Exit Blog 1: Frank McCourt

 Watching these short videos, I am definitely a little bit envious of the creative freedom English teachers will have with their curriculum and the different style of inquiry that could happen in their classroom. I loved my English classes in high school for so many reasons, but especially the creativity and agency that I could bring into my projects (picking what interested me most, what would challenge me, what I could expand on). To me, that was the best way that Frank McCourt brought inquiry into his classroom.

In another class this term, we studied an article discussing how many teachers model their own classrooms after their favourite classroom experiences, as we are students for roughly 13,000 hours before we being on the other side of the desk. My favourite takeaway from Frank’s story is that since he didn’t really have a high school experience, most of his teaching ended up being student-led.  As he talks about in the first video, he would see how students responded to a book, discussion, or topic, and flow with them. I think in a standard classroom the experience is so teacher-led that students don’t have a chance to explore their own interests in a subject, or exercise their agency over their learning. Obviously the cliche is that “as a teacher you learn more from your students than they learn from you” which is maybe not technically true, but I think teacher inquiry is about allowing students to direct their own learning (within the bounds of the curriculum) and also being able to read the “society” of the classroom.

I am hoping that as a teacher, I will encourage students to inquire where they can connect topics with their everyday life. Obviously this is what we hope as teachers (having students see the relevancy of the material) but as someone who struggled with Physics and then proceeded to get an engineering degree, it was the most helpful way to learn to appreciate the intricacies of science and math. Even though the topic could be electricity, how could students connect that to their particular interest (i.e. medicine, film production, math) and how could they look at it in a more or less technical way to grasp the full concept?

In short, my perspective on teacher inquiry boils down to being flexible enough to work with your students, and create options for self-directed learning. I won’t have techniques that work for everyone, but I hope to help students find the techniques they need to succeed.