Breaking educational moulds – We all need to be doing the same thing

 One of the hardest moulds to break in education is consistency.

To be clear I think it is important that schools have consistent values and pedagogy. But there is a tendency to want to keep all parts of school the same.

Our units of inquiry cover the same contexts at exactly the same time.

Yet if you’ve come to the end of a Unit of Inquiry and each class has ended up in the same place with the same evidence of learning, is that really inquiry learning?

Or have the kids and teachers followed a recipe?

This last How We Express Ourselves Unit instead of following the same learning engagements. The teachers headed off in different directions with the central idea guided by the passions and interests of the teachers as well as the children.

Music, art, storytelling, were all different disciplines.

Yet the concepts, attitudes and transdisciplinary skills stayed the same.

The result was that the kids came into their mini-exhibition genuinely excited to see what the other kids had been learning about because it wasn’t a carbon copy of what they had learned.

Sometimes we don’t all need to do the same thing…