Category: Weekly Reflections

This week, we were prompted in class to think about what education might look like in the year 2040. I immediately thought about the introduction to Rob Hopkin’s book, From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want. The first chapter of this book is titled, “What if everything turned out okay?” and takes the reader on a tour of a future world that has moved away from fossil fuels, industrial agriculture, and capitalism, and is moving towards the cultivation of resilient local communities. Reading this, I find Rob’s vision filled with veggie gardens, bicycles, and bakeries really inspiring. The first introductory chapter is available on the publisher’s website here. If this vision resonates with you, you might also appreciate this video here that (literally) paints a picture of a similar future that I find super inspiring.

In part of the excerpt, Hopkins envisions what education might look like. I’ve included a part of this in the quote below. What I find really interesting about this vision, is that there is really no mention of technology. The focus of education in this future world is community, play, and learning meaningful skills. Perhaps this isn’t because technology isn’t a part of people’s lives and instead because technology just plays less of a role or a completely different role in people’s lives.

“In our community, the kids seem to have radically different feelings about school than they did ten years ago. The education department’s decision to eliminate testing, to give ample space for unstructured play and to provide students with opportunities within the community to acquire meaningful skills that enable them to live happy and healthy lives by their own definition means that most kids here now love going to school. My son, for example, recently upped his cooking skills by spending a week at a local restaurant.”

Rob Hopkins Imagining the Future of Education in Chapter 1 of From What is to What If?

Rob Hopkins vision for the future resonates with me in a lot of ways and I think that technology can still have a place in it. I appreciate the move away from testing and towards meaningful skill-building. The focus on community-engaged education is also something that really excites me. I think technology can fit into this picture as well and I think the pandemic was a really great learning experience in this regard. For me, it highlighted a lot of great things that technology can bring to the table. For one, it makes learning a lot more accessible to people regardless of where they live or their ability to access a physical campus. This accessibility is something I hope gets carried into the future. Another thing I think came out of the pandemic, was the ability to communicate meaningfully in real-time with people around the world. I know that this technology existed before the pandemic, but my awareness of it’s possibilities increased greatly after being forced to use it for the better part of two years.

So, what do I hope the future of education involves?

After a good ramble and some reflecting on a vision for the future that I admire, I’ve come up with some ideas of what I hope the future of education involves. I’ve drawn on some of my ramblings above, some of my experiences this term, some things I’ve been thinking about, and some of the things we’ve been talking and learning about in this course. This list is not exhaustive, nor is it complete. I’m sure as I learn more I will have things to add and change.

• Less focus on testing and more focus on meaningful skill-building (borrowing from Rob Hopkins). I think the B.C. curriculum is moving in the right direction with how everything is becoming competency driven but I’m not sure I’m observing this play out in schools in ways that are drastically different than when I was in high school with the old curriculum. I really like how Rob Hopkins focuses on kids learning the skills they need to live their lives “[happy and healthy by their own definition]”. Not everyone will have the same things that they want to get out of education and the learning opportunities that are available should reflect this (and already do to some extent).
• Engagement with the wider community as a tenet of education (also similar to Rob Hopkins). I reflected on this in my first reflection in this course looking at High Tech High and how they created some accountability to their community with their end-of-year showcase. I really hope that this becomes more widespread in the future of education. I think that creating meaningful connections to the community also helps students to recognize the relevance that school has to their lives outside of the classroom. Maybe there won’t even be classrooms. Maybe ‘school’ as we know it will be completely embedded within the wider community. Whoa.
• More time outside learning about the world by spending time in it. This is really related to the last point and is really about connecting students to the more-than-human community that they are a part of. In his great essay, “What is an Education For?” author and environmental educator David Orr writes that “All education is an environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world”. I think that this perspective is really key to bring into the future (and present) of education.
• Technology for accessibility and meaningful connection. I think that technology will be a part of the future of education and I hope that it is in ways that make education more accessible and foster meaningful connections between people around the world who may otherwise not connect. We learned a bit about the possibilities of technology for accessibility in this class and how it can completely transform learning experiences for some kids. I think this is awesome and hope that accessible technology is something that becomes more widespread in the future of education. I also think technology provides really cool ways to connect with people in completely different places around the world and bring them into your classroom. I hope that connection-building and sharing is also part of the future of education.

Below are some of the results of entering a couple of the key words I’ve been thinking about into an AI generated art website. This is what AI thinks of my vision for the future. Of course, there are lots of bicycles (partly because I included them in my description). There are also lots of things that AI came up with that I didn’t explicitly include. Check out the intergenerational learning happening in image three!

