School of Thought Victoria: Recent Episodes
School of Thought Victoria
Welcome to School of Thought Victoria. This channel features the School of Thought podcast, exploring the convictions upon which Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry is based. The goal is simple: to offer thinking and support that will eventually change the paradigm in education. Hosted by Alex Van Tol and Jeff Hopkins.
Ian Chisolm is founding partner of the Roy Group - a highly-respected leadership development firm based in Victoria, BC. Ian talks with Alex and Jeff about what leadership looks like, how leadership supports learning, and how coaching and mentorship approaches can offer models for learning in different contexts. https://roygroup.net/about-us/our-team/ian-chisholm/
Rod Allen, former School District Superintendent and Assistant Deputy Minister in BC's Ministry of Education, joins Alex and Jeff for a discussion about how change is made at the system-wide level. Rod is co-founder of the Deeper Learning Dozen - an organization designed to "support superintendents, through a community of practice, to transform school districts to support equitable access to deeper learning experiences and outcomes for all students and adults, through changes in leadership, school and district systems, adult learning, and pedagogy."
Alex and Jeff talk with Peter about his own educational path, his views on youth innovation (versus entrepreneurship), how innovation can be better supported, and what schools could do to help people participate more fully in today's world. Will have to interview him again, as we overflowed this cup!
Alex and Jeff invite Ava Clark, a PSII learner, to join them in this episode. Ava talks about her transition from mainstream high school to PSII. She articulates her own experience in clear detail, giving us all a chance to see inside the head of person who understands their own learning, the systems and structures that support that learning, and how their learning will propel them into the next stage of their life. Also check out https://www.youthartmarket.com to see one of Ava collaborative projects in action.
Competency-based learning has become a real buzzword in the world of education, but some schools and school systems only real pay it lip service. There are also may who argue that competency-based learning is too vague and over-generalized to offer a rigorous education. Alex and Jeff talk about how competency-based learning, if done well, can be a game-changer in terms of motivation, depth of learning, relevance, and protection against curriculum obsolescence. See also https://www.learningstorm.org for more tools that can help you use competency-based learning and assessment. They're free!
In this episode, Alex and Jeff discuss the reason that PSII calls its learners...well, learners rather than students. It might sound like semantics or fashion, but it goes deeper than that.
In this episode, Alex and Jeff discuss the concept of co-constructed learning pathways. This differs from self-directed and teacher-created learning pathways and is a critical part of the PSII approach to inquiry-based learning.
Learner agency is a term that is bounced around quite a bit these days, but what does it really mean and is it really possible to achieve within a formal learning system? Alex and Jeff discuss how learner agency is one of the foundational convictions underpinning everything PSII is about. They will discuss ways of achieving it, how some learners don't always want it (right away), and how different it is for a teacher when agency is a primary goal.
In this episode, Alex and Jeff dig into the details of PSII's unique inquiry-based learning model. It goes well beyond what many people are calling inquiry (a word that has become a bit of a fashion in education). For more information, you can go to https://wwwlearningstorm.org for more information on the model. Also, here is a short explainer video made by a PSII learner just over a year ago. https://vimeo.com/343711740
We want to help! Let us know of there is something else you want that could help you with inquiry-based learning in your life.
Teachers everywhere learn to plan everything in advance. Unit plan, lesson plans within the unit plan, etc. Early learning specialists, on the other hand, know that learning can emerge spontaneously from the activity in which the learner is engaged at any time. How do we reconcile the world of standard curriculum with the powerful concept of emergent learning?
Assessment has been perhaps one of the biggest failings of education. Despite decades of professional development and excellent research, many schools still practice very old-fashioned, very inauthentic assessment. In this episode, Alex and Jeff talk about what good assessment looks like, and how it fits with the overall model of inquiry-based, personalized learning at PSII.
Self-regulation is worth figuring out. Behaviour is not without context and it is often a sign only of what we are best able to do - not necessarily what we would like to do. Schools can do a lot to help people become aware of how their environment affects their ability to self-regulate, and they can also create environments that make it more likely for more people to be able to self-regulate.