Tag Archives: Inquiry Hub

Choice time for teacher Pro-D

Last Friday I had a Pro-D, Professional Development Day, with the Inquiry Hub staff. We started the morning with a book talk, sharing what we have learned from books we are reading.
A few weeks ago, I had my teachers fill out a form sharing the title and link to a book that they wanted to read for their own personal development. I said that it didn’t have to be education-related, just something they wanted to learn from. Even though I said no obligation for follow up, my iHub staff suggested the book talk as part of their Pro-D day.

I loved hearing all the ideas and educational connections they made to the books they were reading.

Next, we moved on to personal learning time. We each shared what we were exploring, planning, or investigating, and then had an hour and a half to work on it. For example, two teachers worked on updating a questionnaire we give students when the apply to the school. Another teacher worked on a unit in one of his courses he thought needed work, and another teacher created a ‘Diversify your feed’ document and shared it with our staff and students:

I decided to create this image using information our team developed at our previous Pro-D. My way of making sense of our vision for the school:


We got together again (digitally, we weren’t meeting face-to-face) after lunch to share what we’d done, then we did some group planning around our timetable next year… a real challenge in a small school with a small staff that offers so many options for students.

Most of our day was about choice. Teachers got to share learning from a book of their choice, then they got to choose what they wanted to work on, before getting together for collaboration time. We spend a lot of our day at Inquiry Hub giving students time to work on things they want and need to work on. Our students have a lot of self-directed time at our school. It only seems fitting that when it’s time for our staff to learn, that we do the same.

Even though teachers got to choose what book they learned from (it didn’t have to be the one I gave them, although that seemed to be the one they mostly shared from), they were able to be really diverse in their sharing. Even though there were no constraints on what their personal learning time was used for, we shared our intentions before splitting up to spend that time on our own, or together by choice. We had accountability built into the day, but it was filled with personal choice.

It’s not just our students who benefit from choice in learning, our teachers benefit greatly too!

Teaching and Trust

I surveyed our Grad 9’s a couple days ago. Coming from middle school, and getting stuck in a single cohort, they really didn’t get the experience at our school we wanted for them. At Inquiry Hub our students usually connect across grades, and interact as a larger community, which is important in a really small school. But although we were able to give them full days, unlike large schools with a lot more cohorts to manage, the environment our 9’s came into is far more like an extension of a single class in middle school than a high school. That said, they really don’t know what they are missing compared to a regular year here… they’ve never seen it.

I asked them to write on a piece of paper, a positive, a challenge, and/or a suggestion or wish, and I collected them. They could write about any or all of these.

Here are a few of them:

The challenges and suggestions were all related to covid restrictions, with less clubs, and a lack of connection with other cohorts. Beyond that the comments were very positive.

“I like the open and just overall welcoming environment.”

“I like how you can structure your own day…”

“I like how our courses let us set our own goals and learning paths.”

“Even though our community is so small, I like how close we’ve all gotten.”

One comment in particular was quite interesting to me:

“I love how much the teachers trust us here.”

I agree that our teachers give students a lot of freedom, and choice. And students at iHub get a fair bit of unstructured time to work on what the want/need to work on. But I never thought of this through the lens of trust, like this student.

When students feel trusted, they feel empowered, they feel they have a responsibility to keep that trust. It’s an interesting lens to see the dynamic of the classroom through. How does the relationship between the students and the teachers change when trust is given and valued? Where does the responsibility for learning fall in a trusting relationship? What else is fostered in a trusting environment?

Kudos to our teachers for creating such a wonderful learning environment in these challenging times.

Worthy goals

This video came up as a Facebook memory from 4 years ago.

The process of applying for an award like The Cmolik Prize for the Enhancement of Public Education in BC was rewarding because it forced us to reflect on what we do. We have really evolved as a community since this video was made, and while we don’t necessarily give students as much freedom as we have in the past, we’ve created better scaffolding to support students getting their work done… on both the school work they need to do, and the projects they want to do.

A couple recent Daily-Ink posts have focussed on the school: Students design the school about student designed and created murals; and, Obstacles become the way about a student working through a problem rather than letting that problem become an obstacle or a failure point in his project. Creating the space for these things to happen is, as Al says at the end of the video, a worthy goal. Weve fostered a pretty special community where we get to see our students thrive.

