students and has the potential to impact intellectual growth, spark personal development, or contribute to improving the human condition.”

There is a lot of talk about process over product. However this comparison is built on a false dichotomy. It’s not about one over the other, rather it’s process with the purpose of producing a product.

For example, when looking at design thinking, we start with empathy for the end user. The final product is the goal, it’s the purpose we are designing for, but the process of design thinking is the journey we go on.

So, it’s not process over product, it’s process with purpose. The final product is important, be it a presentation, an app, a business or business plan, a play, or a piece of art. How you get there is important too. Understanding the purpose, having a real reason to produce a final product is the reason to go through the process.

What’s exciting is having students learn, value, and be motivated to go through the process to get to that final product. That’s a shift from a more traditional test, or a cookie-cutter assignment where everyone produces an identical final product. Instead the students are part of the process, and understand the purpose of getting to the final product… which they have constructed or co-constructed.

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Here is a specific example: There are a couple educators from the Northwest Territories coming to visit us at Inquiry Hub. They are heading this way to see Trevor Mackenzie on Vancouver Island, and he recommended they come visit our school. Unfortunately the only day they can come is a professional development day when there are no kids at our school. So, I asked 6 kids if they would be willing to come in and present to these teachers.

Once they agreed, I sent this in an email to the teachers coming to visit:

“As an FYI, I’ll be handing over the presentation fully to the students, they will design what it looks like. With the design thinking model in mind, the big question is “What does the end user want/need”… so, please give me a short write-up of what you are looking for.

They will give you the shape of our day, what the student experience is like, but beyond that what do you want to get out of the visit? Whatever you share is exactly what I’ll be sharing with them to prepare with.”

Our students will design the presentation, they will understand the purpose of their final product, and while the process is important, and while they have had a ton of practice producing great presentations, they know that delivering a good final presentation to an authentic audience is what will matter in the end.

It’s not one over the other, it’s process for the purpose of a good final product.

The secret sauce of iHub – Time and Space, and Pace

Inquiry Hub (iHub) is a small school that runs more like a specialty program than a school. The backbone of the program (besides some awesome and innovative educators) is two courses we wrote: Foundations of Inquiry 10 – BAA Course 2018 &  & Foundations of Inquiry 11 – BAA Course 2018. Large high schools have a multitude of elective offerings that students can take, and we can’t offer them with our small teaching staff. Instead, Grades 9 & 10 take these two courses and then in Grades 11 & 12 students do IDS, Independent Directed Studies, where they develop their own year-long course.

Here  is a student, Thia, describing her inquiries, her ‘electives’, at our school:

You can see other unique projects on our student page.

I’ve been doing some reflection and our inquiry courses are necessary, but they not the secret sauce of our school. The secret sauce has two main ingredients: ‘Time and Space’ and ‘Pace’.

  1. We create the time and space for students to work on projects that they want to work on. Student are not ‘in front’ of a teacher who is ‘in front’ of the room all day. They have time and space to work independently and in groups. We create multidisciplinary projects and use an adapted version of scrum project management to get required content out of the way so that students have more time to work on projects they want to work on. They get the time and space to follow their passions and interests while at school.
  2. We provide support for students to help them maintain a good pace. The most important trait a student needs to be successful at our school is that they are self-directed learners… they know how to use their time well. However, most Grade 8 students don’t come fully pre-loaded with these skills, (in fact many adults lack these skills). So, teachers work as a team and our student services teacher connects with any students that are behind on work. She works with students to help them build in strategies that help them keep up and stay on top of work. This is essential in a school where students can have up to 50% of their school day without a teacher in front of them, directing their work/tasks.

Yes, the inquiry process is important. Yes, we can talk about their mindset and look at how we examine failure, but when I really think about what makes Inquiry Hub tick (again, besides the hard work of great teachers) I think that giving students the time and space to explore their interests while supporting them in keeping up a good pace, is what the school is really all about.

Lack of integration not information

We have access to more information than we could ever use. The sum of knowledge available to us is far beyond anyone’s comprehension. Creativity and ingenuity do not come from more knowledge but rather two kinds of integration:

1. Integration of understanding.

There is a difference between understanding how an ocean wave works, and knowing when to catch a wave when surfing or body surfing. There is a difference between studying covalent bonds and understanding how two chemicals will interact.

