This afternoon, one of my partners was the lead teacher as we took students through a Reggio-inspired provocation. Photos of interesting scenes encompassing a variety of topics and social issues, such as ecology, poverty, and the third world were distributed.  Students wandered around to pictures and discussed them, as well as the “wonders” they might have.  Meanwhile, the teachers circulated and documented the conversations and wonders that students expressed.  We then came together and discussed them as a group.

This style of inquiry was at first difficult for me to wrap my head around.  Was my job really just to record and document?  What if the conversations were shallow and did not elicit the depth we were hoping for?  How could I give up control of the process and big questions?  Would it work?

In the end, what I discovered was that, yes the students did mostly reach the depth of thinking we had hoped for. Indeed, we are now off on our way to a new inquiry question and topic and students simply came to it in a different way.  In most of the inquiry I do, the students are challenged with figuring out the principles that are already known to the adults. However, with this more open inquiry, the direction was less known.  As they continued to talk to each other they got to the places we wanted them to get to and it was all theirs.

Today I learned a little more about trusting students.

Chris Southworth (@atticasam) is an ADE, Learning Leader at Cranston School and Star Trek fan who has a passion for Wrath of Kahn.

Over this past summer, our school has had a fresh coat of paint. We're starting the year off with clean blank walls.

If we skipped to the end of the year, we would find many pinholes all over the walls, leaving tell tail signs of the learning journeys that happened throughout the year. 

My goal this year is to make learning as visible as we can in our school. Therefore, our walls will become littered with evidence of learning. With a focus on collaboration, our bulletin boards and learning displays will become interactive and engaging. I hope that students will seek feedback from their peers and teachers and create things that have never even thought about before. 

CBE182 is also starting with blank walls. We hope that our past contributors will share, as well and many new people! We have 1000's of passionate people in our organization and we hope that this blog can share some of that enthusiasm and creativity!

For now the slate is clean, leaving a world of opportunities ahead of us. We are super excited to see where our students' learning will take us. I'm sure there will be many obstacles and speed bumps along the way but in the end we will work through the challenges and come out on top.

Oh the places we'll go!

Steve Clark (@stevewclark) is the Learning Commons Learning Leader at Chris Akkerman TLC in Area III. He is passionate about making learning real and meaningful. 

This year, we explored the relationship that humans have with water and our relationship with the rivers that run through Calgary. We asked important questions about how water shapes us and how we shape water, an interconnected relationship that requires serious, thoughtful, consideration, and time to study the topic in depth. The more we learned about the rivers, the more compelling they became. We have become hermeneutic scholars around the rivers’ origin, landforms, myths, civilizations, celebrations, conflicts, disasters and their deep meaning to us and our personal identities as beings living in Calgary at this time in history. The rivers have become a part of us, just as we have become part of the rivers. Everything is the same issue.

A reflection from Zach captures a lasting impression:

Learning about the river changed my thinking about water. I find myself thinking hard about water in different and related ways. I am rethinking local and international water issues and how we treat them. I found that one question would lead to another and once  that question was answered, it led to another, fascinating question.

The lasting impressions from our explorations around water this year have made me respect our rivers a lot more than I did before. I try to waste as little as possible, leaving  a cleaner river and a cleaner earth. I also use less water, knowing that the freshwater supply is finite. Water is a part of us and we need to take care of it. We are the river.

Margeaux Montgomery is an educator who enjoys exploring, wondering, creating and laughing with her students daily.

“Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.”
 ~ James Bryant Conant

Recently, for our grade 9 summative assessment for the immigration unit, my colleague and I asked our students to answer the following question: How does immigration benefit Canada? Instead of the traditional (and safe!) essay assignment, we asked students to use the Aurasma app to share their knowledge. They had to create a target image on paper that visually represented their main idea, and then using the app they connected their image to a videotaped speech where they expressed their views orally. This was a risk for both the teachers and the students … most of us had NEVER even used the app before, but were interested in the idea of augmented reality and wanted to give it a try in the classroom.

Other risks that were taken during this project:

• Our classrooms became mobile – students came and went between our rooms for supplies, and worked in pairs in the hallway, foyer, conference room, or other quiet spaces to record their speeches on the iPads.

• Students who had prior experience with the Aurasma app became the “experts” or teachers in the room.

• Students quickly got over their fear of oral presentations when they realized they could simply hit delete and then re-record their speech until it was “perfect”.
  

Was doing the assignment this way worth the risk? You bet! Students were engaged, assignment completion and submission was 20% higher than usual and the final products were of high quality and demonstrated understanding.

So, what did I learn today? I was reminded that teaching and learning, or making progress, always involves taking a risk!

Melissa Hopkins (@MN_Hopkins) currently teaches social studies and home economics at Clarence Sansom School. Her interests include fostering critical thinking, literacy, & creativity, as well as exploring the concept of the flipped classroom.