Obstacles become the way

When I wrote Learning and Failure I struggled with the word failure. Setbacks and obstacles that some see as failures can often become the impetus for far greater learning than if the roadblock never needed to be faced.

Here is the end of the post:

“The learning potential of failure is significant. If the work is meaningful enough, there can be more learned from an epic failure, than a marginal success, where the measure for success was set too low.”

One of our students at Inquiry Hub is working on developing an artificial intelligence (AI) program that can listen to a song and determine the key of that song. The workings of this are far beyond my understanding, but in his reflection about his learning so far, (after doing a great job explaining the process), he shared this in his ‘Log of Milestones’:

– Made a python script to automatically take a mp3 file, and find its music key by making a query to Tunebat. I got blocked by Tunebat, because they identified my automated queries as an “attack” on their server.

– Wrote a Firefox web extension using javascript to make the queries to Tunebat not seem automated, and therefore not rejected. Managed to work.

And then later:

– I found there was a way on Python to fake a web request to Tunebat without getting blocked.

I love seeing this creativity and resiliency. The obstacle becomes the way. He sends hundreds of automated requests to a website, essential to give him the large amounts of data he needs to train his AI; the website sees these automated requests as an attack on their server (this is known as a DOS attack); So he writes first a web browser extension, then later a python program, that tricks the website into answering his thousands of requests without seeing them as an attack.

The roadblock or failure isn’t a failure, it’s an opportunity to adapt, be creative, and learn new skills.

F ailure

A lways

I nvites

L earning

The invitation is always there, the opportunity to overcome can become the place where amazing learning happens. A potential failure can become the impetus to build resilience and to create new and unforeseen challenges to overcome. It can become the thing that makes the learning experience a worthy experience to remember… more memorable than the easy ‘A’ on a cookie-cutter style learning experience where the outcome is uniform for all the students who jump through the same hoops to get that ‘A’.

The obstacle can be the failure point where people give up, or it can be the opportunity to overcome. The learning invitation is there, as long as the drive, resilience, and effort are there to push a student.

Sure in this example he might not have been able to fool the website, and maybe his efforts could have come up short, but I don’t think that would have stopped him anyway. His attempts at a workaround could still have provided a lot of learning that he never would have had otherwise. The obstacle became the way, and while the positive outcome this time was rewarding, so too could have been a so-called ‘failure’. There is nothing artificial about this kind of learning.

Students design the school

Seven years ago a student and her father wrote a grant proposal and got money to beautify the school. Most of the money went to get concrete picnic benches in our courtyard, but there was also money earmarked for an outdoor mural.

The student who submitted the grant and 3 of her friends started polling students about what to put on the mural. At the time, we had a school slogan of, “Connect, Create, Learn”, and these students came up with the most popular adaptation to this: “Dream, Create, Learn.”

I hated it. We were a very small school with no catchment, meaning every kid must choose to come to us rather than a school near their home, and I thought the word ‘Dream’ was not a good word to recruit students or their parents. “Parents don’t want to send their kids to a school that’s about dreaming,” I would say. “We love it. and that’s what we want the mural to say,” they responded I acquiesced. The mural was created as the students wished.

Now, the dedicated self-directed time we give students to work is called DCL… their time to Dream, Create, and Learn. This idea I originally hated has become woven into the vernacular and culture of the school.

This year, we had the Grade 10’s design murals for the school as one of their SCRUM projects. Here are the designs they came up with.

One of these murals is a play off of DCL, Dream, Create, Launch. While this won’t replace DCL, it’s an idea inspired by one of our teacher, John Sarte, who is our STEAM teacher, (except the ‘M’ isn’t for Math, it’s for Marketing). John loves the notion of seeing Inquiry Hub as being an idea incubator, with students designing real world solutions and projects. I love the student design, and that this mural is at the entrance to the part of the building that is our school.

Allowing students the opportunity to create these murals, and giving them a lot of choice about what to design and where to put them is something that I think makes them so appealing. ‘Your journey starts here’ is in our office. ‘Nature calls’ is in our bathrooms. Our pentapus mascot (a 5 legged octopus named ‘Ollie’, also chosen by students) and ‘Live your dream’ are in our learning commons. And, the sunflower mural livens up a beautiful atrium that most people didn’t even notice we had. Oh, and our school logo, also designed by a student.

