Weekly Reflections – The Wellness Teacher Journal

“Education is not the filling of a pale, but rather the lighting of a flame”

Jeff Hopkins Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry located in Greater Victoria is an independant high school that focuses on inquiry based learning rather than traditional learning found in most schools in Canada. The major difference between this school and a traditional high school is that students are given more autonomy in their education, and the school fosters an environment that allows for a variety of ways to learn. The structure of the school allows for student’s to research and learn about things that really interest them, while strengthening competencies such as critical and creative thinking. What I like about this school is that it gives students the opportunity to be excited about their education. PSII has a Detailed Daily Calendar that students get to look through and decide what subjects or classes they want to partake in. They offer a variety of classes to students ensuring that their is something for everyone. Some classes that stuck out to me were ASL, Electronic Music Production, Beginner Japanese, and Ceramics. On top of these more elective courses they also offer more traditional subjects like Pre Calculus 11 & Calculus 12, Physics and Chemistry. I think it is great that they offer a combination of traditional and elective classes to allow students who want to pursue university to have the background knowledge that they will need like Calculus 12. With that being said many of the elective classes that are offered are those that you would find in University or College level, offering specific and in depth subjects to deeper students interest and understanding of the topics. Jeff mentions in his video that a student created a paper on Ebola prior to the outbreak that happened in parts of Africa and it has been read by thousands of people to learn about the causes of an outbreak and how to mitigate it from happening. This is just one of the many incredible things that this school is doing, all because they are giving their students the freedom of choice for their own education.

The quote that is featured above is one that Jeff says at the beginning of his TedX video. I really resonated with this quote and I believe that it sums up this type of learning offered at PSII well. Some of the best learning or education I have had in my life has been done on my own time while researching topics of interest to me, not while writing an eight page paper on a historical event that didn’t quite captivate me. That’s not to say that learning about traditional topics and historical events aren’t important, they absolutely are. I believe it is important for humans to be well rounded and knowledgable on all topics. Where I think free inquiry is interesting and powerful is for example taking something like learning about New France. New France is a major part of Canadian History and it is important to know about the history of our country. However what if you had a student that learnt about New France but had an interest in Spanish History, you could say to them instead of writing a paper about New France, why don’t you compare and contrast the rise and fall of New France to New Spain, and try to find the commonalities or differences between these historical events. That slight change and freedom for inquiry could take a C paper to an A+ purely due to the increase of interest from the student. As educators are goal should always be to help our students suceed to the best of their abilities, not just in our class but as human beings. In order to allow our students to succeed it is our job to ignite that flame for learning.

For my first weekly reflection I wanted to do it on the film “Most Likely To Succeed”. I first want to summarize the key points from the film…

Larry Rosenstock is the founder of High Tech High. He created a school that was based off the belief that if a child is interested in something they will want to learn other things that may increase their ability or understanding of the thing they are interested in. An example he gives in the film is on how in his wood working class he noticed his students were willing to learn geometry as it helped them make more stable and functional furniture (00:17:10 Whiteley). He also has a strong understanding and belief that everyone learns in different ways, based off of his own experience studying for the law bar in an unconventional way. Larry established High Tech High with no bells, no written exams, classes aren’t divided into subjects and teachers are brought in on yearly contracts to teach what they are passionate about. This means that teachers have freedom to choose subjects and subject matter that goes beyond the standard curriculum that’s traditionally required. Within each class and the teachers chosen subject matter their is a high emphasis on soft skills such as time management, work ethic, collaboration, confidence building and learning how to deliver as well as recieve feedback. The improvement of these skills are essentially the core mission of the school, creating a group of learners that develop skills instead of retaining information.

What I found most interesting and relevent to today with High Tech High was the acknowledgment and awareness to how artificial intelligence is going to impact our future generations. They had a couple different reasonings for why soft skills are important but what I took from the film was that these human skills are hard to replicate with artificial intelligence. We already see many careers being taken over by AI but the careers that require human compassion, empathy, collaboration and compassion will be very hard to replace with anything other than a human that posseses those skills. The ability to retain information is not as valued as it was in the past due to the fact that we have an unlimited amount of resources and information at our fingertips. We have been learning in history how education has adapted and changed based off of the societal needs at the time, as future teachers we are in a really interesting time where education needs to be transformed in a way to set our future generations up for success, and High Tech High is a great example of this.

With this being said I do think that tradional course content does have a place in education. I believe that it’s imporatant students are educated on all subjects like social studies, math, sciences and the arts as I believe this can help create well rounded individuals. However I do believe that instead of trying to understand every single part of a subject and play a memory game just for a test, it would be more interesting to allow students to understand some main points of the content with the goal to then create a collaborative project based off of something they find interesting that’s either within or relative to the content. An idea I thought would be interesting is if you were teaching a high school math class, your class project could be to code an app which would require some basic understanding of mathematical equations. This could also be done with younger years through access to various different platforms that allow for app building. With this group project in mind it makes the content being learned much more interesting and engaging for the learners and they end up walking away with a tangible item that they worked months to build.

I believe their is space for both traditional and modern education to exist cohesively in our schools, but its important to recongnize the many ways that children learn. We already see many schools implimenting this but it may be time to veer away from traditional testing and lean more into the types of projects and ideas that will develop human skills talked about in the documentary.

Category: Weekly Reflections

Weekly Reflection #2 – Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry

Weekly Reflection #1 – Most Likely To Succeed