My 3 Things

DISCLAIMER: Teachers are already doing these things, so this is not revolutionary. I have simply identified areas in which I would like to grow professionally and took steps to do so.

In January I was lucky enough to interview for, and accept, a CWS position at St. Marys DCVI. It was a couple of Geography sections; one academic and one academic/applied split. Although the position didn't yield a full timetable, it did present the opportunity for me to explore various pedagogies in facilitating learning. I have taught this course many times in the past and always found myself stuck in the 'googleable' content that makes up the foundation of the course and trying to take it to a more engaging level. The available time also provided me with the chance to build our students' relationship with the community in which they went to school. As one of the pillars I built myself up on in my interview, I wanted to connect students with the St. Marys community and build a sense pride and stewardship. Finally, I always try to integrate a new technology. Mainly to enhance student learning, but also to ensure that I'm constantly stepping outside of my own comfort zone. So, below is a small commentary on how successful, or not successful, my professional risks were this past year.

ISSUES BASED or INQUIRY BASED LEARNING

I had the pleasure of working with a group of teachers in Grande Prairie, Alberta (2013-2015), and implementing a cohort-wide pedagogy focused on Project-based Learning. Driving questions rolled through core courses as students focused on projects that spilled into all subjects; a real collaboration of learning. I thoroughly enjoyed this practice and have often thought about incorporating it into my present classrooms. Now, with popular opinion moving towards Inquiry-based learning, I have found that this experience has only accelerated my growth in this area.

In previous experiences teaching this course, most of my efforts were spent trying to champion the curriculum at the cost of a more engaging delivery. This time I took a different approach as I wanted to address three things specifically; student engagement/voice, the fact that the course is called "Issues in Canadian Geography", and the popular emergence of Trevor MacKenzie's "Dive into Inquiry" (a read that has influenced me and many of my colleagues as of late). Using MacKenzie's "Types of Student Inquiry" model, CGC 1D grew from 'structured-inquiry' to 'guided inquiry'. As a result, students felt more empowered as they were defining strategies and solutions for key geographic issues in Canada. I've listed below the 'issues-based units' that we addressed in the second half of the semester.

i) Canada's aging population crisis.

ii) Significance of immigration to Canada's future population.

iii) Government created barriers to FNMI standard of living and quality of life.

iv) The role of fossil fuels in Canada's economic and environmental future.

v) Balancing economic development of Canada's natural resources and environmental responsibility.

These issues shaped our content, research, investigations, discussions, and inquiry processes, and essentially led to various designs of solutions and strategies that students felt could address these issues in some way. My next step is to graduate to 'free inquiry'. Letting go and empowering students to locate an issue in Canadian geography that drives them. At the moment, I'm happy with my own progress in this area, but obviously not satisfied as we only made it so far through the student inquiry process.

THE AMAZING RACE DCVI

For me, the beginning of this course provides the platform to develop skills. Specifically, geographic skills like map reading, orienteering, and sense of direction. The fist couple of weeks was spent learning how to read maps, compass direction, explain directions, convert scale, etc. This time of year also presents snow and sub-zero temperatures. A mix that is not so much fun when applying these skills in the great outdoors. So, we waited for warmer weather.

My goal was to create a fun geographic activity that engaged students with the skills they had learned and the community that they learned it in. From this, an adapted version of "The Amazing Race" was developed for grade nine geography students to participate in throughout the town of St. Marys. Working in collaboration with Tawnya Basisto's Grade 11 Travel and Tourism class, we were able to create a student-led course full of challenges, Canada 150 trivia, and local destinations. The afternoon of June 8th saw 61 grade nines make their way through a 12 km course using only a map. Destinations along the route included the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, VIA Rail, local parks, the famous Quarry, and town hall. Once students made it to each stop they had to complete the challenge and answer the trivia. Only then were they given the clue and map to the next destination.

Of the 61 students who participated, 57 successfully completed the race. This inclusive event brought students together in a community building effort. They conducted themselves politely and represented DCVI in the most 'amazing' way. I can't wait to try this again in the future. Now that relationships have been made with various community members, it can only grow.

GEO-GUESSER

Now, I'm definitely not the first teacher to use this. I played around with this App a few years ago but nothing really came of it. However, a recent article in Professionally Speaking by Stefan Dubowski (kindly passed on to me by DCVI Librarian Sue Hushen), shone light on teacher Ryan Henderson of Burlington, ON. He was demonstrating a way to use the GeoGuesser App as a tool for enhancing student learning. So, I decided to integrate it at the eleventh hour of the course to see if it would float.

GeoGuesser presents students with 360 Google street map view of 'a place' on Earth. Students are forced to use geographic inquiry skills to deduce where the view might be located. Geographic characteristics like latitude's affect on climate, climate regions, weather patterns, language on signs and buildings, mountainous or flat landscape, and so on. Students must think critically about what clues are offered by the scenery and objects within. This provides the opportunity to make connections with the curriculum, specifically geographic inquiry skills. Once they have made an educated guess of where the view is located, they swipe out the world map and 'pin' the location. GeoGuesser then 'pins' the correct location and provides you with the distance between your guess and the actual location. While we only engaged with this app for a short period of time, students urged me that this is a must in all Geography courses. So much that students could be caught playing this in the hallways, outside of class time.

Again, the commentary above does not provide groundbreaking ideas or teaching strategies. They simply describe the three 'risks' that I took this semester. They were successful for the most part, but I believe that what is most rewarding is the chance to build on these experiences in the future. As the year comes to a close I'm quite happy with my own professional growth this year. I feel as though I have found pedagogy that meets my needs of deeper thinking in the classroom, and presents students the opportunity to engage in issues within their community and provide voice.

See you next year.