Reflection post #2, PSII

On September 26th our EDCI 336 class had the opportunity to visit the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry. PSII is a independent school operating in downtown Victoria, BC. They move away from tradition teaching methods especially with their approach to the BC curriculum. Jeff took us through the working of the school and it was incredible hearing from him. This school was his passion project and he really took a jump to get it started unsure if it would take off but it really did. I was amazed by the level of independence and creative liberty the students receive. The students choose an inquiry (project, question, etc.) that they wish to dive deep into and that is their focus, the curriculum requirements are then pulled out after their work is done instead of creating a sort of rubric to fit their learning into before hand. The idea of the inquiry project reminded me of the Capstone project, which is a graduation requirement for BC. Each school has a different starting point, but the end product is you present your area of inquiry to teachers at the end of grade 12. Personally I went to two different highschools, one for grades 9-11 and a different one for grade 12. I had chosen a topic I was super passionate about in grade 11, but when I changed schools I was told that wasn’t enough and that I needed to restart. This was upsetting since I never got to share the thing that I, the student was passionate about, instead I had to fit my inquiry up to the standards of my new teachers. My main point in this story was that I was so engaged in my learning when I had the topic I was interested in and I learned so much on my own. This is what PSII is achieving but in all their classes. I was shocked when Jeff told us the classes chosen to be taught are based off what the students WANT to learn that year. This also reminded me a little bit about the Most likely to succeed documentary where they combined two different class subjects to come up with a super cool end product that students were proud of. At PSII many students go home and continue to learn on their own outside and are so engaged with their work that the abuse of screens/social media and the use of AI is less of an issue. I was left amazed when I left that building, especially after finding out no schools in BC have adapted any of PSII’s methods. It seems like a no brainer that this is seriously working for a lot of students and I would argue could benefit all students. I hope I will have some of my own creative liberty to try out this style of learning in my future classrooms to make this style more accessible for all, since PSII does have tuition and a small capacity. I was left with a question that I could possible use as an inquiry as well. Jeff mentioned that school’s in Finland are already quite similar to PSII and I wonder if that correlates with the high happiness rate that we also see in Finland, Denmark, etc.