Students ideas and artwork bring our school alive.

The Big Shebang

Part 1

I had a really funny exchange in the office with three Grade 10 students. They were talking to my secretaries when I came in and they told me how good their presentation was in their last class. The Grade 10’s are in scrum teams researching books like: Good to Great, Dare to Lead, Atomic Habits, and The Practice, and creating presentations that summarize the book and run students they are presenting to through an activity to learn a concept or two from the book.

One of the girls was sharing some strategies they used to keep students engaged, and another one said, “It was so good, we were awesome. I wish you were there to see it… Actually, no, I’m glad you weren’t because we were already nervous enough.” To this I responded, “You see me in your class all the time and I stay and watch presentations whenever I can. Have I ever been scary? Why would me watching make you nervous?”

She responded, “Well… because… you’re the Big Shebang!”

I laughed and told my secretaries that I needed a new name plate for my office.

Part 2

One of the other projects that Grade 10’s are working on is to make improvements at the school. Four of the groups have decided to do murals and part of the process created by the teacher is “Mr. Truss’ approval”. This has been great and has given me the opportunity to share some feedback. Often, I’m very aware that my suggestions can come off as instructions, and I have to be careful not to derail their plans or vision by making an off-the-cuff suggestion that they think they now need to meet to get approval. While on the other hand, some suggestions just make sense and should be done.

An example of the latter is a mural with 3 panels, and in the middle panel a small item (a blueprint) was coloured a different colour than everything else in the mural. I suggested they use one of the colours of the image the blueprint was about, visible on both the other panels. This simple change took attention away from this small item, and created continuity for the piece. That suggestion was given as, “Try changing the blueprint colour to one of the colours of the item it’s a blueprint of, and see if that ties the 3 drawings together.” And they came back agreeing that it did.

I was far less pushy with another suggestion about an identical grass silhouette at the base of each hill they are drawing, to suggest that these panels are of the same hill rather than 3 different ones. While I like this idea, I didn’t push it the same way, because it was a suggestion that they could take or leave. It would tie things together, but it’s not as compositionally important, compared to an out-of-place, uniquely coloured item pulling attention to it unnecessarily, like the blueprint.

What I’ve really enjoyed is that “Mr. Truss’ approval’ is a big thing. It’s an affirmation that their work meets a standard of expectation. What I’m keenly aware of is that as the approval giver, I can overshadow or derail the vision of the students if I’m not aware of how my feedback can be taken.

Part 3

Inquiry Hub is a very unique school. As principal I get to see students visit my office with ideas, suggestions, and permission requests all the time. While I’ve dealt with minor discipline issues, they tend to be so minor that they don’t even make it into my office. So, I don’t hold the presence of a scary principal. Furthermore, I’m invited into classes all the time to see presentations (I wish I had more time to actually go sometimes). Yet, there are still times when students get nervous that I’m watching. There is the Big Shebang effect. To me it’s humourous, but I need to remember that to some students, it’s a big deal.

Covid daily routine

Early on in the pandemic, I read that ventilation and fresh air circulation was very good in helping to reduce spread of the virus. At that time my morning custodian was not consistent and so I had different custodians coming to the school, so I decided that I would go to each of our 5 classrooms at Inquiry Hub and open windows to start the school day. We have early morning principal meetings on Thursdays, and on that day I didn’t get around to opening the windows until just before classes started.

On this day I was able to see and chat with a lot of students on my route. So, that time slot has become my daily routine. In a couple of the classes I will end up asking students to open the windows if they are already seated nearby and I can’t access them and be socially distanced, while the other 3 room windows are always easy to access. But more than that, it puts me in every room, each morning, to say greetings and chat with students.

I know that I’m lucky to only have 5 rooms to do this in, with my other school being the online school with no physical classrooms to visit, and for some principals this would be a massive undertaking. But for me this is a wonderful way to start my day. Sometimes I just say quick good mornings, other times I get into full conversations with students.

Yesterday I spent time hearing about the progress of one of our grade 12’s who has been working on a massive project since grade 10. Monday was just a catch-up on the winter break. This routine can take me about 5 minutes or it can take over 15. No matter how long I spend, it has become a wonderful routine that starts my day off right.

Students are so confined in their movements now compared to pre-covid. Even in our small school they use 3 different entrances and have no common hallways. With things being so isolated between groups of students, this little covid inspired daily routine has really helped me connect to students in a way that I would have otherwise missed.

