Tag Archives: Inquiry Hub

Presentation day

Yesterday was a day at school when many students were doing year-end presentations for their inquiries. In the morning I visited the Grade 9’s and watched the tail end of one presentation and then the full following presentation. In the afternoon I got to see several Grade 11 & 12 presentations. Overall, I was very impressed!

My biggest takeaways were first how confident the students were. We have created a great culture where presentations happen all the time and students demonstrate that they are comfortable in the front of the room. Also, student feedback is awesome. Students in the audience share genuine praise and feedback.

But the thing that really impressed me was the design of the presentations. The slideshows each had clear themes, and almost all of them were not typical to PowerPoint. They didn’t feel like students took a theme and plugged their slides into them. Rather, they had the look and feel of something designed by the students, and in many cases they did fully design every slide themselves… making sure to have continuity from slide to slide.

From grades 9 through 12 the slide design was better than almost any presentation we would have had at the school 5 or 6 years ago. The students also had a story line through their presentations. Good delivery, good design, good storylines, these students can really put together solid presentations. I could definitely learn a few things from them about creating and delivering a good presentation!

Perfection Paralysis

Most of us can’t imagine working on something for an hour or two then ripping it up or clicking ‘Select All’ and then hitting delete. But for students who are bitten by the perfectionist bug, it’s just something they do when what they’ve done doesn’t meet the high standard they place on themselves. They will miss a deadline because what they have written will only get them a low ‘A’, rather than a much higher one that they have their heart set on. They will have done 2 hours work on something they think will get them a 90%, then another hour and a half making it a 95%.

This is achievable for a perfectionist working on one project, but will absolutely bury them when they are trying to do this on 3 or 4 assignments simultaneously. The thing is, trying to tell a perfectionist something is ‘good enough’ is like telling a Golden Lab to save some food for later. It’s just not in their nature.

The message we try to give at our school, which has its fair share of perfectionists, is to choose your perfectionism. Don’t disregard it, but use it in some places and not in others. We do agile/scrum projects where part of the project is ‘defining done’ so that students can achieve tasks and move on, rather than spending too long on too many parts. We set challenging timelines where the focus is on completion rather than perfection.

It’s not about taking perfectionism away from a perfectionist, this is a skill many others need to learn. Instead, it’s about helping them learn to harness this skill without it consuming them. It’s about channeling perfectionism where it matters, on projects that matter, and not overwhelmingly on everything. It’s not a habit to break, it’s a skill to use when doing things where perfectionism makes a difference, rather than being something that consumes a kid with unrealistic stress and hours of wasted time.

Favourite question

Inquiry Hub is a school where students need to be self directed. A good portion of a student’s day is determined by the student. On any give school day students can have 1-3 hours where they are deciding what they want to work on. There is always work to be done for courses. There’s always a student chosen inquiry to work on. There’s always a distraction that can pull them away from their work, since they have full access to their laptops and the internet, and access to any other personal device they bring to school.

It’s a subject of a future post, but I’d love to develop a K-12 Inquiry Hub with a vision where it’s a school for every kid. But we get students at grade 9, and if they come to us without self-directed skills, and distractions prevent them from independently working and getting things done during their school day, or if they don’t self advocate when they are stuck, then our school becomes a really challenging place. It becomes a place where a student is always overwhelmed, or catching up on work, and never doing their inquiry projects… which is precisely why they came to our school.

When we interview our applicants (an interview with students and parents), we have a series of questions we ask, which really help us uncover their learning habits, and if they will thrive in our school. One question that we ask near the end doesn’t always tell us a lot about this, but it’s my favourite question. “Tell me about a time when you really had to work hard to accomplish something.” I then elaborate, “You felt a great deal of accomplishment when you were done, but it wasn’t easy.” And, “It doesn’t have to be school related.”

This question is about grit. It digs into a personal story of perseverance. And students often share some really interesting stories. We often learn about an aspect of their lives that we would not have learned otherwise, like the student has their black belt in Karate, or they’ve done 8 years of dance. I also like asking it at the end of the interview, because it finishes the interview with students thinking about something that gave them a good sense of accomplishment.

Last night we did our last scheduled interview, and I’m looking forward to a freer evening schedule, but overall, I really enjoy the process we go through and we end up with some truly amazing kids in our school. Students who thrive and find their tribe.

We are (digitally) open

We had our second digital open house in 2 years last night. 9 students were there, 2 crew and 7 presenters, but there were many more that were showcased in videos, and involved in music and artwork to help make the show possible. It was definitely a student-made production.

