I enjoyed Trevor MacKenzie’s presentation to our Ed Tech class. He opened in an interesting way, asking us to reflect on our high school experience. What did we like and what didn’t we like about this experience?

For me, the high school was not great. I moved in Gr. 11 and dealt with bullying and some absolutely insane situations. I was not focussed.

MacKenzie presents inquiry-based education as a way to spark curiousity and develop lifelong learners. On the face of it, I can totally see how it could work for certain students. In my case, I’m not so sure. I may not have liked school but it was good to have lots of scaffolding around my learning. It was only after I graduated, and removed myself from all the craziness of high school, that I could reach my full learning potential.

With that said, I think that MacKenzie presents many good ideas, some of which I will outline below. He has an infectious love of inquiry based learning and sees a great deal of potential in it.

  • MacKenzie puts important questions to educators. How can we cultivate competencies, dispoitions, and habits of mind?
  • He also states that there is a big misconception with inquiry-based learning, in that it demands a tremendous amount of scaffolding around it.
  • MacKenzie, like me, thinks teaching should be active. He looks for every opportunity to get students moving around. Speed geeking is where students present their ideas.
  • Perhaps my favourite take away from his presentation was how students tend to shut down when they see a grade. As an English teacher, he refrains from sharing letter grades to students at the same time he gives them feedback. This is because students naturally look at the grades and don’t botether absorbing the feedback (and of course the feedback is where the value is). He said that he marks down the mark in his grade back and then just hands back assignments with feedback. Seems like a great idea.

The best classes I’ve taken our a blend of lecture and free inquiry. I personally think the two should live side by side. I enjoyed the presentation.

Some good resources for Trevor MacKenzie can be found here.

  • Joel