In this class, we had a special guest speaker: Jeff Hopkins from the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII). PSII is an independent school located in downtown Victoria that uses an integrated approach to subjects and tries to help students create a more self-directed and customized educational path. In doing so, they often get students to pursue more hands-on projects and more interaction and partnership with the community than they would experience in a traditional public school.
What impresses me most about PSII is the goal of “making itself obsolete”, which Jeff has stated clearly and emphatically. His ultimate goal for the school would be to have the approach prove so successful that the philosophy and approach become mainstream and get adopted by the public school system. Also, the integrated, community-based project-heavy approach may work very well for certain outgoing, highly self-motivated students with the right attitude.
However, I do have a few concerns: one is that it requires a lot of energy an cooperation from families and community members. This could be a positive aspect, developing students’ connection to people, businesses and organizations within the community, but it may also create unfair advantage for students who come from less supportive backgrounds and, if implemented on a wider scale, exhaust intangible resources like engagement from local business. It also may very well be the case that not all students are equally well-suited to this approach, which ties into another concern: evaluation of its effectiveness. Even if you have data demonstrating a high level of post-graduation achievement for PSII students, that must be taken with a huge grain of salt, because there is an enormous selection bias for an independent school like this in favour of students who are well-suited to the model and have parents and families that are more engaged than average and probably less likely to have low incomes, low education levels, and other factors that often contribute to the trouble that some students have in the public system. Also, especially when you define learning in more intangible ways as PSII does, it can be hard to measure: