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.
I heard something in a meeting recently that I haven’t heard in a while. It was in a meeting with some online educational leaders across the province and the topic of Chat GPT and AI came up. It’s really challenging in an online course, with limited opportunities for supervised work or tests, to know if a student is doing the work, or a parent or tutor, or Artificial Intelligence tools. That’s when a conversation came up that I’ve heard before. It was a bit of a stand on a soapbox diatribe, “If an assignment can be done by Chat GPT, then maybe the problem is in the assignment.”
That’s almost the exact line we started to hear about 15 years ago about Google… I might even have said it, “If you can just Google the answer to the question, then how good is the question?” Back then, this prompted some good discussions about assessment and what we valued in learning. But this is far more relevant to Google than it is to AI.
I can easily create a question that would be hard to Google. It is significantly harder to do the same with LLM’s – Large Language Models like Chat GPT. If I do a Google search I can’t find critical thinking challenges not already shared by someone else. However, I can ask Chat GPT to create answers to almost anything. Furthermore, I can ask it to create things like pro’s & con’s lists, then put those in point form, then do a rough draft of an essay, then improve on the essay. I can even ask it to use the vocabulary of a Grade 9 student. I can also give it a writing sample and ask it to write the essay in the same style.
LLM’s are not just a better Google, they are a paradigm shift. If we are trying to have conversations about how to catch cheaters, students using Chat GPT to do their work, we are stuck in the old paradigm. That said, I openly admit this is a much bigger problem in online learning where we don’t see and work closely with students in front of us. And we are heading into an era where there will be no way to verify what’s student work and what’s not, so it’s time to recognize the paradigm shift and start asking ourselves new questions…
The biggest questions we need to ask ourselves are how can we teach students to effectively use AI to help them learn, and what assignments can we create that ask them to use AI effectively to help them develop and share ideas and new learning?
Back when some teachers were saying, “Wikipedia is not a valid website to use as research and to cite.” Many more progressive educators were saying, “Wikipedia is a great place to start your research,” and, “Make sure you include the date you quoted the Wikipedia page because the page changes over time.” The new paradigm will see some teachers making students write essays in class on paper or on wifi-less internet-less computers, and other teachers will be sending students to Chat GPT and helping them understand how to write better prompts.
That’s the difference between old and new paradigm thinking and learning. The transition is going to be messy. Mistakes are going to be made, both by students and teachers. Where I’m excited is in thinking about how learning experiences are going to change. The thing about a paradigm shift is that it’s not just a slow transition but a leap into new territory. The learning experiences of the future will not be the same, and we can either try to hold on to the past, or we can get excited about the possibilities of the future.
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!
We went away for the 4-day weekend. We took the ferry Thursday night after work, headed to Vancouver island, and came back Monday. We spent 3 nights in Victoria visiting my daughter and a night in Nanaimo visiting my wife’s parents.
I’m amazed how long this break felt. It was wonderful to get away for this little holiday. I feel like I’ve had a real break. I feel fresh and ready to start the week… and it’s a short week!
If I were to redesign the school year, I’d make the summer shorter and make every other weekend a 4-day weekend. Instead of a set 4-day week, with the same day off every week, like every Friday, I’d run a long weekend like this one we just had, with Monday and Friday off, then I’d run a regular 2-day weekend, then I’d run another 4-day weekend. Each week would only be 4 days long, but the weekends would alternate between 2 days and 4 days off, rather than repeated 3-day weekends.
I’d give up on a long summer holiday to run a schedule like this. 2-3 times a year these extended weekends could be scheduled school events like field trips with students, for things like visiting the capital or camping. Or maybe just the 2-day weekend, where students have 10 straight days of school with a special event in the middle.
But more than that, I think I’d be refuelled and ready for anything after a bi-monthly 4-day weekend. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t better for students too. While this is unlikely to happen, I’d just like to say that I’m thankful for this break and I’m ready to jump back in and have a great week at school.
I love when sportsmanship shines through. I walked up to a student during lunch and he was playing chess on Chess.com. My daughter gifted me a paid account for my birthday and so I told the student my username and said he could challenge me if he wanted. He said he would. I told him that I wouldn’t be making moves during the school day so the game might go fairly slow.
The game was quite even with him being up a minor piece for a bit, then I made a lucky move that put me a piece ahead. I say it was lucky because when I made the move before it, I didn’t realize how good the move was… so it wasn’t like I was seeing ahead and planning it to work as well as it did. He never recovered and I won the game.
But what I found interesting was that even when he was down to two pawns blocked by my pawns that were fully protected by my king, and I had two knights hunting his king down, he didn’t resign. He played the game out until he was checkmated. Then, the next time I visited his class, he came up to me and extended his hand for a handshake. “Good game,” he said shaking my hand and looking me in the eye.
I’m sure he wanted to beat his principal, and I think he might in a future game, we are pretty even in skill. And when he does, I’ll be sure to not resign and allow him the complete victory. And I’ll be sure to shake his hand, and congratulate him on a good game.
I love the ingenuity of students when it comes to avoiding work. I remember a student showing me how playing 3 French YouTube videos in different tabs simultaneously somehow fooled the Rosetta Stone language learning software to think he was responding to oral tests correctly. How on earth did he figure that out?
