Asking Questions
“What do you want to learn?” “How do you want to show me what you’ve learned?” These are the questions we hear being asked on our visit to Aldershot High School. We are sitting in Sarah Spencer's’ Grade Nine Applied Science class. The students have just returned from a scavenger hunt in a nearby ravine and they’ve been asked to record some of the things they’ve noticed on the blackboard. From here, the teacher hands out the Overall Expectations for the course and ask the students to pay attention specifically to the Biology portion of the document. This is the student's introduction to the Biology unit of the class, and it isn’t going the way we would usually expect. Rather than the teacher guiding the students from topic to topic, the students are being allowed to find their own path. Each student is identifying their own interests from the Biology curriculum and, presumably, their paths will diverge from here. But we won’t get to ...