This week, we were fortunate to have Chantelle Morvay-Adams from BC EdAccess join our class. BC EdAccess is an organization devoted to advocating for and supporting people with disabilities and their families within the BC education system. Chantelle brought a lot of her personal experience navigating issues of access within the education system into the discussion which I think added a really important lens to her presentation. We have been talking about accessibility in other classes as well and this was a really great reminder of our responsibilities as teachers to address the needs of all students in the classroom.

BC EdAccess Exclusion Tracker

BC EdAccess has created an exclusion tracker for students and/or their families to report instances where they have been excluded from school activities or school altogether. The purpose of this tracker is to confirm the existence of exclusion within the school system, examine the types of exclusion that take place, and to empower students and families with the tools they need to self-advocate. I found it really eye-opening the level of exclusion that students with disabilities are experiencing in schools. In the 2021- 2022 school year, 4760 incidents of exclusion were reported.

“In order to eliminate the discriminatory practice of excluding children with disabilities, we must continuously expose how, when, and where it happens in schools.”

Nicole Kaler, Chair, BC EDAccess

Below is a list of some of the ways that students are being excluded within the B.C. education system that have been reported through the tracker:

• Only being allowed to attend for a partial day
• Not being allowed to attend school until an EA is available
• Excluded from field trips
• Excluded from extracurricular activities
• Excluded from certain courses because materials are not adapted
• Excluded because of concerns over adherence to COVID safety protocols

Moving Towards Equity and Inclusion

After Chantelle spoke, we had discussions in small groups about some of the systematic barriers that exist within the education system and how we might dismantle them and create inclusive classrooms. Some of the ideas that came up in this discussion and that have come up in other classes are listed below.

• Asking students and families how you can best support them
• Creating and maintaining open lines of communication with families
• Google Read-Write text to speech plug-in
• Speech to text technology in Google Docs
• Newsela news articles with a variety of reading levels and text to speech
• Closed captioning on YouTube and in Zoom
• Using FM systems for learners who are hearing impaired
• Recording classes for students that cannot be physically in class

This week in class we had a discussion about online learning. This was not the first time I’ve participated in this type of discussion and it was interesting to hear a whole host of new and familiar perspectives on people’s experiences learning online. Personally, I found online learning challenging. I found that I really missed the social connections that came with being at school in person and I found it really difficult to separate my school life from the rest of my life at home. On the other hand, I was also able to live outside of Victoria for the majority of the pandemic, which is something I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do.

In addition to learning online, I was also facilitating programs for youth in a rural community. Being a simultaneous online learner and facilitator was a really interesting experience, and I feel that I learned a lot about how online learning can be really useful in certain circumstances. In particular, I learned a lot about making learning more accessible and some of the ways technology can work online and in-person to increase accessibility (e.g. adding closed captioning).

Summary of Discussion

Below I’ve made a table of pros and cons that came up in our discussion of online learning. Although I don’t think it’s ‘future of education’ (or at least hope not), I do think that online-everything that occurred during the pandemic provided an opportunity for reflection about all sorts of aspects of education.

In a previous post, I looked at a framework to guide inquiry that’s used at the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII), an innovative high school on  lək̓ʷəŋən territories in Victoria, B.C. We were lucky to have Jeff Hopkins, the principal of PSII, join our class to talk about the school and some of the projects his students are working on. I found Jeff’s discussion to be really inspiring. We’re learning about the concept of inquiry in all sorts of classes, and it’s really neat to see how Jeff and PSII have run with it and are implementing it in real and meaningful ways.

Key Takeaways

1. Emergent Curriculum

One of the terms Jeff used that really stuck with me was “emergent curriculum”. My understanding of emergent curriculum is curriculum that emerges from student interest and ideas. I think this is a really interesting, powerful, and engaging model for co-creating curriculum. One of the main questions I had about PSII is how they line up this emergent curriculum with the B.C. curriculum that they are having to work within. This is something I feel like I still don’t understand fully, but from what Jeff said, it sounds like this can sometimes be a bit challenging. PSII is trying to move beyond simple coverage of curriculum within a system that is still trying to check curriculum boxes.

2. Assessment of/for/as Learning

One of my other main takeaways from Jeff was his focus on assessment as a tool of, for, and as learning. We haven’t taken a class in assessment yet in this program, but have been learning a little bit about it in a couple of our classes. Jeff’s perspective on assessment was really interesting because it is really embedded in everything that PSII learners and teachers do. When I think about my high school experience, we did a lot of learning followed by assessing (Assessment of Learning) and a lot less of assessment as part of the learning process. I’m really interested in learning more about assessment and the different ways it can work, which is something I didn’t expect that I would have a lot of interest in coming into this program.