2. Integration of fields of study.

A mathematician who sees poetry in a series or pattern of numbers. An engineer who sees an ant nest and wonders what they can learn about airflow in buildings.

In this day and age, lack of information is seldom the problem, but lack of integration is.

For schools, integration means getting out of subject silos, and thinking about cross-curricular projects. STEM and STEAM education, and trying to solve hard problems without a single correct answer. Integration of curriculum, inquiry learning, iterations, and learning through failure by hitting roadblocks that require out-of-the-box thinking and solutions.

Integration comes from challenging experiences that require base knowledge in more than one field. So, while knowledge and information are necessary, information is not sufficient without integration of ideas from other subjects and fields. The learning really begins where subjects and concepts intersect… and where learning across different fields is meaningfully integrated.

Undershooting Your Potential

“If you’re always right, you’re not learning.

If you’re never failing, you’re not reaching.

The objective is to be right. The objective is to succeed.

But if you’re always winning, you’re undershooting your potential.” ~ James Clear

I’ve written about this as it relates to school a number of times… but I like this slant of ‘undershooting potential’. Our school system is filled with smart students who know exactly what to do to get ‘A’s. They jump the provided hoops, they strive for the 95%, rather than 88, or 90. They complain to the teacher about the 96% because they want 98. They know how to play the marks game, and yet they are nowhere near their potential.

No, I’m not saying that their potential is actually 100%… I’m saying the entire system allows them to underperform. They do a dance to earn an extra 2-3%, they read and re-read the criteria to make sure they hit all the targets, they spend an extra hour editing their work. But that work is nowhere near their potential. They are doing work that shows their answer is right. They are proving they can succeed at the task. They are winning at the good marks game, but they are undershooting their potential.

They are answering the same questions as their peers, they aren’t developing their own questions.

They are responding to questions that have a clear and definitive answer, they aren’t trying to solve complex problems with no clear answer.

They are following textbook experiments with pre-defined procedures which have been replicated thousands of times with the same results, they aren’t testing their own unknown variables.

They aren’t trying something epic and failing. Back in 2009, in a post called, Chasing the ‘A’, I quoted Bud Hunt,

“In no way am I suggesting getting good grades is a bad thing; that would be foolish. Getting good grades is not the problem. Allowing grades to dictate one’s life is.

Grades don’t guarantee success.

Passion + Determination + Positive Attitude = Success

I’ll give you an A if you transform the world.”

When you chase marks, good marks are the goal. Many students can play that game without really hitting their potential. The problem isn’t wanting good grades, these are still needed to pursue future dreams. The problem is a system where students always succeed without knowing what their potential is. I’ve said before that this is an injustice:

Every student will encounter failures later in life, ‘in the real world’, so if we don’t challenge them in school, we have not given them the tools to face adversity later on. The question we have to ask ourselves is, “Are we challenging students enough, so that they are maximizing their learning opportunities?” 

The pursuit of an extra couple percent on a cookie-cutter assignment with uniform cookie-shaped answers is a system designed to allow students to undershoot their potential.

Students need to design their own learning challenges, and learn to fail and to overcome those failures along the way.

The Resilience of Students

We had our final PAC meeting of the year last night for Inquiry Hub. At the end of the Principal’s Report I did a quick ‘Thank You’ to parents, students, and teachers. One thing I mentioned when I talked about the students was resilience. I am so impressed with how resilient students were this year.

We’ve had students deal with family hardships that no kid should have to deal with. We’ve had students who have had their own struggles that they need to face. We’ve had students who have struggled previously that have stepped up and found ways to be more successful. These students are especially resilient, and may not even realize it.

We’ve also had many students who have come to school every day and just made the most out of this year. In many respects it has been a challenging year, one where things did nothing go as expected. But students have come together and created community. They have supported each other. They have found ways to thrive.

And they’ve learned so much! I’m absolutely impressed with some of the inquiry projects that were done this year. And when I’ve watched student presentations, I’ve seen slides that are so well put together that you would think they were going to a design school. They aren’t just putting information on a page, they are conveying a coherent story. While this is usually something we consistently see with seniors, this is now something that we are seeing at every grade.

And students are committed to helping each other. They have come together and showed how much they care for one another, and supported each other. The examples I can think of are plentiful, but also a little too specific to share here without asking permission. The point being that during a global pandemic, when I’d expect to see more individual concerns for student well being, I’ve instead seen resilient kids coming together to help each other.

