This week, we visited the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry downtown Victoria. Jeff Hopkins, Principal and Teacher at PSII, spoke with us briefly about the school’s foundational approach, values, programs, and day to day.

Essentially, PSII is an operating independent school, open to students from grades 9 through 12. It is entirely inquiry-based, drawing from Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD), which encourages students to question, grow, and continually deepen their learning. Students at PSII have the ability to earn credits for science, math, language, PHE, arts, and social studies courses through individual inquiry based projects. PSII encourages its’ students to learn predominantly in an emergent manner – uncovering their learning needs as they inquire – while also meeting BC curriculum requirements.

Overall, it was fascinating to hear about and explore the school campus. The building has a small science lab, large art studio, and several individual classrooms and group study spaces. Jeff shared many success stories and individual student projects, including learning novel languages, opening a nail salon, and pursuing accelerated learning at UVic. I think that an inquiry-based school like PSII would be extremely beneficial for some learners, and several elements of PSII’s structure would be helpful for all learners. For example I believe frontloading inquiry, notably in the field of science, is a critical step for students heading into post-secondary science. I appreciated PSII’s value of student questioning, encouraging independent thought and taking time to teach students how to conduct research. I hope to apply these elements to my own classroom some day.

On the contrary, PSII does cost students approximately $8000 per student, which makes it inaccessible for some learners. Students are not able to participate in all high school sports due to the smaller school population, rendering only individual, pair, or trio style sports an option for students. Students would also miss out on school-wide events such as dances, spirit days, etc. or large group classes such as concert band. PSII’s website does mention some student camping trips, which provides a parallel option to typical public school classes such as outdoor pursuits. Finally, students do not experience a structured, block system, which I believe has benefits and disadvantages alike. The freedom to self-direct their learning is an extremely valuable skill, while following a block system also offers a learning opportunity for students who will be working highly structured, shiftwork style jobs.

Overall, PSII had several amazing programs to offer, and provided lots of valuable insight concerning inquiry-based learning, despite some differences and potential downsides.

Images were screenshotted from the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry‘s website, and downloaded from UnSplash.