One of the most challenging tasks for a school leader is to have a positive impact on overall student learning without necessarily being a classroom teacher (Powell and Kusuma-Powell, 2013). Whether a school leader is a department head, coordinator or principal, he or she must influence the organization’s capacity to nurture, challenge and bring about […]
Building our Toolkit for Inquiry Learning The Background Story My school is revisioning our future. We have been working toward co-creating a model of education, which takes the best of our strengths and using these to design and enact a new Learning Ecosystem. Our vision is simple. What we want is… All students will be […]
One of the topics that can fuel hours of teacher dialog is the difference between assigning tasks and teaching the process by which tasks can be pursued through inquiry. Assigning might consist of telling students to do a task. Teaching a process involves teaching approaches to learning, which might allow students to problem solve for […]
Is schooling completely future-oriented? What might be the boundaries presented to inquiring minds by orientation in time, place and space? The global context in the MYP “Orientation to time, place and space” presents the questions of “where” and “when,” as concepts organizing how individuals might think (IBO, 2015). Consider a few of the recurring misunderstandings in schools: […]
There are some ‘problems’ that surface every year in schools. One of these is the tug-of-war between being rigorous and inclusive. Sometimes, we think that the solution to every issue is to become more rigorous: raise the standards and the engagement and achievement will follow. Other times, we think that the solution to every issue […]
In rethinking the shift to constructivist approaches in the classroom, one guiding principle stands out as key in considerations around inquiry. Warren Berger, in his book A More Beautiful Question, captures the process of inquiry, “Ambitious, catalytic questioning tends to follow a progression, one that often starts with stepping back and seeing things differently and […]
A teacher asked me today, “Why is it that my students do not see the value of poetry?” She had followed the literature text’s suggestions, asking guided questions so students could access the meaning of the poems in the text. We dialogued on the flow of the lessons in her unit, and found that the […]
