Tag Archives: students

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.

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

What students remember

What students forget:

  • The Krebs cycle
  • Historical facts
  • How to solve quadratic equations
  • The homework they did
  • Answers on tests
  • Worksheets
  • Teachers who will forget them

What students remember:

  • Teachers who will remember them
  • Teachers who listened
  • Teachers that made them laugh
  • Teachers who were passionate about teaching
  • Teachers who didn’t give up on them
  • Friends
  • Engaging projects
  • Sports and clubs

These lists are not extensive… but they are the inspiration for a question: What will students remember about school during the 2020-2021 pandemic?

Teachers have it tough right now. Students too. More than ever teachers need to focus on teaching students, not subjects.

Yesterday I saw an article with a title like, ‘Study shows students are months behind in reading skills due to remote learning.’ Squeezing one more book into the year won’t change that. Showing students a passion for reading will.

Focus on students… and they will remember you, and what you taught them, for all the right reasons.

Voice and choice

This was my Facebook memory from 3 years ago:

Spent well over 15hrs at work today and came home totally pumped! Students rocked their presentations at our open house tonight.

The whole event exceeded my expectations, starting with about 240 people coming (more than I had reservations or seats for), and ending with students interviewing each other with questions from the audience.

It is simply amazing what student’s can do when they are given voice & choice, and they are provided with time to explore their passions and publicly share them.

Congratulations to our Inquiry Hub students, you were amazing school ambassadors today!

I’ve been thinking and writing about giving students choice, voice, and an authentic audience for over a decade now. And, I’ll always remember this night as the night I really saw it fully come to life.

Everything about this open house went amazing. The only challenges where parking, and adding more seats to the gym. The students did 90% of the planning and executed a seamless event with perfect sound and incredible presentations that opened people’s eyes to what’s possible when students feel empowered in a school.

The best part of the night was watching students interviewing students about their inquiry projects. Our students got to share what kinds of projects they do, designed by them, to follow their passions and interests as part of their school day. This is the real strength of what we do at Inquiry Hub.

There are students just like ours in every school. The difference is, in many other schools, students spend their days following a pattern of going class to class and doing what the teacher tells them to do. Yes, some of those things teachers ask them to do are amazing. But students seldom get a part of their day to choose what they want to work on. Students seldom get to design their own learning on a topic of their choice.

What we’ve learned as educators at Inquiry Hub is that to do this, students need scaffolding and support, working on progressively bigger projects. Students need assistance with time management and being self directed. And students need to try, fail, learn, and grow.

Whenever I hear a senior student at Inquiry Hub talk about their projects, they talk about being fearless learners who aren’t afraid to fail along the way. They will often do this while telling a story about something others would consider a huge success, but to them there was still more to do, or aspects of the project not yet achieved. This resilience only comes when students feel they have voice and choice in their learning, and this open house three years ago told me that we were finally achieving the kind of student empowerment we were hoping to achieve when we started the school.

Averages and Parachute Packing

This is Part 2 of:

Average tells us nothing.

Here are some very well rounded marks of a hypothetical student in a course:

The student starts out very average with 60% on the first 3 tests:

On the next test, the student shows much greater comprehension:

Then on the final test, the student shows mastery of the PLO’s, the prescribed learning outcomes:

Now if these were tests on completely different units, unrelated to each other, you could argue that the student deserves a 70% final. However if the student was learning information that was cumulative and knowledge at the end of the course required understanding of previous work, then wouldn’t the student deserve a higher mark?

For example, if the student was learning to code, and the simple(r) concepts learned at the start of the course (that the first 3 tests were on) were required understanding to do well in the second part of the course: Shouldn’t the student’s final mark represent greater understanding of the course than the 70% final mark from the average of all 5 tests?

The Parachute Packing Analogy

I love the simplicity of this example! There are 3 students who are in a parachute packing class:

Students take 3 tests during the course.

Student A starts off strong and gets an A on the first test, gets a B on the second test, is over-confident, flounders and gets a C on their final test.

Student B is a solid B student and gets B’s on all 3 tests.

Student C struggles on the first test and gets a C, starts understanding the concepts and gets a B on the second test, then totally understands all the concepts and finishes with an A on the final test.

All 3 students have a ‘B’ average in the course.

Which student do you want to pack your parachute?

Average tells us nothing.

Part 1

It might be an exaggeration to say that it tells us nothing, but averages don’t usually give us enough information to be useful.

Individual student level: In Math class, kid gets an ‘A’ on his test on positive and negative integers. Then he gets a ‘C’ on fractions. Score averages to a ‘B’… but when the kid moves on to algebra, and most of the algebra includes solving problems with fractions, it’s unlikely the kid will do better than a ‘C’. The important information is the ‘C’ in fractions, not the ‘B’ average.

On a team level: When some team members have done amazing things and other tram members have done nothing new, measuring the average means absolutely nothing. You can’t look at averages when some team members will move and some won’t. The reality is that everybody has to be moving in the right direction, and when some are standing still, it doesn’t matter where the average is, it doesn’t matter if the average is moving slightly up.

The fact is that we are failing or we have failed if we don’t figure out where we are weakest and improve where we need it most. Athletes get this. They know that the weakest part of their performance is the area where there is the most room for improvement… this is a mindset we need on our teams to move forward.

Part 2: The Parachute Packing analogy and school grades.

Resilience Revisited

Right now it seems like I chose the right #OneWord for 2020: Resilience. But as you read my last post of 2019, written before we learned about the impending pandemic, remember something… We are social beings and we are not incredibly resilient on our own. We need a community, we need friendship and love, we need each other.

