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.
Today is our school’s annual open house. We have about 150 people that reserved seats. After 11 years we still rely on this event to get students and their parents interested in applying to attend our school. It’s amazing to me that more students don’t want the Inquiry Hub experience for high school.
I know a tiny school doesn’t meet the needs of some students who want a big high school experience. However I also know the format of the school with self-directed inquiries and way more unstructured time for working independently and in groups is ideal for so many students. I know that our students find the transition to university easy, and that they don’t only feel prepared but also thrive in post secondary environments, since they have practiced being inquisitive, self-directed learners.
Yet, without hosting this big event, after visiting our middle schools to introduce our school as a viable choice beyond their catchment high school, we would struggle with enrolment. And so tonight is a big event for our school. More than half of our students are participating in or helping to run the show. They did the majority of the planning, and they will be amazing ambassadors.
I love their enthusiasm, and it makes me proud to see our students excited to promote our school. It’s going to be a great night.
Last Friday six of our students presented to 34 middle school cohort student teachers from the University of British Columbia. They had prepared the presentation for two visiting Northwest Territories teachers a few weeks back but I didn’t get to see it. In preparing the presentation I had asked them not just to share some of the amazing inquiries they get to do at Inquiry Hub, but also ones that were challenging and did go as well as planned. I didn’t get to see their first presentation but I watched this second iteration.
Most of them didn’t just share a challenging inquiry, but their worst ones. They had me and their audience laughing as they described how things went epically wrong, or how what they thought would be a topic of great interest barely held their attention for 2 days. But more than that, each and every one of them eloquently expressed their learning from that epic failure.
Sitting behind the students, there were a few times I had the urge to say something, but I forced myself to stay quiet. Each time I had the urge, the students ended up helping each other fill in the blanks I thought were missing, and in several of those cases better than I would have… and allowing them to lead, without speaking up, gave more authenticity to the presentation experience than I could ever have contributed. I did come in at the second half of the Q&A and answered a few questions, but at that point the presentation was basically over.
I wrote this in an email to these students and their parents. I couldn’t be more proud of these young learners and leaders:
Greetings to our Inquiry Hub Ambassadors and their parents,
A few weeks back, I asked a few students to present to two educators from the North West Territories during our Pro-D Day. Today, those same school ambassadors provided school tours and presented to 34 Middle School Cohort Student Teachers from UBC. I didn’t get to see the presentation to the NWT teachers but I did get to watch today. I just want to say that it was an honour and a privilege to have these 6 wonderful students represent our school, and share their inquiries and learning experiences here at iHub.
They represented our community, and their learning, extremely well and the student teachers were impressed, and I’d even say ‘blown away’ by their presentation. Their ability to respond to the Q&A questions the student teachers asked was also exceptional.
I wanted to share this with them and their parents and to say on behalf of our school… Thank you!
“Someone asked these questions in response to a blog entry, and I was wondering, what would YOUR response be?
1. What role/how much should students be using AI, and does this vary based on grade level?
2. What do you think the next five years in education will look like in regards to AI? Complete integration or total ban of AI?”
I commented:
1. Like a pencil or a laptop, AI is a tool to use sometimes and not use other times. The question is about expectations and management.
2. Anywhere that enforces a total ban on AI is going to be playing a never-ending and losing game of catch-up. That said, I have no idea what total integration will look like? Smart teachers are already using AI to develop and improve their lessons, those teachers will know that students can, and both will and should, use these tools as well. But like in question 1… when it’s appropriate. Just because a laptop might be ‘completely integrated’ into a classroom as a tool students use doesn’t mean everything they do in a classroom is with and on a laptop.
—
I’ve already dealt with some sticky issues around the use of AI in a classroom and online. One situation last school year was particularly messy, with a teacher using Chat GPT as an AI detector, rather than other AI detection tools. It turns out that Chat GPT is not a good AI detector. It might be better now, but I can confirm that in early 2023 it was very bad at this. I even put some of my own work into it and I had Chat GPT tell me that a couple paragraphs were written by it, even though I wrote the piece about 12 years earlier.
But what do we do in the meantime? Especially in my online school where very little, if any, work is supervised? Do we give up on policing altogether and just let AI do the assignments as we try to AI proof them? Do we give students grades for work that isn’t all theirs? How is that fair?
This is something we will figure out. AI, like laptops, will be integrated into education. Back in 2009 I presented on the topic, “The POD’s are Coming!”
(Slideshow here) About Personally Owned Devices… laptop etc… coming into our classrooms, and the fear of these devices. We are at that same point with AI now. We’ll get through this and our classrooms will adapt (again).
And in a wonderful full-circle coincidence, one of the images I used in the POD’s post above was a posterized quote by Miguel Guilin.
It’s time to take the leap. AI might be new… but we’ve been here before.
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.
“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.
——-
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.
For our small school we invite the entire community to watch our grad. So since our first grad in 2016, I’ve written a completely different grad speech each year. I have a former student who has seen at least the last 5, and he is very honest about what he thinks of them… and I value his feedback.
This year I’m struggling with the topic. I usually have the frame of the speech completed by now, if not the whole thing written. I’m still deciding on my theme. So, tonight I write, tomorrow I rehearse, and Wednesday I am on stage sharing it. I don’t mind a tight timeline, but I do wish I was a little further along right now.
