Tag Archives: Inquiry Hub

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.

Grades and university admissions

Today is report card day. I’ve looked them all over and I don’t think there are going to be any surprises for parents. A few positive bumps, a few dips, but overall pretty good results for students at our school. Further to this, I’ve only heard positive news from our grads about getting into the programs they want to get into. This last point, post high school admissions, is the only reason grades are really important… but I can spend hours telling you why marks shouldn’t be the only thing that matter.

I haven’t looked at the stats recently, but pre-covid stats about drop out rates during or after the 1st year at the top two universities in our province were 14% and 12%. I know some of these are students changing their minds, or other legitimate reasons, but I also know a large percentage of those dropouts are students who just couldn’t handle the change from high school. Most were probably straight ‘A’ students. They did well on all of their report cards. They were good at high school. They were good at giving the teacher what they wanted. They were good at test taking.

Then they head off to university. With no parents or teachers policing them, and no regular routines to follow, without after school activities that they used to fill their high school evenings with, there is suddenly a lot more responsibility to manage time. With professors not outlining assignments as clearly, or not providing samples of expectations, the work seems harder to manage and still get top grades. And for some, the freedom away from strict schedules is a chance to rebel a bit, and late nights don’t go very well with school work production and studying. There are as many variances to the reasons as there are students, but 12 and 14 percent drop out rates are a significant number when you consider the thousands of students who apply and don’t get into these top universities. Those are high percentages of top students not handling the transition.

Grades don’t tell the whole story.

What did students create? How did they build community? How did they manage their time? What does their portfolio look like? Portfolios aren’t just about art, they can be projects. It’s not surprising that a kid like this gets into a top music program in the country and wins awards, or when this kid gets into art school, or one of these kids gets into a small 40-student two year business program, and the other one gets into Mechatronics. It’s disappointing when a kid like this doesn’t get into the Ivy League school school he wanted to, but he still got into Computer Science at UBC, and  he didn’t drop out after his first year. None of these kids have or will drop out after a year, unless they decide they want to do something different.

All of these kids were ‘good at school’, but that wasn’t all that they were. They were students who had opportunities to work on their passions while in high school. They were students who had time in their schedule to decide what they were going to do, and they learned to manage that time… like they would have to at university. Not all of them were straight ‘A’ students, but all of them were successful students that got to demonstrate more than just good marks on tests.

To get into university my average was 73%. By the 4th year at my university, back in 1990, the average to get into the same general arts program was 81%. Had I been born just 4 years later my meager average would not have gotten me into my university of choice. Today, most popular programs at top universities demand an average well above 90%. But I have to wonder, how many of these high achieving students are going to drop out after a year? How many of them will have high school experiences that truly prepare them for the transition into these high stakes programs?

What other evidence should universities put weight on besides marks? I’d take a ‘B’ student with curiosity, drive, and a wide variety of interests over a straight ‘A’ student who fights for every 1/2 percent they can on a test. I’d take them in my university. I’d hire them at my company. I’d even be more likely to want them as a colleague or a friend. Grades should matter, they just shouldn’t be the only thing that matters, and the stakes on them shouldn’t be so high. Being a good student should also mean being a well rounded students, and that would improve the success rate of students finishing more than just one year at a university. When grades are used as the only measure to weed out students, many of the students being weeded out are exactly the students universities are wanting.

Grad Commencement Speech 2023

This was my speech at our Inquiry Hub Secondary Grad. As I mentioned a couple days ago, there were unexpected technical issue, and so I can’t share the video, and I’m just sharing text with slides below. The 4th and 5ht slides were gifs, but I’ve just included still photos. I enjoy writing a new speech each year, and this is my 8th one. While I didn’t share a title for it, it did have a title in my notes. Here is “Technology and Community”, shared Wednesday June 21, 2023 at Inlet Theatre in Port Moody, with the grads and families of Inquiry Hub Secondary School:

It was the summer of 1985.

I was 17, and I got to see a movie called Back to the Future when it was in the theatre, not streaming on Netflix. It’s a story about a boy named Marty who was the same age as me… and about the same age as our grads now. Marty went 30 years into the past and had all kinds of adventures and misadventures.

Then a few years later Back to the Future 2 came out, and this time Marty went 30 years into the future… all the way to October of 2015. That future he supposedly went to was almost 8 years ago now.

In Marty’s version of 2015 Nike had shoes with power laces that tightened themselves. There were 3D hologram advertisements, hoverboards, and of course, flying cars. While Nike has made a version of the power laces, we still have a way to go before any of these technologies are as accessible and pervasive as in Back to the Future 2’s version of 2015, and I’m not sure we’ll even get there by 2045?

It’s hard to imagine these things when personally, I’m still waiting for a phone battery that will last me a whole day.