Resources from Jeff

Jeff shared a whole bunch of resources with us, including some of the books, videos, and ideas that guide his work at PSII. With all of the resources being thrown at us, I thought I’d compile a list so that I can come back to them later. Here are some of the things he shared:

• Social by Matthew Lieberman
• The Emotional Life of Your Brain by Richard Davidson
• Calm, Alert, and Learning by Stuart Shanker
• Karen Pape’s work on Neuroplasticity
• Trello for organizing inquiry projects
• Andrew Maclean’s inquiry assessment tool, Comtinuum
• PSII’s competency assessment framework

In the past, I’ve used PowerPoint in a variety of ways. The most common way I’ve used it is to make presentations, but I’ve also used it to make academic posters and figures. Something I like about PowerPoint is that you can change the size of a slide, which lets you make a poster of any size. I used this feature to make a poster for a research project in my undergrad (below). I also really appreciate how user-friendly PowerPoint is. Compared to other programs I’ve tried, I find that the learning curve required to make simple graphics in PowerPoint is much less steep than programs like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. If you’ve used PowerPoint to make a presentation it’s only a small step further to try graphics or posters.

In class, we were introduced to the power of PowerPoint to make simple graphics. Having used it for similar projects in the past, I felt like I had a decent background using PowerPoint going into this, but I learned a bunch of new things! It was awesome! I had no idea that you could use PowerPoint to remove the background of an image. I had also never tried using PowerPoint Icons or 3D models. This class was a great opportunity to play around with a familiar tool in new ways. I ended up trying to make a diagram illustrating how sediment deposition varies downstream following a river from mountains to the ocean. While making the diagram, I tried to use some tools that were new to me, like icons. This diagram is relevant to Physical Geography 12 or Geology 12. Knowing how the energy of an environment impacts sediment deposition underpins interpretation of the history of a sedimentary rock. Creating a diagram in PowerPoint could be one way to test student’s knowledge of a topic like this in a creative way.

Last week in class, we had a discussion about content curation. This discussion could not have come at a better time! At this point in the program, I feel like I’m being inundated with amazing resources that I want to save for later but I don’t have a good system for keeping things organized and find-able for future me. This week, I’ve spent some time trying to figure out a good system for organizing all of the links and lesson plans, readings and resources that come my way. Before this week, I felt like my content curation was all over the place. I had lots of things saved in my bookmarks and in folders on my desktop, but no unifying strategy. This sometimes made it hard to find resources later. I’m hoping that trying out some new systems make this a bit easier.

My goals for the this content curation exploration were to:

1. Find a system that is easy and convenient to use
2. Find a system that uses as few platforms as possible for saving information (i.e. everything in one place instead of all over the place)
3. Find a system that is automatically backed up somewhere so I don’t have to worry about losing everything

Here are some of the things I’ve been trying out and my thoughts on them.

Google Drive

I’ve used Google Drive for a long time but usually only for group projects. I’m used to using Microsoft Word and Excel and so tend to use Microsoft 365 and OneDrive through UVic for working on and saving my individual work. With the number of group projects in this program on Google Drive, I feel like I’m straddling too many platforms right now. So, I’ve been experimenting with moving things over to Google Drive and using it to save my own work and resources that I find. Right now, I am working on a plate tectonics unit plan for Earth Science 11. I’ve been testing out Google Drive as a way to save resources as I come across them and integrate them into my wider unit plan. So far, this is working okay. I like that everything is in one place and it is easy to add and save different types of files. I have some work to do still on migrating other projects I am working on to this platform so that everything is in one place.

Google Keep

The one thing I don’t like about how I’ve been using Google Drive is that it is not always convenient to move something from a web page into a Google Doc. I have to have the Google Doc open while I’m researching a topic and then switch between tabs when I want to save something. This is where Google Keep comes in handy. I’m thinking about Google Keep as a better way to do bookmarks. Like bookmarks, you can use a Google Chrome Plug-in to make saving webpages quick and easy. You can also add tags to the webpages you save so that they are organized much like bookmark folders. The difference is that when you save something to Google Keep, you can also add information to it. For example, I’ve been working on an annotated bibliography for one of our classes right now, and I’m finding this a really useful tool for finding and saving resources with a bit of a summary attached to them. As an added bonus, Google Keep integrates with Google Docs so that you can bring notes you make in Keep into a document.