We don’t always give kids the credit they deserve. They are amazingly resilient and at a time when many people are dealing with hardships greater than they normally have to face, our students, our kids, have been dealt a challenging school year and have made it through this year surprisingly well.

I can’t wait to see what these kids do when we are able to provide them a full school experience next year… it’s something I really look forward to. I’m already excited about what September will bring.

Voice and choice

This was my Facebook memory from 3 years ago:

Spent well over 15hrs at work today and came home totally pumped! Students rocked their presentations at our open house tonight.

The whole event exceeded my expectations, starting with about 240 people coming (more than I had reservations or seats for), and ending with students interviewing each other with questions from the audience.

It is simply amazing what student’s can do when they are given voice & choice, and they are provided with time to explore their passions and publicly share them.

Congratulations to our Inquiry Hub students, you were amazing school ambassadors today!

I’ve been thinking and writing about giving students choice, voice, and an authentic audience for over a decade now. And, I’ll always remember this night as the night I really saw it fully come to life.

Everything about this open house went amazing. The only challenges where parking, and adding more seats to the gym. The students did 90% of the planning and executed a seamless event with perfect sound and incredible presentations that opened people’s eyes to what’s possible when students feel empowered in a school.

The best part of the night was watching students interviewing students about their inquiry projects. Our students got to share what kinds of projects they do, designed by them, to follow their passions and interests as part of their school day. This is the real strength of what we do at Inquiry Hub.

There are students just like ours in every school. The difference is, in many other schools, students spend their days following a pattern of going class to class and doing what the teacher tells them to do. Yes, some of those things teachers ask them to do are amazing. But students seldom get a part of their day to choose what they want to work on. Students seldom get to design their own learning on a topic of their choice.

What we’ve learned as educators at Inquiry Hub is that to do this, students need scaffolding and support, working on progressively bigger projects. Students need assistance with time management and being self directed. And students need to try, fail, learn, and grow.

Whenever I hear a senior student at Inquiry Hub talk about their projects, they talk about being fearless learners who aren’t afraid to fail along the way. They will often do this while telling a story about something others would consider a huge success, but to them there was still more to do, or aspects of the project not yet achieved. This resilience only comes when students feel they have voice and choice in their learning, and this open house three years ago told me that we were finally achieving the kind of student empowerment we were hoping to achieve when we started the school.

Students following their passion

Last year I didn’t update the students page on the Inquiry Hub website. The past couple weeks I’ve added projects by Senn and Miró, and I’ll add more next week. One of the best things about Inquiry Hub Secondary is getting to see students work on passion projects that they decide on, and that they design their learning around.

Students projects come to life when students get to follow their passions and interests. If you’d like to learn more, we have a website for educators. Even here, you will hear student voice. Soon we will have a digital open house. Students are working on both advertising and content for this event.

We are small, and agile, (and have students working in scrums – more on this later). We have educators who are passionate about what they do and focus on supporting our students. And we have self-directed students who are still taking all the required courses for graduation, and also working on projects they want to work on.

Visit our student page or our educator page to learn more.

More than academics

Last night we did a livestream of iHub Annual, a yearly celebration that includes presentations, awards, and our Grad. It was one hour long, but it took a couple hundred hours of work to put together, including running the social distancing grad celebration a couple nights before. It didn’t go perfectly, there were a few kinks, but overall it went very well! Our awards at our school are minimal: Leadership & Community service, inquiries, and the Grade 12 ‘Spirit of Inquiry’ Award, for the grad or grads who exemplify what it means to combine leadership/community and also produce amazing inquiry projects.

Highlighting the service to our community (the school or greater community) is something that makes me appreciate what schools do beyond academics.

It’s interesting to think of how remote learning has interrupted the feeling of community, but we still try to bring kids together. One of our teachers started a watch party of the livestream on Teams, and going to check out the chat conversation afterwards was heartwarming. The students watching were complimenting the student performances, congratulating the award winners, and sharing in the celebration of the night. It really was powerful.

This morning a video, Numb – a short film by Liv McNeil, was shared with me:

While remote learning works for some, for others it just isn’t school. I think about how much of what we highlight in our year-end celebration has to do with community, compared to a focus on academics… and it really makes me think about how much more of school is about belonging, and well-being, and community. That isn’t to say academics isn’t important, it’s just that school does so much more than give students final marks on a transcript.