I remember reading that we tend to overestimate the changes that will happen in the short term and underestimate the changes that will occur in the long term. That may be so, but what we define as short and long term now tends to be shrinking. I’m not sure we are going to see hovercrafts and flying cars circulating in our communities any time soon, but…

I do marvel at how fast technology is moving, and the world of Artificial Intelligence is quickly advancing from being good at playing board games and doing math, to doing some really interesting things.

We have AI tools that create amazing art,

write computer code,

and even write grad speeches… and while I wrote these words myself, ((really)), many of the visuals I’m sharing are the product of AI. My point though is that if I told you just 4 years ago, when our grads were in Grade 9, that we would have this technology before they graduated, you probably wouldn’t have believed me.

Our grads are headed into a world where, just in the last few months, job descriptions that have been the same for years are now being redefined. A world where they will probably get into automated cars that drive themselves. And a world where living to be 100 could be as common as living to 65 years old today.

I’ve worked for the same company for 25 years now… I am not sure many, if any, of our grads are headed on that same path. Times change. Technologies change. Jobs change. How we interact with the world changes.

But I hope one thing stays the same. I hope that our grads remain as kind, accepting, and caring as they are today. I hope that they find a community of people to grow old with that is as wonderful as they are… and remember, you are going to grow really, really old! One of the pleasures of working at a small school is getting to know students well, and getting to really see how students interact with each other in a quaint, caring environment. Our grads are fun, quirky, and unique. They want to do well in school and they are willing to work hard. For some of them this came easy. For others, they were initially dragged along by their peers and teachers, but they are ‘there’ now.

That’s the amazing thing about the journey through high school, it’s a hero’s journey. It’s not an easy path, it’s not supposed to be.

On an Inquiry Hub student’s journey through school, we ask them to do really challenging things… from Mr. Soiseth’s Philosophy classes, to cross-grade Shakespearian acting and filmmaking, to designing their own year-long courses. It’s not unusual for a student to spend significantly more time on an inquiry than they are expected to. And our students leave school doing more presentations in a year than most students do in their entire high school career. Even here we see the respect and kindness of our students, who make an excellent audience and provide considerate and thoughtful feedback to each other.

Technology can change us. It can change our careers. It can change our lifespan. It doesn’t have to change what kind of people we are, and how we treat one another. I’m proud of who our grads are today, and you should be too.

It doesn’t matter what job they end up with, if they will be driving flying cars, or buying their kids hoverboards in the future. What matters is that they will be a positive influence on their community. They will be thoughtful, kind, and considerate of others. They will be the kind of people you want to be around. And that, that is the highest compliment I can give them.

Honoured guests, parents, teachers, and students, I present to you Inquiry Hub’s esteemed and wonderful graduating class of 2023!

Grade 9 for a day

Today a group of Grade 8 students who will be joining our school next year are spending the day with us at our school. Our Grade 9’s have planned the day for them. Our school only takes a few students from each of our middle schools so students arrive at our school in September knowing very few other students.

While students will be nervous today, this event really breaks the ice for students when they join us in September. It allows them to arrive at their new school already knowing a bit more of their community, both students in their grade, and older students who have already welcomed they to our community.

It’s a long day for me because we also run an after school barbecue for parents followed by our Parent Advisory Committee meeting in the evening. But I love days like this. I enjoy seeing our students welcome other students to our school. It’s fun to see the nervousness of the new students fade away throughout the day. And it’s great to feed our community.

Last year we only ran this event for an afternoon, and we didn’t run it at all during the two covid years before that. So it’s nice to bring back the full tradition, and to provide this community event again. It adds to the welcoming feeling to our school, gives our Grade 9’s an authentic leadership experience, and gives our future students a great sense of our school community.

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.

Defining the Unconventional

Inquiry Hub is a very different school than a conventional high school. Students get a lot less direct instruction, they do a lot more group work and presentations, and they get time in their day to work on passion projects. These passion projects serve as their elective courses, and they get credit for doing them. And while we can’t offer the amazing array of electives courses students get in a large high school, students get to go in-depth on topics of interest in a way that they just don’t normally get to in a ‘regular’ high school.

Despite our grads moving on to programs like engineering and computer science, and despite acceptance to UBC, SFU, Emily Carr, BCIT, Waterloo, McGill, and other universities, colleges, and technical schools, we still get parents concerned that somehow their kids will be disadvantaged by going to our school.

Our kids transition to university very well, and do not struggle in their first year, unlike 12-15% of grads across the province that graduate high school successfully then don’t make it through their first year of university. But incoming parents are still worried that their kids won’t be prepared for university. The skills they learn in our school to self advocate, self-direct, and structure their own learning are exactly the skills student don’t get in far more scripted learning environments where the teacher tends to determine what students are doing for almost the entire day in a traditional block schedule.