Twitter Lists

I’ve never used Twitter before, but my mum, who is a teacher, loves using it as a way to learn about new resources and share them with other people. With the option to use it for this class and her experience in mind, I decided to give it a go. While working on my curation system, I thought I’d check out the ways that Twitter could be a part of this. Although I’m not super keen on retweeting everything I see that I want to save, I do think that the option to make Twitter Lists is something that could be useful to me. From my understanding, a Twitter List is like a sub-feed where you can group accounts you follow by topic and have all of their tweets show up in one place. I have an interest in environmental education, so I decided to make a private list where I can follow different twitter accounts related to this.

Concluding Thoughts

Although I don’t think I’ve perfected my content curation system, I’ve enjoyed exploring some different strategies for improving it. As the term goes on and I play around with this system, I’m sure it will evolve in lots of ways. For now, I am happy to have streamlined my system and bit and excited to see how it changes the ways I curate resources and information.

This week in class we had an EdCamp. An EdCamp is an “unconference” where participants drive the professional development instead of organizers. Our EdCamp started with people writing topics on sticky notes and posting them on the wall. As a class, we then voted for the topics that we were most interested in discussing and the four topics with the most votes became the discussion points for the day. A facilitator took the lead on each topic, and the discussion began! There was no expert speaking at the front of the room and instead the discussion was driven by the experiences of participant. The video below illustrates what this might look like.

This was my first time participating in a conference with a participant-guided structure and it was really neat. I really appreciated the non-hierarchical nature of discussion, where everyone was welcome to participate and share their experience regardless of their teaching area, teaching experience, or other expertise. I found the structure also really conducive to building relationships between participants. As we chatted, some of us realized we had experiences in common or similar questions about a particular topic and were able to make connections over these things.

Using the EdCamp Model in the Classroom

Even though we were participating in an EdCamp in the context of teacher professional development, I think that a similar model could work really well in the classroom. For example, one of my teachable subjects in social studies, and I think that you could use EdCamp as a way to talk about current events in class. It could also be used as a way to find out what students are interested in and give them some space to self-direct their learning and teach each other. In one example I read about, a teacher has their students organize an EdCamp-style workshop for a younger grade at the school. This gave them an opportunity to not only explore their own interests but also take a leadership roles with younger students.

The SAMR model provides a framework for integrating technology into a classroom. The model was developed in 2010 by Rueben Puentedura, a chemist, expert on technology and education, and a former teaching fellow at Harvard University. The model progresses from enhancement to transformation of educational experiences using technology in four stages: substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition. Using technology to enhance an educational experience, can involve simply substituting the technology for existing methods (e.g. writing an essay in a word document instead of on paper) or augmenting existing methods using technology (e.g. using spelling/grammar checkers to improve essay). Using technology to transform an educational experience can involve modifying existing methods (e.g. using google docs to write essays in small groups and then share between classmates for feedback) or redefining them all together (e.g. creating video/podcast based on essay topic in group).

In the video below, Rueben Puentedura, the creator of the SAMR model highlights an example of how this model could be applied moving from the enhancement to transformation stages. In this video, Rueben highlights that in moving from enhancement to transformation, a key change is that activities students normally complete individually become social activities as well. For example, an individual assignment could become a group project. Alternatively, the outcome of a project could be shared with the wider community.

Applying SAMR in the Classroom

Example: Learning About Seismic Waves

When an earthquake occurs, seismic waves are released. There are different types of seismic waves which behave in different ways. These waves can be detected and recorded by an instrument called a seismometer. Learning about different types of seismic waves and their detection is part of the Geology 12 curriculum in B.C.

Substitution: Instead of drawing a diagram of different seismic waves on the board, use a diagram from the internet on a powerpoint slide.

Augmentation: Instead of a diagram, use a simulation to demonstrate the differences in behaviour of different types of seismic waves.

Modification: In groups, ask students to create a short video clip simulating the motion of the different types of seismic waves through dance.

Redefinition: Introduce a seismometer into your school so that students can see how seismic waves are detected and recorded in real-time. In groups, students could analyze some of the data from the seismometer and compare it to the data coming from other school-seismometers in the region. More resources here.

The Pacific School for Innovation and Inquiry (PSII) is a high school on unceded lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) territories in downtown Victoria dedicated to learning through inquiry. In a similar way to High Tech High, subjects are integrated and the B.C. standard curriculum is “uncovered” by uniquely combining different subject areas across the curriculum. What’s neat about PSII, is that learning is highly personalized. Learners guide the inquiry based on their own interests, and teachers support them in this journey. There are no grade groupings, and students are grouped dynamically based on shared interests or similarities in projects or differences, depending on what makes the most sense in each context. Learners are encouraged to engage with the community in “real” projects that contribute in some way to their community and wider society. It all sounds pretty fantastic, but how does it work in practice? How do students come up with inquiry topics? How do teachers best support this inquiry? Is there any guiding structure that inquiry at PSII follows? These are the questions that this blog post will explore.

