This week In class we had guest speaker, Jeff Hopkins, in class. Hopkins is the principal of the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII). PSII is an independent school located in downtown Victoria that uses inquiry based learning. The 110 students don’t have a timetable or set classes. Instead they come up with questions about what they are interested in and teachers help them along the way. Hopkins said that he was inspired to create the school after feeling like he had to ignore what he knew about learning in order to teach. I really enjoyed seeing what inquiry based teaching can look like at a high school level. I experienced a lot of inquiry as part of the education program but it was nice to see a real world example of it working at a high school. I also enjoyed discussing what problems the school has faced how how they were overcome. I think when it comes to my own teaching I was inspired how PSII was able to incorporate any subject into the inquiry model. I would like to bring a number of elements of inquiry based learning into my own practice.
PSII also had some resources I found useful. I have listed them below.
PSII Assessment Framework and how it connects to the BC curriculum
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.