Link to the Blog: http://shelleywright.wordpress.com/
Name of eduBlogger: Shelley Wright
EduBlogger's Background: Senior Years ELA and Science educator in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan and current PhD student in the area of Curriculum and Instruction.
Why I followed blog: Mike (my professor) told me that Shelley's blog deals a lot with inquiry-based learning within the Senior Years age group. I happen to be pursuing a degree in the Senior Years stream, and I truly believe that inquiry-based learning is the only future of Education.
Description of the Blog: Shelley's blog discusses, in depth, the importance of inquiry-based and problem-based learning in creating lifelong learners with developed identities and relevant skill-sets. Throughout her blog posts, she states her case intelligently, and eloquently (she is an English teacher, after all), and it is a case that I strongly agree with. Honestly, reading her blog has been such a validating experience for me, since almost everything she has written has been on my mind sometime in the past two years of my Education degree. I will definitely continue reading both her blog posts and her Twitter tweets.
Shelley's TEDtalk Video:
Here is an excerpt from one of Shelley's posts titled "Academics: What's it Good for?," which I feel really sums up what I have experienced in some of my own secondary and post-secondary education classes, and what I believe many students are still experiencing today:
"Schools value hoop jumping. For the most part, kids who we consider “academic” tend to be good hoop jumpers. They’ve figured out the system and can navigate their way through the predictable demands of the system. But they are seldom truly engaged. Rarely are they transformed by their learning. They’re going through the motions."
And here is a response I wrote to Shelley after reading the full post from which this excerpt came from. I feel that it will serve to further explain why I am such a fan of her blog.
Hi Shelley,
I am in my final year of Education (high school stream, with teachables in English and Biology - we sound a lot alike in more ways than one) at Brandon University. I came across your blog because my Internet for Educators professor, Mike Nantais, recommended it, and I am sure glad he did. What you have written here about inquiry-based and problem-based learning mirrors my thoughts on the future of education, exactly, and I am so thankful to have read it. I am thankful because I feel that in many high school classrooms, including some of the ones I learned in (only 5 years ago) and some of the ones I've student-taught in, this style of teaching and learning has not quite been accepted - which is too bad, since I know the consequences of academic hoop-jumping from first-hand experience.
I was always thought of as being an academic student through both high school and my undergrad degree. My whole self-concept was based around my ability to get good grades in school. It wasn't until I entered into the Faculty of Education that I began to realize that "academic" is not synonymous with "skilled" or "intelligent." I mean, sure, in order to jump through the hoops presented in school, one needs to be smart enough to know the system, literate enough to read the textbooks, and resilient enough to memorize the content - but these skills are not the skills I realized I would need if I was going be successful in my Bachelor of Education degree, and then eventually as a classroom teacher. During my student teaching placements, in between teaching my students, I was also re-teaching myself how to learn. I realized that I did not truly understand many of the concepts outlined in the curriculum, because when I learned them in school, they were memorized, spewed out on an exam, and then forgotten almost immediately, as you say in your blog post. Skills that should have been built up in school, like critical-thinking, creativity, logical reasoning, collaboration, and independent thinking, were skills that I had to develop on my own.
It is wonderful to know that a real, live teacher is putting inquiry-based learning into practise, and is being recognized and celebrated for it across the country. It is very reassuring for someone like me, who believes in the theory, but has not yet had the opportunity to put it into practice.
Thank you,
Brittani
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