Jeff Hopkins on the Pacific School of Inquiry and Innovation

Last night I saw this tweet by Jeff Hopkins promoting a new vlog/podcast series ‘School of Thought Victoria‘. Perfect timing since I just finished my most recent audio book and ended up in long drives today. So, I’ve already devoured 3 of the four videos already (I listened, I did not watch,  which is all you need to do since it is a discussion).

So much of what Jeff has shared with Alex Van Tol about the Pacific School of Inquiry and Innovation resonates with me, and what we are working on, and towards, at Inquiry Hub Secondary School. In this series, Jeff is outlining 20 convictions that the school is modeled on. I am looking forward to every one of these conversations.

Here’s what I’ve listened to so far,

Agency:

Inquiry Process:

Learner vs Student:

Subscribe to the channel, and listen to Jeff’s wisdom.

Failure is a frame of mind, not an outcome

I’ve written a lot about learning and failure. In a post titled, Learning Through Failure vs Failing to Learn, I said,

“When we talk about learning from failure, we are not actually talking about failure, we are talking about perseverance, and resilience, and tenacity. We are talking about coming up to resistance and unplanned outcomes and working through them to achieve a goal. We are talking about students learning significantly more than if everything went their way.“

Listening to many students at Inquiry Hub, you hear them talk about this in an amazing way. They share the very ethos behind this idea:

For anyone that didn’t bother to watch these two short clips, here is what Thia said in the second one,

“Inquiry projects aren’t about always being successful. It’s about trying something new, learning new skills, creating something. It isn’t always about being the best at it, or succeeding in it. You might have a failed inquiry, and that’s completely ok. It doesn’t always have to be a success for it to be a good quality project. It’s all about the process.”

What’s interesting is that if you don’t understand this idea, it sounds like accepting failure is ‘OK’. If you don’t recognize that students are talking about putting themselves ‘out there’ and trying something beyond their comfort zone, then it sounds like they are giving themselves a participation badge for just showing up. But if you truly understand and embrace the idea of learning through failure, you aren’t talking about failure at all.

Elon Musk just had a rocket explode upon landing and called it a success because of the data they collected.


I’m sure there are people who get this. I’m also sure there are people who laugh, “Ha, you call that a success? What a loser.”

A real loser is one who doesn’t try. A real loser is one who gets an outcome they don’t want and quits. A real loser is someone that makes excuses rather than steps up to make things right.

People who do epic things, and people who try epic things and don’t succeed, understand that failure is a frame of mind, not an outcome. They understand that learning is a journey, not a destination.

When students own the learning

Last night was Inquiry Hub’s open house. I shared a post about our open house last year: A Place to Dream, Create, and Learn. A year ago we packed around 200 people into our gym and had a great night of presentations:

But with Covid-19 this year the event had to go digital. We held a YouTube Live event. Show starts 26 minutes in or you can watch topic-based sections here: InquiryHub.org/open2020

It is such a privilege producing something like this with these students. They worked so hard preparing the event. They created scripts, videos, music, and designed posters, (like the 16 individual posters that fit together to create a single poster below, used as one of our backdrops). And students learned how to use all the equipment along the way. We had 3 cameras and a slideshow presentation, and while transitions could have been a bit tighter, I’m so impressed with how this student-organized event went.

One neat thing that we did was that we had a question submission form that we advertised before and during the show, where viewers could ask questions. Then we answered them live, throughout the show. Our student producer fed the questions to our student MC, and she directed them to our student and teacher panel depending on who she thought should answer. This is a challenging thing to do well in a live show… especially having never done it before. Of all the questions asked, I think I offered one of the weakest answers (because I rambled a bit on what should have been a 10 second answer). Beyond that flub, we didn’t need to have an answer clarified by someone else.

We had over 180 live viewers at the start of the show and still had over 170 viewers 40 minutes in. To keep that many people watching for that long is a testament to how smoothly things went.

Through the night, one thing was clear: when students take pride in their school, when they feel they own the learning, they will step up and deliver a great product when called upon to do so. Students thrive when they own the learning.

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(Just dug up another similar post I wrote about one of our previous open houses, prompted by a Facebook memory,)

 

Logo Composite Design by Maddison D, Grade 10