Skills learned at Inquiry Hub not only help students when they get to university, but these skills also help students be more entrepreneurial, more innovative, and more prepared to be productive in a knowledge economy. Our students will prepare presentations for a midpoint in a project that would blow away what a team would do for a final project in another school, or even what a marketing team would do for a client pitch. Guests in our school are continually blown away by the confidence and professionalism of student presentations.

We are still iterating, we are still learning, we are still figuring out how to help students who struggle… but that’s part of what makes the school great. The environment is dynamic, flexible, and responsive. And students learn that learning is a process. They learn to share their learning in meaningful ways. And they learn to be productive members of a learning community. If that’s considered unconventional, we’ll just keep being unconventional.

Be invisible

Yesterday I said in a post about our school’s open house, “I have a saying I share with the tech crew which is, ‘It’s your job to be invisible’.”

A few years ago we had Alvin Law visit our school. When he arrived our tech crew set him up with a wireless microphone and had everything set up just as he specified. He did a truly amazing performance and after the show, after the tech crew helped take off the microphone, Alvin said to me, “Dave, what kind of a school are you running here? It feels pretty special.”

Then he said, “I present to multi-million dollar companies, like IBM and Microsoft, and I have never had a tech crew treat me so well. I’ve never had my sound work so well. I’ve had presentations where they are paying me a lot of money to present to 1,000 people and they can’t get my sound to work. There wasn’t a single issue with my sound today, it was perfect.”

That’s the sign of a good tech crew… they are invisible. When a microphone doesn’t work, people notice the tech crew. They are also noticed when a microphone is too loud, or there is feedback, or an off stage mic isn’t turned off, or when the lighting doesn’t actually light up the performers. When these things happen, the crew become part of the performance. When everything works as planned, they are invisible.

When a tech crew does their job well, they are invisible.

iHub Open House

Last night was Inquiry Hub‘s yearly Open House to promote our school and help Grade 8 students and parents learn a bit more about us. After 2 years of only hosting it online, it was wonderful to provide a face-to-face experience again. We had about 150-160 people join us at the school and about 60 follow along from home on our livestream.

I threw a little curveball into my part of the presentation when I asked a former student to come up and tell us about his experience moving from our school to university. I knew he might be coming to the event but I didn’t see him and ask him if he would say something until about 3 minutes before the show started.

He did a great job, and I knew it would be valuable for him to share this experience because as part of the presentation there was a video where a current Grade 9 asked a current Grade 12 if she felt prepared for university. But how is a Grade 12 to know when she hasn’t made the transition yet? So asking a student who made the transition and successfully graduated from Computer Science at UBC was, to me, a good thing to add to the show.

What’s neat about our school is that students present so often as part of their experience, I knew this student could share his experience with short notice and do an excellent job. And sure enough he did. That said, I also knew that I was causing panic for a few of the student organizers for going ‘off script’. I actually mentioned that at the start of my talk, before introducing our former student.

The pride that these students all take in their school is so high and the idea that I’d go rogue and change plans a bit was simply not part of the show. Still it went off well and the rest of the show went exactly as planned. That’s not by mistake, there were several rehearsals and presentations and technicals went as expected. I have a saying I share with the tech crew which is, “It’s your job to be invisible.”And indeed it was. More on that tomorrow, I’m just thrilled to say that our students did an amazing job not just with the presentation but with engaging with the audience afterwards, sharing some of their inquiries, and showcasing the kind of projects done at our school.

It was a special night!

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?

A piece of living history

Yesterday Jowi Taylor brought his Six String Nation presentation to Inquiry Hub. The guitar named The Voyageur is built with 64 unique pieces of Canadian heritage, and Jowi’s storytelling brings some of those pieces to life.

I first met Jowi, and Voyageur, a decade ago on a retreat to an ‘Unplugd‘ conference near Algonquin Park in Ontario.

In my ‘Thank you’ to Jowi at the end of his performance yesterday, I shared that he and I had met at this conference and that the first time I heard The Voyageur played was by Bryan Jackson, a teacher and now Vice Principal here in Coquitlam. Bryan sang an original song about a profound piece of graffiti written on a wall in Winnipeg. I shared how uniquely Canadian this was, and that the thing I love most about what Jowi has created is that the guitar is a piece of living history.

For many, history is in books, and places to visit, and items you can’t touch in museums. The Voyageur guitar brings Canadian history into schools and communities, it creates special memories for the people who touch and play it. It brings history to life. My student, Trevor, will always remember getting to play this guitar that has been touched by so many famous Canadians, and played by Canadian music legends across the country.

And like me, there will be students and adults in the audience that will remember the stories told by Jowi about how this amazing guitar was brought to life.

Here is my first memory of Bryan Jackson playing The Voyageur at Unplugd, back in the summer of 2012: “Graffiti”

Learn more about Jowi’s Six String Nation here.