Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
Thanks for the opportunity to share Will, it was great to connect.
Here are a few links that we were going to share that we didn’t get to on the final slide: http://Educators.inquiryhub.org – Created for the Cmolik award, which we lost out to Peter Liljedahl, mentioned in the webinar.
And a couple posts I’d like to share… the ‘Teacher as Compass’ post that it turns out you prompted with a Tweet… and my ‘Learning and Failure’ post. We didn’t really get to this in the presentation, but one of the things I’m most proud about at our school is how we teach students to embrace would be failures as learning opportunities from which to grow and improve.
Thanks also to all who attended. Happy to share other resources such as our Inquiry courses.
Dave
This Wednesday, Jan 17 at 4pm PST, please join us to learn about Inquiry Hub Secondary School. I’m looking forward to connecting with Will Richardson again, I’ve followed him and been influenced by his thinking since I started blogging in 2006. When he suggested connecting for a webinar I knew that I wanted a teacher with me, and who better then my colleague John Sarte. John is a founding teacher at Inquiry Hub, and he has been truly instrumental in developing the vision of our school, and helping us create our unique learning environment. Here are the webinar details, I hope that you can join us!
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FREE WEBINAR: “Inquiry Hub: The Dream, Create, Learn School” with Dave Truss and Dr. John Sarte – Hosted by Will Richardson
Details
Join us for this important overview of a compelling school model that highlights the power of project-based learning.
Inquiry Hub is a small Coquitlam School District (BC) high school that is unique in its approach and delivery. Known as the Dream – Create – Learn school, Inquiry Hub was born out of the idea that students don’t need to spend every minute of their day siloed into individual courses, without any unstructured time. It has evolved into a community of students who work both together and individually to complete the required curriculum while also designing some of their courses and their day around inquiries and passion projects that they want to pursue.
Grade 9’s and 10’s do cross-curricular projects using SCRUM project management, collaborating to get work done efficiently and effectively, and they also take an Inquiry Course designed around developing strong presentation skills and documenting their learning journeys, doing passion projects that they design. Grade 11’s and 12’s construct year-long IDS – Independent Directed Studies courses where they delve deep into their interests.
A key component of the program is DCL time, coined after the Dream – Create – Learn motto, where students are not in a structured class, but rather have unstructured time to work on their class projects, homework and assignments, and/or on their passion projects. Central to this is creating a community of learners who are eager to help each other and who have learned that failure is part of learning. Projects can be too big, too challenging, too overwhelming, but still result in a final product or presentation that exceeds expectations.
Wednesday, Jan 17 – 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM PST
RSVP now to join us for this important session with principal Dave Truss and teacher Dr. John Sarte. (You’ll need a free membership to Will Richardson’s Big Questions Institute Community to RSVP and join us.)
I’m genuinely excited about the year ahead. I know things are far from ‘back to normal’. I know safety is still a primary concern, and we’ll be wearing masks for quite some time yet. I know there will be unexpected challenges that come our way…
But the first day of a school year always holds so much promise! There is so much potential for us to do awesome things, and to watch our students shine. It’s an opportunity to look forward knowing that as educators we make a difference in people’s lives.
“With great responsibility comes great power”… that’s the reverse of the Spiderman quote, “With great power comes great responsibility”, and a teacher, John Sarte at Inquiry Hub, uses this to explain to students that while we give them a lot of time to work independently (a lot of responsibility) that comes with a lot of power. This is something that teachers understand, because they are given the great responsibility to teach, and they have tremendous power over what that experience looks like.
And collectively we have so much power over what the year ahead looks like… Let’s keep our optimism up, and make this school year exciting, engaging, and full of meaningful learning for everyone (teachers and students alike).
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.
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.