This year the presentation relied heavily on audience participation. One of our seniors opened the show then manned the back end of our online form where people watching could answer questions. Then he and our host decided who would answer the question. We had 3 stations set up with microphones, one for the host, one for students, and one for teachers.

Doing this live with 3 camera views, 5 microphones, and a program that bounced back and forth between these based on audience question… live, is no easy task. On top of that there were videos scheduled, and when each person spoke, their names would come up with a slick animated graphic, designed by a student.

Anyone that has tried to run a live event would know just how challenging this would be to run. And our students did a fantastic job! It’s awesome to be able to work with these students and our team of teachers. And hopefully our open house will draw more great students to the school.

Satisfactory Work Habits

When report cards go out, they include Work Habits. The usual standard is either that you got a ‘G’ for good, or you haven’t done a good enough job. Admittedly, as a parent, I wanted to see ‘G’s more than ‘A’s, because I wanted to know that my kids were trying their best.

At Inquiry Hub we look at it differently. We think the scale is skewed to the negative with ‘Satisfactory’ being something bad, when in fact in means you are doing a ‘good enough’ job. This was part of my message home to parents that went out on report card day:

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Work Habits – The work habits provided are ‘G’ – Good, ‘S’ – Satisfactory, and ‘N’ Needs Improvement. 

Many middle and high schools break this up as ‘G’ = anything above average. ‘S’ = There are some issues. ‘N’ = Not good. Some schools even give awards for students that get “All G’s”. That is NOT what we do here. The word ‘Satisfactory’ is not a bad word. Satisfactory means doing what needs to be done. That’s not a bad thing… could it be better? Yes, it is possible that a student can step up and do more than they need to… that’s ‘Good’. And for us an ‘N’ means that work habits need improvement, like most other schools. 

We like to have a positive distinction between ‘Satisfactory’ and ‘Good’ rather than ‘Good’ being the only measure of doing good work. It’s more important to us to separate 2 kinds of ‘Good’, than 2 kinds of ‘Needs Improvement’. In fact, we have many over-achievers in our school, and one thing we stress is that sometimes it’s perfectly OK to do ‘enough’ work in one area so that you can focus more attention in another area. Can you still talk to your child about moving from ‘S’ to ‘G’? Sure, but please don’t put a lot of emphasis on this! ‘Satisfactory’ can often mean, “I did what I needed to do to get the job done.” If everything you do is always good, that’s a heck of a lot of stress to deal with when you have a lot on your plate. 

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This approach seems even more apt now that we are having students do SCRUM projects, because part of working on a scrum team is defining what ‘Done’ looks like. For some parts of a project ‘done’ doesn’t mean ‘excellent’, it means good enough to move on. This is an important skill to learn. The interesting thing is, when you are working on a team, the collective definition of done is usually more than just ‘satisfactory’, and is already better than ‘good enough’. This isn’t about putting the least amount of effort it, it’s more about not extending the team so much that they can’t finish a project on time.

Sometimes satisfactory work really is the goal, so that you have the time, energy, and enthusiasm to do other work at an excellent level. A satisfactory work habit means that you’ve done what you needed to do.

Checkout Votemate to learn about the Canadian election

Developed by a former Inquiry Hub student, Votemate.org is a free site to help inform you about the upcoming election:

*(Great non-partisan resource for students!)

I received an update email:

Hello there!

There’s a federal election on September 20, and if that’s news to you, or you’ve just been finding the politicking, debating, and campaigning profoundly uninformative and useless, VoteMate is here to help.

We’ve created a whole new platform comparison pageallowing you to compare the platforms of each party on the issues you care about. It’s customized to you so you can focus on the information you need, and filter out everything you don’t. We’ve also got profiles on many of the candidates running this election! And we’ll be adding more features soon.

Here are the platforms you can compare:

This is fantastic for learning about candidates in your riding as well as comparing platforms and policies.

As mentioned, it’s also a great non-partisan resource to share and discuss with students. They can break into groups according to policies and platforms they care about, they can learn about candidates in their riding. They can use the rating tool 🙂😕🙁 to determine what Party they support based on platforms.

Check out Votemate.org! As I’ve shared before, I believe it is you duty as a citizen to vote… and it’s wise to make an informed choice.

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[Oh, and maybe support it too, (either one-time or once-a-month).]

Ask a student

I’ve created a survey for my Grade 11’s and 12’s. They are the only students in our school that know what our community and culture was like pre-lockdowns and pre-restrictions into cohorts to deal with the pandemic. The 11’s only saw this from September to February of their grade 9 year, the 12’s experienced it for a year and a half. I am asking them these questions for a few reasons:

1. I want them to remember what makes our school special.

2. I want them to share their perspective so that we know what students find valuable about the culture we had before restrictions altered our environment.