In the end, it’s not about me, it’s about the grads… I just want to share something not too long, and respectful to our grads and our community. And maybe, if I’m lucky, get a small chuckle or two. Wish me luck!
“Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it” ~ Max Frisch
One of my favourite presentations I’ve ever created was back in 2008 for Alan November’s BLC – ‘Building Leadership Capacity’ conference. It was called: The Rant, I Can’t, The Elephant and the Ant, and it was about embracing new technology, specifically smartphones in schools.
The rant was about how every new technology is going to undermine education in a negative way, starting with the ball point pen.
I can’t was about the frustrations educators have with learning to use new tools.
The elephant was the smartphone, it was this incredibly powerful new tool that was in the room. You can’t ignore an elephant in the room.
The Ant was a metaphor for networking and learning from others… using a learning community to help you with the transformation of your classroom.
I ended this with a music slideshow that I later converted to video called, Brave New World Wide Web. This went a bit viral on BlipTV, a now defunct rival of YouTube.
The next year I presented at the conference again and my favourite of my two presentations was, The POD’s are Coming, about Personally Owned Devices… essentially laptops and tablets being brought into schools by students. These may be ubiquitous now, but it was still pretty novel in 2009.
These two presentations and video give a pretty strong message around embracing new technology in schools. So my next message about embracing AI tools like Chat GPT in schools is going to come across fairly negatively:
It’s going to be a bumpy and messy ride.
There is not going to be any easy transition. It’s not just about embracing a new technology, it’s about managing the disruption… And it’s not going to be managed well. I already had an issue in my school where a teacher used Chat GPT to verify if AI wrote an assignment for students. However Chat GPT is not a good AI checker and it turned out to be wrong for a few students who insisted they wrote the work themselves, and several AI detectors agreed. But this was only checked after the students were accused of cheating. Messy.
Some teachers are now expecting students to write in-class essays with paper and pen to avoid students using AI tools. These are kids that have been using a laptop since elementary school. Messy.
Students are using prompts in Chat GPT that instruct the AI to write with language complexity based on their age. Or, they are putting AI written work into free paraphrasing tools that fool the AI detectors. Messy.
Teacher’s favourite assignments that usually get students to really stretch their skills are now done much faster and almost as good with AI tools. And even very bright students are using these tools frequently. While prompt generation is a good skill to have, AI takes the effort and the depth of understanding away from the learners. Messy.
That final point is the messiest. For many thoughtful and thought provoking assignments, AI can now decrease the effort to asking AI the right prompt. And while the answer may be far from perfect, AI will provide an answer that simplifies the response for the the learner. It will dumb down the question, or produce a response that makes the question easier.
Ai is not necessarily a problem solver, it’s a problem simplifier. But that reduces the critical thinking needed. It waters down the complexity of work required. It transforms the learning process into something easier, and less directly thoughtful. Everything is messier except the problem the teacher has created, which is just much simpler to complete.
Learning should be messy, but instead what’s getting messy is the ability to pose problems that inspire learning. Students need to experience the struggle of messy questions instead of seeking an intelligent agent to mess up the learning opportunities.
Just like any other tool, there are places to use AI in education and places to avoid using the tool. The challenge ahead is creating learning opportunities where it is obvious when the tool is and isn’t used. It’s having the tool in your tool box, but not using it for every job… and getting students to do the same.
And so no matter how I look at this, the path ahead is very messy.
Six years ago in Philadelphia I ran a session at Educon on Failure. Bill Ferriter came to the session and after the interactive presentation he created this image:
This was the premise I was working from,
When is failure really a success?When we engage students in EPIC projects and challenges,the journey to success is often fraught with failuresthat can prove to be amazing learning opportunities.
Do we need to reexamine the use of the term ‘Failure’?
Our present education system is built around always finding the ‘right’ answer, but when can the wrong answer be valuable? How can we provide rich, meaningful opportunities for students to make mistakes, iterate, persevere and develop alternative approaches to problems relevant to what they are learning?
4 years before this presentation I created this image:
Think of this: If students (regardless of skills and abilities) have only ever met success, and accomplished every task, assignment and project they have needed to do for school, then they weren’t pushed hard enough. In this case, it is the program that is the failure, because the students were not challenged as much as they should have been.
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.
We talk a lot about ‘learning through failure’ in education, but we don’t really mean failure. Because when a student takes lessons from something not working, then it’s a learning opportunity and not actually a failure.
When you think about it, lack of knowledge is where the learning begins. If you give students the knowledge, they don’t really learn, you actually rob students of their learning. You want them to struggle and to find the learning challenging. And if the challenge is authentic, if it’s really a challenge, then it’s not something they’ll get on the first try. So hitting the ‘failure point’ is part of learning. Trying to achieve too much needs to be part of the process… and so bumping into failure is an essential part of learning.
So a failure is only a failure if the challenge lacks reflection, resources, support, or effort. If these things are provided (by the teacher and more-so by the learner) then the learner didn’t actually fail. They may not achieve their original goal, but they invited learning into the attempt… and learning is achieved. That is not a failure.
The idea of learning through failure is actually not a failure at all. It is accepting that there are opportunities for learning in not achieving the intended goal but still identifying that there was learning to be acquired and often the struggle is something that makes this kind of learning stick.
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.
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.
