This week in EDCI336, we had a guest speaker, Trevor MacKenzie, come talk to us about inquiry-based learning. He is a high school English teacher at Oak Bay High School.

One aspect of the conversation that grabbed my attention was to do with the idea that students need to have learnt or mastered certain content before they go on to university. MacKenzie reminded us that not all high school students DO go on to university, and I definitely think that is important to keep in mind. However, in our 21st century modern economy, a post-secondary diploma is increasingly (or already) a necessity to earning a livable income. The 2016 Canadian Census found that a whopping 54% of Canadians aged 25 to 64 had either college or university qualifications. That percentage is likely even higher now in 2020, as the percentage of college/university educated Canadians has been steadily rising for the past couple decades. The reality for our students then is that a majority of them will likely NEED to pursue post-secondary education at some point in their lives.

Photo by Vasily Koloda from Unsplash.

According to MacKenzie, at Oak Bay High, the high school he teaches at, roughly 99% of students will carry on to university. In my opinion, the transition from university to high school is a tough transition for most students. It definitely was for me, despite the fact that I took AP classes and achieved straight As in high school. For this reason, I can see where some teachers are coming from when they express concern that switching from traditional didactic instruction to a more inquiry-based model will result in less content be covered.

Photo by Junior Ferreira from Unsplash.

However, from what I am learning about inquiry-based learning, I understand that this model does not immediately conceptualize content and direct instruction as being bad. On the contrary, MacKenzie stressed that content is critical. One concrete example that MacKenzie offered to bridge this gap between traditional instruction and inquiry-based learning was to shorten the length of time that we lecture to students. He stated that student attention spans usually cap out at about 12 minutes. He also suggested moving back and forth from direct instruction (lectures) to activities for student engagement (small discussions, short activities, group brainstorming, think-pair-share, etc.). This is one tangible suggestion that I appreciated and will take away from MacKenzie’s talk.

I will leave you with one additional quote from MacKenzie that I jotted down and that has helped me continue to hone my understanding of the difference between different forms of assessment:

“Formative assessment is the learning and summative assessment is the performance.”