SLA

This year’s professional development meetings started with the theme of Inquiry. Since it is a core value of SLA, inquiry is a topic that I have been thinking a lot about over the summer. In many ways what makes SLA different from other schools is its combination of inquiry-driven project-based curriculum using the tools of School 2.0.

When we were asked to write a reflection on “Inquiry” at the beginning of the workshop this is what I came up with:

Inquiry is becoming an increasingly important organizing element in my history classes. As I move away from memorized content I want to replace it with knowledge learned through investigation. The trick is framing learning environments that are open enough to give students the latitude necessary to create meaning while structuring them in such a way that something constructive happens. This really pushes the boundaries of my grasp of the subject. Frequently, in the past, I struggled for control of my classes through mastery over the input (facts) and not output (student knowledge and understanding).

It may seem here that I am going a little overboard in not trying to address the content part of the study of History. I do think there is some content that is important, but we error so much in the wrong direction that I don’t mind stating the need for investigation over memorization. My classes were pretty far from traditional before I came to SLA but they are much more so now. I am thinking about how to phase present my current position on the skills vs. content debate for another post so I won't go into details here.

During our conversations about Inquiry, one of the breakout groups coined the metaphor of “Teacher as Sherpa” which I kind of like. (“Teacher as Coach” is now a cliché to the point that the phase is almost meaningless.) The image of helping students, in the form of a guide, climb a mountain seems to illustrate, in part, what great teaching should ideally be. This is a teaching metaphor that, for the moment at least, has legs.