Here’s a video of a kid who, while doing an online math quiz for homework, figured out that if you go to the web browser’s developer ‘inspect element’ tool you can find out the correct answer. Just hover over the code of the multiple choice questions and it highlights the choices and the code tells you if that choice is true or false.
If there is an easy way to solve things, students will figure it out.
There isn’t an AI detector that can figure out with full certainty that someone cheated using a tool like Chat GPT. And if you find one, it probably would not detect it if the student also used an AI paraphrasing tool to rework the final product. It would be harder again if their prompt said something like, ‘Use grammar, sentence structure, and word choice that a Grade 10 student would use’.
So AI will be used for assignments. Students will go into the inspector code of a web page and find the right answers, and it’s probably already the case that shy students have trained an AI tool to speak with their voice so that they could submit oral (and even video) work without actually having to read anything aloud.
These tools are getting better and better, and thus much harder to detect.
I think tricks and tools like this invite educators to be more creative about what they do in class. We are seeing some of this already, but we are also seeing a lot of backwards sliding: School districts blocking AI tools, teachers giving tests on computers that are blocked from accessing the internet, and even teachers making students, who are used to working with computers, write paper tests.
Meanwhile other teachers are embracing the changes. Wes Fryer created AI Guidelines for students to tell them how to use these tools appropriately for school work. That seems far more enabling than locking tools down and blocking them. Besides, I think that if students are going to use these tools outside of school anyway, we should focus on teaching them appropriate use rather than creating a learning environment that is nothing like the real world.
All that said, if you send home online math quizzes, some students will find an easy way to avoid doing the work. If you have students write essays at home and aren’t actively having them revise that work in class, some will use AI. Basically, some students will cheat the system, and themselves of the learning experience, if they are given the opportunity to do so.
The difference is that innovative, creative teachers will use these tools to enhance learning, and they will be in position to learn along with students how to embrace these tools openly, rather than kids sneakily using them to avoid work, or to lessen the work they need to do… either way, kids are going to use these tools.
One of the dumbest tropes in education is that, ‘There is no such thing as a bad question’. Yes, yes there is. Yes there are. There are many bad questions. We live in a world filled with bad questions.
Why are people still asking if climate change is real? Why do people still question if the world is flat? Why do people still question evolution and want creationism taught in classrooms?
Because we live in a world where bad questions are asked and people respond to them. With each justification there is a rebuttal, and when millions of people hear the dumb, illogical, misleading, and inaccurate rebuttals some of them will believe these bad ideas.
Bad ideas spread from debating bad questions.
Good questions deserve debate. Bad questions should be ignored… or redirected. ‘Is climate change real’ is a dumb question based on a bad idea. A better question is, ‘We know humans are impacting the climate, what can be done to reduce that impact?’ Spending time rationalizing the first question is literally giving the question too much power, and the ignorant responses an opportunity to be shared.
It’s worth saying this again, it’s the problem we face today across many fields, spreading through news and social media… and when we participate, we are part of the problem:
Bad ideas spread from debating bad questions.
So the next time someone tells you there is no such thing as a bad question, you might want to disagree, just don’t waste too much time debating the point.
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.
I am nervous about the balance of things: work/home life/exercise; leadership/management; priorities/budgets; teaching & learning; support & independence; planning & follow through; time & efficiency.
I may be nervous but I can feel the potential… the promise of a great year ahead. Physiologically there is almost no difference between anxious nervousness and excitement. So I’ll reframe my thinking, I am excited.
I hope all educators are equally excited. We are in an incredible occupation. We change lives. We make learning fun and engaging. And our teaching goes well beyond the curriculum. We don’t teach subjects, we teach kids. We teach kindness, collaboration, cooperation, and creativity. We don’t just teach classes, we teach young adults who want to do well, who soar, who struggle, and who do the best with the resources they have.
Some come to us full of support and resources, others come to us with much less. The less the resources, the more compassion we need. The greater the challenge, the more patience we must have. The more we are challenged, the higher we must rise.
We can be the purveyor of the status quo, or we can be the change agents we want to be. It all begins today… here we go!
Well today I did a whole lot of nothing. I came down to the basement do a workout 3 hours ago, and I have successfully completed a 10 minute row, less than 10 minutes of stretching, and an abdominal workout that lasted the length of a 2 minute and 40 second song. Hey, this might not be a typical workout… but I didn’t skip the day. Not every workout needs to be at 100%.
I listened to a part of a podcast, watched a few TikToks, and I’m writing this lying on my back next to a magnetic toy where I successfully made a couple DNA strands out of triangles. 
I’ve spoken about playing with geometry before, this ‘playing’ was the most productive part of my day.
Tomorrow is Day 1 of the new school year and the pace for the next month will be anything but lazy. So, I look at my 3 hours of ‘wasted’ time as time very well wasted. Today was the calm before the storm. Batteries are charging, and I’m taking full advantage of my last lazy day, not even caring that I’m mixing my metaphors. 🤪
Now off to pick up pizza, ain’t no way my wife and I are cooking tonight! 😀
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To all the educators out there, I wish you a fabulous year of teaching and learning ahead!