3. I want to learn what students didn’t like or enjoy, so that we don’t bring those things back.

I created the questionnaire and shared it with teachers for feedback. I also shared it with one of our grade 12’s. The teachers said, ‘good questions’ and gave a suggestion or two. My student said the same, then went on to give me a whole slew of suggestions that will make the survey easier to understand and respond to, and provide better (clearer) feedback to us. This student’s suggestions allowed me to see the survey through a student’s eyes, and gave me perspective that I could not have had otherwise.

Sometimes we do things for students without having empathy for their experience. We design activities and assignments without thinking of the user experience… without including them in the design process. Often we can make these activities and assignments for students so much better… if we just remember to ask a student.

Exit interviews

Yesterday was the last of school for students, and today is the last day for teachers. For the past couple years, we’ve had grads where the students came one at a time, and so part of that included them giving a short interview.

Instead of running credits on our iHub Annual we ran some clips from the interviews:

The 3 questions we asked were about favourite memories, advice for new students, and future plans.

Then yesterday afternoon I decided to interview two of our teachers who are leaving us next year. I don’t have the video ready, but a couple questions I asked them were, “What could other schools learn from us?” and, “If you could wave a magic wand, what would you change about Inquiry Hub?”

I really enjoyed my conversations with these teachers and they made me realize that I should be asking our grads more questions before they leave us. I also had a conversation with one of previous grads and mentioned I’d love to interview him as well. We can learn a lot from exit interviews, and I plan to take advantage of this in the coming years.

An Annual Event

Last night we held iHub Annual where we highlighted some student performances, our Ollie Awards, and our grads.

Our Ollie Awards are our awards based on our motto: Dream – Create – Learn, and students from all grades and all levels of academic achievement can receive them.

The show opens at 4:45 with a song co-written and performed by students for the annual. My speech to the grads is at 39:40, and our Valedictorian and Spirit of Inquiry award winner’s speech is at 49:17.

This is a presentation put together with so much student work, and it comes off quite polished. It is a celebration of the year that was, and for a few moments while watching it, I forgot about the challenges this year presented.

I can’t wait for the opportunity to run this event live again, but watching last night from the comfort of my home, I was thrilled to see students in the chat enjoying the show, and I was grateful that I wasn’t in a stuffy theatre on one of the hottest days on record.

It truly is remarkable to work in a school where students know that it’s their job to Dream and Create, as well as to Learn.

Make Lemonade – A life lesson about perspective

This was my yearbook ‘message from the principal’ for Inquiry Hub this year:

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Make Lemonade

          When the backdrop of your school year is a Global Pandemic, it’s hard to think of the things you got to do, and easy to think about all the things you didn’t get to do. It’s hard not to think this way when so much has been taken away from us. We are used to students mixing across grades and getting to know everyone in our community through events and potluck lunches. Well, this was not a year for those things. But when you look at the year we had, we were lucky compared to many high schools.

          We provided all-day schooling when other schools were having students only come to school for half a day and doing another course online, then switching these two around. Meanwhile we had our cohorts in school for the entire day. Other schools rushed students through quarters, with 2 courses at a time. We continued with our year-long classes. Courses in other schools were paired down to the essential curriculum. We had students continue to follow their passions and interests with Inquiries and IDS courses, and teachers continued to look at things in depth, and had time to follow student interests along the way.

          I was watching a TikTok recently and it was about things non-native English speakers didn’t understand when they first learned English, (I am definitely on grown up/teacher TikTok and have a different feed than a younger-than-me generation). The phrase that this person didn’t understand was “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” To most of us this is a phrase that means, when things are sour and going against you, make the most out of it. However, this woman was from a country and culture where lemons are used to spice things up, and the taste of a lemon is truly enjoyed. To her, “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” meant, appreciate the good things in life. She never understood the phrase to mean anything negative. When life gives you a wonderful lemon, well then celebrate and make some lemonade!

          When you look back on the past year, I hope you can see it from the perspective of this lady, and find the delicious lemons you made lemonade out of. Who did you spend more time with? What did you enjoy doing that you don’t usually do? What do you feel lucky that you had, that others didn’t have? If you were living in Toronto this year, you would have spent almost the entire year doing school from home, whether you wanted to or not.

          Also, we are heading into a summer with much less restrictions than last year. What are you looking forward to that you will enjoy even more than you ever have? What opportunities are you going to take advantage of, that you probably wouldn’t have? Where is your family going to travel next?

          It’s time to enjoy your summer… and make  some lemonade.