So just got home from our cohort field trip to the independent school: Pacific School for Innovation and Inquiry, and having no clue what to expect from my first independent school trip, they really surprised and impressed me. The whole field trip was essentially a presentation by the founder, principal, and teacher at the school (who’s name is totally slipping my mind right now), and he gave us great insight to how the school works and answered everyone of our questions.
How the school works is it is funded 50% by the government and the rest by student tuition (about $7200/year). He said the goal of this school was to prove and show to others that if you have an idea of how schooling should work it is completely feasible to be able to run an independent school through only 50% funding by the government. The tuition covered many things for the students including a laptop that every student must have, and assorted passes (ex. pass to the local YMCA) because for physical education students had to be able to interact in the community because the school itself was barely big enough to hold the 96 students and 7 teachers.
The founder initially started this school because he believed that the inquiry process made the most sense on how students should learn and how school should be. How the inquiry process was setup at PSII was that each student had at least 2 full scale inquiry projects on the go that started off as a simple question like “what is dreaming?” then after simple googles, and the use of wikipedia, was turned into a question of more depth like; “how does lucid dreaming effect one’s mental state?”. After this stage students were then tasked with going on and doing their own individual research that normally reflected some of the British Columbia curriculum. This is how students were to complete the BC curriculum and progress through high school while still having the opportunity to go to university.
Although the school itself was extremely interesting and how the students were constantly learning about things that intrigued them, there were a few situations where I was unsure about the school and how I would enjoy teaching there. The first being; how do the teachers keep the students on task? Wandering around the school I saw lots of students just messing around on their laptops and not really doing anything of much importance. Because there are no set classes, and teachers are more there to help you when you need it and not crack down on what you are doing it made me register that the students might have too much free time on their hands. I know students can’t be working on school work 24/7, but personally I see too much of a temptation for goofing around. Secondly, how can the teachers assure students are meeting the basic BC curriculum requirements in order for students to graduate in BC? This was a tricky one for me to wrap my head around because of the shear amount of freedom students got in this school and how there were no set classes. The principal gave the example of a student who just loved calculus and started learning calculus in grade 9 and continued on until he graduated. This led me to believe he did numerous inquiry projects on this topic, thus probably not touching on a lot of science or English topics. So how did he get to the point where he got enough credit to pass English 9-12, and finish the provincial exam? It’s these types of scenarios that make me appreciate what these teachers are doing for these kids because it really did seem like they enjoyed it, but it is not a school I would see myself working at.
The one major thing that I noticed that made me feel like I wouldn’t want to work at a tech inquiry based school is that teachers seemed more like teacher assistants. With having barely any lessons to teach and a lower student/teacher ratio, it seemed like it would get boring at points. Most students said they didn’t engage with teachers often unless they had too, and the way the principle made it seem is that they only needed to check up on the students once per day. Although we weren’t there for that long, I just had a few questions that I mentioned in this blog post that made me wonder if I could ever work at a school like this.
Finally, because we are elementary school teachers and we visited a high school, I am genuinely curious to know if this type of schooling is even possible for students as young as primary, intermediate or middle years. I mean I never knew a place like this even existed for high schoolers so I am not gonna doubt that it could work for younger ages, but I just am having trouble fathoming how it would work. Overall, it was a super cool field trip and opened my eyes to the shear amount of technology used in a full inquiry based schooling system.
Riley