Relationships, be they with family, friends, co-workers, student/teacher, and even pets, build our resilience, and our ability to not just cope, but to thrive.

Let’s support one another and show our resilience together!

Here is the post:

December 31, 2019

If I were to pick 2 words for 2020, I might pick “Growth Mindset”, but if I’m only choosing a single word, it would be:

Resilience

The world needs this word right now. Here are some specific places I see a need to pay attention to this #OneWord in 2020.

In Schools:

Student anxiety seems to be on the rise, and anxiety lowers resilience and the willingness to try new things. Words seem to ‘injure’ students in ways that victimize them rather than make them stronger. This is not to say that students should tolerate bullying or inappropriate language or slander, rather they should speak up, defend themselves, and report poor behaviour. Instead it seems that they feel wounded and do not act. This is a sensitive topic, but one where I’ve seen a greater awareness of adults who want to support students and at the same time I see students allowing words to hurt them deeply, giving too much power to the transgressor.

In Politics:

I said this in Ideas on a Spectrum, “In a civil society, dialogue is the one problem-solving strategy that should be sacred. To do this, free speech is essential. But right now there is a culture of ‘attack the opposition’ that is very scary.“ – We need to be resilient when hearing opposing views, and understand that, “…we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views, unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference.” When we can’t have conversations with people that have different political views, we don’t grow as a culture or as a society.

In Online Spaces:

People will make mistakes online. They will say things that are unintentionally hurtful, or blindly offensive. This is different than someone being intentionally biased and rude. If the slander is intentional, it should be reported. If it is unintentional, even to the point of ignorance, we need to be more resilient about what our responses are. When every transgression is treated with an attack, the most severe/bigoted/rude/biased transgressions are not given the heightened alarm that they deserve. With lesser errors and mistakes, we need to let people have a venue to recognize their errors and invite conversation rather than damnation.

Growing up, I heard the playground retort to taunts, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never harm me.” We are past the era of letting nasty people say whatever nasty things they want, and just turning the other cheek to pretend we are not hurt. This is a good thing. We want to live in a world where that behaviour is not acceptable. But it does not serve us well to treat the attacker like they can not repent or be sorry. It does not serve us to let the words said hurt us too deeply. By being resilient we can speak up, clarify our perspective, and engage in conversations that help us feel empowered rather than victimized.

Resilience allows us to be strong, flexible, and engaged in a society that is the kind of society we want to live and thrive in.

A chance to teach

Our grade 10’s are working on resumes and yesterday I got to work with them on a lesson about job interviews. Their pre-lesson homework is to fill out an application form, I use an old one from Subway. I start by sharing some of my experience hiring as a Starbucks manager, then we discuss what makes a good application form, resume, and interview.

Then students take turns in groups of three, being interviewer, interviewee, and observer. They are given a 10 question interview, but the second and third person to go get 3 new questions each turn… this adds a bit of variety to those that have watched the other students go before them.

This is a lesson I’ve done many times before, and one that I enjoy sharing. It is practical and useful, and I share some personal, funny, and even embarrassing stories that help students get to know me a bit better.

In the craziness of school startup, it’s just wonderful to spend a bit of time teaching, to remember why I do the things I do. I have not had a lot of teaching time the past few years, and spending a bit of time with students like this really charges my batteries!

Sorry, my brain is full

Since March there have been so many new demands on educators. The path has not been easy. And the new school year has added many more expectations compared to having 70% of the year already completed, when Covid-19 brought with it the new phrase, ‘remote learning’.

How do I do effective group work with students one or two meters apart? How do I do collaborative projects and minimize the sharing of resources? How do I facilitate student-to-student communication when some students are in class and the rest are learning from home? How do I effectively engage students working from home on web conferencing tools. These and many more questions combine to overwhelm educators who are coping with learning on the fly as they navigate a new frontier.

It really isn’t easy.

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Let’s pause here and think about our students:

How does it feel to be new to a country, not know the language, and have to learn, when everything said needs to be translated and most words are not understood?

How does it feel to be introduced to y=mx+b when you struggle with Math, and never really understood how ‘x‘ was a number, and fractions confuse you?

How does it feel to have to learn the krebs cycle when the chemistry and vocabulary is all totally new to you?

How are you supposed to interpret the meaning of a story when every 5th word is either new to you or seems out of context related to the words around it?

How are you supposed to work from home when the home environment is filled with distractions and interruptions that don’t happen at school?

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While educators struggle to learn in new environments and with new tools, let’s pause and think about how hard learning is for some of our kids, who are also learning in new environments and with new tools… and new content they have never seen before.

Is it just me?

I’ve seen incredible understanding, kindness, and patience in schools this year. I’m a bit worried about the kids who worry, and I wish classes could mix, but it seems everyone is being so considerate.

Maybe it’s just the honeymoon stage, but I’m impressed with the gratitude and thoughtfulness of digital communication I’m seeing. I’m noticing appreciation from families for what is happening… even if it isn’t ideal, or what could have been possible without so many restrictions.

This doesn’t show up in the news. This isn’t what makes headlines. Schools are resilient places. Educators are caring people. Students want to do well.

Everyone is stepping up.

It’s only the start of the journey, and it may be a bit of a bumpy trip… but everyone is doing the best they can (students, educators, and families) and that is making a noticeable and positive difference.

Is it just me, or are others noticing this too?