It was really great to hear Trevor Mackenzie’s thoughts. I was really engaged with the pacific school of inquiry and innovation talk, but it was a tricky thing for me to balance. I really loved the ideas, but I could only pick a few and needed to mentally modify them to work them into a public school setting. This talk really helped give me a clear mental image of what inquiry can look like in a public school setting. I think the idea of just keeping things totally open with students is ideal, but I was really surprised to see just all the ways that can manifest. I’m pretty excited to see what types of strategies I can work into my own classes from this lecture. I found the student self-assessment grading to be really interesting too. I was talking with some teachers during my observations and they’ve been facing issues with students being unable to fail and repeat middle school grades. I’m curious if this is pandemic related or how we can balance ensuring student understanding and inquiry otherwise.

I made a lot of notes on the books he recommended and am looking forwards to learning about them more in the future. They were:

It was nice to hear about strategies for dealing with classroom problems that are rooted in student-control. Like using groups to generate questions is really smart. I think it’s a pretty common occurrence for no questions to come up in the question part of a class and then for a large group of students to approach the teacher individually after class. I definitely did that a lot and I see it pretty frequently in my university classes as well. Unfortunately, those students going to ask individually are probably just a small portion of the students who do have questions that they could or want to ask