Week 4 Reflection – Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry – Designing for Learning

Jeff Hopkins | TedxVictoria | Education as if People Mattered

This week we learnt about Jeff Hopkins who is the co-principal and founder of an alternative school in Victoria, British Columbia called The Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII). In learning about him I watched a TEDx called, ‘Education as if People Mattered’ about his educational philosophy which led him to create the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry. He delivered this talk in 2014 at a conference focused on the theme of the pursuit of knowledge. One thing that has stuck in my mind from his TEDx is the quote he used at the beginning of it, “education is not the filling of a pail but rather the lighting of a fire” and that “education needs to be sparked and nurtured into a flame”. I interpret this as seeing learning as something that’s already inside of us, rather than something that comes to us from the outside and therefore is something that just needs to be triggered, fostered, and supported. As a future teacher this is an impactful and inspiring statement.

He then went on to discuss the fact that our education system needs to make a shift from its current focus which is teaching students to know about things, to teaching students so that they actually learn. Although this TEDx was from 2014, I think that this statement is still true and that our education system still has not made this shift.

Another thing that stood out to me was when Jeff mentioned that one of the students who had attended PSII had written a paper on Ebola that has been read by thousands of people and was used by a professor training doctors in Nigeria to teach their students about how Ebola spreads. This was surprising as I had never thought that someone who was in high school could write something that would have this much of an impact on the world. This clearly demonstrates how PSII enables students to explore their interests at a high level and how moving away from what Jeff called “artificial subject silos” to areas of competencies and high level objectives, can result in students knowing things and not just knowing about things.

Overall, I really enjoyed learning about Jeff and the PSII as it left me with lots of things to think about!