Our visit to the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry was inspiring! The philosophy of the school very much aligned with mine. I loved seeing how engaged every student was in their work, this is rarely what you see when observing a high school. Their inquiry approach was interesting, and I will admit I am still a little confused about how it works exactly, but it was fascinating to me that the students still end up covering all the curricular material through projects chosen by themselves. This is difficult for me to conceptualize, and I imagine quite a lot of work for the teachers. Does this then mean that the teachers create personalized learning plans for every student based on their interest, yet still woven with curricular content? This would require a lot of work on behalf of the teacher. That being said, if the pay off is student engagement and in depth learning, then the extra teacher effort would be worth it in my opinion.
I attend a similar high school, minus the inquiry aspect (which I suppose is the most important part). My school was a self-directed learning school, meaning I learnt through a textbook and at my own pace instead of through a lecture style with teachers. I would study on my own, and when I felt ready I would write the exam for that unit. I enjoyed the flexibility with this type of schooling as I wasn’t the type of student that enjoyed being confined to classrooms and bell schedules. The difference between my old school and PSII was that it wasn’t inquiry based. We learnt curricular material straight from the text book and wrote standard tests after every unit. PSII has taken this idea and made it student centred. The problem with my old school was that it was often hard to get motivated as you didn’t have a teacher constantly setting due dates or specific blocks to do work. If I wasn’t interested in a subject I often neglected the work I had to do until the last minute. PSII has eradicated this issue allowing the students to chose how they learn and what specific topics they learn. This helps to keep students motivated as they are learning through within a field of their interest.
I would be curious to study more closely how their system works to see really how engaged the students were beyond the surface level that I saw last week. From what I was able to see, however, they have created a revolutionary way of educating youth that I would love to see gain more traction within Canada.