PBL or Bust!

Okay. I figure I'd better document this whole "grade eights do the Inquiry on Water" thingamabob in January.

The story of how we even decided to attempt Problem Based Leaning at my school goes back to the Building Expert PLCs our previous principal created.  You can read all about it on his blog. Anyway, a few of us had spent the better part of two years learning about inquiry / problem / project based learning - we even tried versions of PBL in our own classes.

When Johnny left, we got stuck in limbo. We had always planned on implementing PBL school wide, but we didn't know how. More correctly, we didn't know how it would be received and none of us were ready to take the fall out. All we knew was that by September of last year, we had reached the apex of our learning around PBL and inquiry.  We needed to actually put the theories in action.

We hummed and hawed about even continuing to meet as a PLC and even toyed with the idea of letting the dream die.  Even the two administrators who were in our PLC were ready to move on - they were still supportive, but the business of helping to run the rest of the school no longer afforded them the time to think about the logistics of actually "doing" inquiry.

I forget exactly how it all got decided, but I remember a colleague saying, "We just need to do this now!" We eventually came back together, talked more, and planned an actual proposal for the staff.

And now, here we are... in the supposed "Prep Phase" fumbling our way through tech issues and questions from other staff about room switches and course content and logistics of space and I'm still trying to accept the fact that it's going to be messy!