A Guide for Inquiry

So, how does one start an inquiry project? And where does it go from there? PSII follows a five-step model of inquiry. These five steps are as follows:

1. Starting: What are my initial questions? What types of questions can I ask?
2. Deepening: How can I answer these questions? What else do I need to know?
3. Refining: Can I improve my questions from step 1? Do I have any new questions?
4. Planning: How can I address these questions in creative ways? What are the best modes to address these questions? What will I need to answer these questions? How long will each of these questions take to answer?
5. Learning: Am I achieving what I set out to do in my planning stage? What is going well? What could be improved upon?

These five steps are built into a standard framework that learners at PSII are able to follow. An example of this framework put into action is animated in the video below.

Applying this framework to my own inquiry

For my free inquiry project, I am exploring urban environmental education by engaging in backyard adventures. These are adventures that are local to where I live, within a radius limited by my own abilities. Through this effort, I’m hoping to explore my own environmental education, learn a bit more about the place I live, and make connections to how I may apply similar principles in the classroom (and outside of it). To familiarize myself with the PSII framework and as an example of how it may be applied to an inquiry project, I’ve laid out the five steps in the table below. I may come back to this throughout my project to modify and refine it as I learn more.

The movie “Most Likely to Succeed” is about High Tech High (HTH), a school on unceded Kumeyaay territories in San Diego, California with a radical and innovative approach to education. At HTH, students engage in semester long cross-curricular projects designed to prepare students to be citizens and leaders in a high-technology world. The original school, which is featured in the film, was opened in 2000, and has since expanded to include six high schools, five middle schools, and five elementary schools, all following the same innovative approach. Examples of some of the projects that students engage in at HTH include:

• Exploring the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history and articulating the key factors influencing the rise/fall of civilizations through a mechanical art installation (Social Studies/Physics/Engineering)
• Exploring themes of justice, genocide, refugees, and the treatment of women through the reading and performance of Greek plays (English, Social Studies, Art)

More projects can be seen on the HTH website here.

The way that teachers combine subject areas at HTH was really interesting, and frankly, quite amazing. As a teacher-in-training, I found it incredibly inspiring to see these examples of cross-curricular inquiry in action. HTH seemed like a real-life example of a lot of what we have been talking about theoretically in PDPP classes, combining concepts of inquiry, experiential learning, multiliteracies, and interdisciplinarity. Within the new B.C. Curriculum, where there is a focus on broad concepts and competencies rather than specific curriculum, I think that there could be some opportunity to explore this type of teaching and learning. One of the challenges I foresee with applying the HTH model to a classroom in BC is that most high schools in BC offer subject-specific classes in siloes (e.g. Social Studies, Science, Math, French, Art, English). This means that being able to cross the divide between subjects requires collaboration with other teachers in different subject areas who teach in separate class times. In our Social Studies methods class, we learned about Hood River Middle School, where teachers collaborate between different subject areas to approach problems or topics from different ways in their different classes. For example, while students were launching a weather balloon and analyzing the data it collected in a science class, they were also coming up with different types of stories about where the weather balloon may have travelled in an English class. This could be one way to approach something similar to the HTH model within the current B.C. public education system.

It was also evident from the movie that students are incredibly engaged and invested in their learning. In part this may be because the projects they are working on look incredibly fun, but I think part of it may also be a result of the focus on exhibiting their work at the end of the year. The public display of class projects at the end of the term provided them an opportunity to share what they had learned with their community in a spectacular showcase. I was really impressed by this mode of assessment because I think it’s a great example of education not only engaging the community it is a part of, but also being accountable to it. This is something that I have not seen explicitly explored in any of our classes yet but is something that I think is really important. Educators should be accountable to the communities they are teaching in, both as an aspect of professionalism and as an act of citizenship. By displaying their work in a community showcase, students are also learning the importance of being a member of a community and their role as citizens within that community.

I left this movie feeling inspired. It was really cool to see a school taking such a unique approach to education, that not only appears to be really successful, but also looks super fun! It was also neat to explore the HTH website a bit more, learn a bit more about some of the other projects they have taken on, and think about how some of the same ideas could be applied within the education systems we will be working in.