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Welcome to the Wonderful World of Teacher Inquiry! Together we will explore some of the inumerable questions about teaching, learning and everything in between.

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Green Spaces at School

It often occurs me just how weird it is that western culture makes such a deliberate, harsh division between what is Natural and what is Human. Of course, we have a bunch of dead white guys to thank for this (Descartes, Hobbes and Aquinas to name a few). [Hu]man's supremacy over the natural world went more or less uncontested by the western hegemony for a significant amount of time. Placing the natural (the garden) into an intellectual space is therefore a revolutionary counter-cultural practice. Beyond all of the physiological benefits we know green spaces provide, gardens in schools represent a paradigm shift in the way we think about our world. I personally believe that this is a critical movement towards environmental responsibility that we must continue. One of the things that struck me about the reading was the number of times students listed "slowing down" as a benefit to the gardening space. The students we will teach have all grown up in a world where time is ...
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Being Welcome (For Oct. 12 in-class)

Below are some common classroom experiences that make me feel more or less welcome: Positive experiences opportunities to self-determine my learning space to give and to revoke consent individual attention recognition of difference between students (race, sexuality, gender, interest, etc.) teacher openness regarding and willingness to correct mistakes acceptance and praise of student mistakes as part of the learning process deliberate and explicit class and subject expectations space for and acceptance of the need for physicality and movement space and flexibility for questions and "off-topic" moments organization and routine respect for personal boundaries teacher investment in my learning positive interdependence and personal investment in my learning Negative experiences presumptive and gendered language (the scientist = he; the nurse = she) cis-hetero-normative assumptions (binary pronouns used without checking, assuming that someone who "loo...
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Controlled Confusion?

Controlled confusion . Is this an oxymoron? Educational neuroscience reminds us that excess stress - when all you see on the board is hieroglyphs or the white hot panic when Teacher asks you a question and you're not even sure it was in English - gets in the way of learning. And not just a little. Chronic experience of excess stress will actually re-wire the brain in such a way that it can no longer properly regulate emotion. Imagine trying to concentrate when your body is in a constant state of fight, flight or freeze . It's obvious, then, that confusion has no place in the classroom. But is it? One of the tensions expressed in educational neuroscience and effective learning is that there is an optimal level of stress. Too much gets in the way, but too little does also. Learning is hard, and in order to make the cognitive jump to higher understanding, we need a little oomph. Healthy stress is an incredibly useful motivator. In this way, Teacher must balance on one scale  a ...
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