Bumps in the Road

To this point, most of my posts have celebrated the successes of our 'rethinking learning journey.'  

As we all know though, the reality with trying anything new, is that some days go more smoothly than others.  

In keeping with the mindset that students are capable and competent, our inquiry learning journey began by allowing all students equal opportunity to explore and engage in independent learning. Were we nervous about how it may go?  For sure!  It's hard to step back and completely believe that, without us managing them, good things would happen!  

As mentioned in previous posts, things started off with a bang. Students were excited and engaged!  After several periods of self-directed learning (with some criteria for guidance), we began introducing new aspects and expectations for inquiry learning.  

Some of these included:

• the importance of tracking learning
• strategies for organizing new learning 
• ways to share new learning 
• the necessity for regular reflecting so that personal goals could be set 

Through our own conversations and reflections as educators, our next steps were in response to the student needs we observed.  What we noticed was that with the increasing level of expectation, two natural groups emerged: those that could manage it all and those that struggled with making it all come together.

Our main response to these challenges was to have conversations with the students.   These began one-to-one with students, on an as-needed basis and then soon evolved to whole group discussions.  We shared organizational schedules, introduced a daily morning memo to ensure daily expectations were visible and continued to encourage students and make suggestions for how they could manage things on their own.  We had seen them do it before and wanted to see it again.  These conversations with the students were our attempts to honour the 'co-partnership' of this new learning environment.

Yet, despite this continued support, the 'not-so-good' days seemed to outnumber the good ones.  We were up and down like yo-yo's, fluctuating between days that ran smoothly and days that didn't. Frustration was no stranger during this part of our journey and celebrations became fewer. 

We discussed, on more than one occasion, how it would be easier for us to go back to directing the students- back to structures and routines that we knew how to manage.   We weren't sure how long we should continue trying or if we should just give in (or give up) with this new way of teaching and learning and go back to the way things were.  We also considered running two different systems- one which allowed those who independent with inquiry to continue and one which went back to full structure for those who weren't. Thankfully, we rethought this decision.

After going back and forth on how to handle this, it came to us.  We had come too far to give up.  When things ran smoothly, they were good- very good.  We didn't want to let that go. What we realized, was that although we were in constant conversation with students about the challenges we were having, we had not fully brought them into the process of owning responsibility for the success of this new way of learning. 

They consistently told us they loved inquiry learning and the changes that had been made in the classroom but when we shared challenges with them, we were doing most of the decision-making on how to deal with them.  We needed to really step-back and embrace them as partners in order to make things work.  They needed to 'own it.'

It was with this realization that our journey of 'co' with the students really began.  The conversation that helped with getting us back on track started with the video below: