Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry

The path is made by walk­ing…

 

Our class recent­ly had the chance to sit in on a Zoom meet­ing with Jeff Hop­kins, the founder of the Pacif­ic School of Inno­va­tion and Inquiry (PSII), and it was an eye-open­er. PSII’s approach to edu­ca­tion is so dif­fer­ent from what we’re used to in my school and school dis­trict. It’s built around an inquiry-based frame­work where stu­dents’ per­son­al curios­i­ty and goals dri­ve their learn­ing. Lis­ten­ing to Jeff describe how PSII oper­ates real­ly got me think­ing about how we approach teach­ing and learn­ing in my own con­text.

At PSII, the learn­ing paths are co-cre­at­ed by stu­dents and teach­ers, cre­at­ing a dynam­ic process tai­lored to indi­vid­ual needs. This flex­i­bil­i­ty in group­ing remind­ed me of when, 12 years ago, a cou­ple of col­leagues and I approached our admin­is­tra­tion dur­ing our school’s tran­si­tion from a Junior Sec­ondary to a Mid­dle School. We advo­cat­ed for a shift in per­spec­tive, sug­gest­ing that we view stu­dents’ time with us as a 3‑year jour­ney rather than three sep­a­rate sin­gle-grade years. Our vision was to see stu­dents’ learn­ing unfold col­lec­tive­ly and inten­tion­al­ly, much like how PSII approach­es their work with stu­dents today.

One aspect of PSII that res­onat­ed with me was how they encour­age stu­dents to take on real-world projects and con­nect with peo­ple and resources out­side the school. I try to bring this idea into my wood­work class­es by inspir­ing stu­dents to learn wood­work­ing tech­niques they’ve seen else­where or to explore entire­ly new crafts. For exam­ple, I encour­age them to iden­ti­fy a real-world need and design a solu­tion that mat­ters to them. They can bring their ideas to life using tra­di­tion­al wood­work­ing meth­ods or advanced tools like CNC and laser machines, or even 3D print­ing. It’s incred­i­ble to see their ideas take shape in ways that inspire them to learn more.

Jeff’s talk rein­forced my desire to bring more inquiry-based prac­tices into my teach­ing. This approach aligns with the ideas I’ve been explor­ing in my Master’s research, where inquiry-based learn­ing is cen­tral to cre­at­ing mean­ing­ful edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ences. It’s not always easy to rethink the way we’ve been doing things, but it’s excit­ing to imag­ine what’s pos­si­ble when curios­i­ty, per­son­al goals, and mean­ing­ful learn­ing take cen­tre stage.

For a deep­er dis­cus­sion on PSII and Rein­vent­ing Edu­ca­tion, here is Jeff Hop­kins: