Edmonton Inquiry

Sometimes things all come together and align as you as facilitator hopes.  What does that mean and what are the indicators?  For me it is achieving with participating educators what you hope they will achieve with their learners -a greater sense of individual and group agency. It's having a sense that as a result of the work you have put into facilitating, the individuals and group no longer need you. They are taking their learning into their own hands and doing it in the context of a transformative world view.

One little indicator of this was the forming of a follow up group with members adding their names to a google doc they created, and members of staff from a school actively planning on how they were going to carry this leaning forward back at their school.

Earlier in the institute I experienced one of the better responses to the after day 1 lunch challenge -how are you gong to go about learning to address these questions (as compared to the normal response of just starting to answer them).  Small groups chose a question fo interest and worked through the V heuristic to step 4.

Innovations
-took the time to have small groups tease apart the tentative strategies of transformative leanring.

Each group took one strategy and then addressed
-expand it further
-identify contrasting views
-implications for classroom practice
-implications for professional leaning

taking the time to do this gets them to attend to this important element -these principles are what we can base decisions on.  They are so opposite of conventional learning but rarely are people actively cognizant of them.

Other indicators of facilitation success

-the longer we are into the institute the less the facilitator finds the need to talk -because the experiences are being drawn from the groups and leadership in the group is being identified and brought forth.

The right people were in the room

this groups of about 25 had a core of 5 or 6 educators strongly into inquiry and transformative practice and hence there was a good sense of the possibilities of transformative learning to draw out and share

Megan is certainly one who should be called upon to prep one or more blog postings based on her experience last year.

We had 4 who were secondary oriented and for the section on dissecting an inquiry I had them use the KARS video and the diagram on page 71/72 of DOTS.  this worked well since NC only has stories up to grade 6.

Really worked to make day 2 learning activities responsive to the questions generated and the insights provided in the pre session survey.    Again -they experienced transformation learning by the facilitator walking the talk.

Still grappling with what we call all this.  Folks call it environmental inquiry, natural curiosity, while I try to capture a bigger picture by calling it transformative learning.

I will get this group together for a zoom sharing in 2 weeks so let's see what that brings.

Nice to go out on a high.