Today we visited PSII (Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry) located in downtown Victoria. We were introduced to a new, inquiry-based way of learning in which students at a high-school age participate in an alternative way of secondary education. Students can pursue educational paths that interest them, and by doing so, complete BC curricular competencies along the way, allowing for them to graduate with a regular high-school diploma. A lot of the progress-tracking is done using mediums such as Trello and Google calendars, so students can keep in touch with teachers outside of the classroom. The point of this type of learning is to allow students who do not excel in a traditional educational environment to create their own paths and complete competencies in a meaningful way for themselves. If people are passionate about what they are studying and inquiring about, they are more likely to have lasting understandings and comprehension that they can carry into later life. Students can often carry out projects that complete multiple competencies from different subjects, because there is often common skills. (Ie: art projects that contain math.) Another thing brought up during the orientation talk about about how students are being prepared for problem identification an THEN problem solving. This is because in life, often problems will come up without any real context, and being able to solve it must first require identification of said problem. Traditional education focuses highly on very pointed problem solving, where all the problems are laid out in front of you and you have to solve it in a very specific way, while inquiry based learning allows for learners to find the problems themselves and solve it in a personalized way. The photo attached is a picture of me inside the “Sensory Room,” which is a room that allows for students to have personal emotional decompression.
