Today we had the opportunity to visit the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII). This is an alternative school that consists of 96 students and 7 teachers. At PSII learners work at their own schedules, developing inquiry questions that are interesting to what they want to learn. There is no bells, no set classes, and are not broken up by grade. The school focuses on allowing their students to personalize their learning according to what they need. The school is running very similar to the work force that these students will eventually become a part of. Students have a list of task that need to be completed and schedule out their own time in the day to make sure that these task are being completed according to their time frame. Inquiry based learning is something that I have become very interested in since joining the Education Program and discovering this type of learning. I believe that this type of learning really connects to BC’s new curriculum as it is focused on the needs of the learning and allow for them to learn through their own interests and passions. I am currently reading Trevor Mackenzie’s and Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt’s book The Inquiry Mindset. I believe that this book should be read by every teacher as it allows for you to look at the way we teach all ages of children in a very different but affective way. I do believe that there would be challenges shifting all districts to this type of schooling. For many years, our education system based achievement off a standardized grading system that forces students to achieve at the highest potential in order to further their learning at a university. For many people these grades have become a reward and testing has become normal and necessary in order to assess a student’s progress. I believe that the hardest challenge moving toward this type of system would be trying to shift our societies mindset away from a grading system and towards a system that looks more at a student’s abilities within the competences required by our government. Becoming an elementary teacher this experience has made me look at ways I can involve this type of learning into a primary level classroom. I believe that for students at a young age starting to learn the basic skills, inquiry learning would be such an amazing way to do this. Instead of trying to force our students into the educational system of strict schedules and artificially manufactured lesson plans, young students could learn these basic skill through their own interests just as they have been doing in their first years of life. I am very excited that this type of shift in learning is starting to occur more and more in our province and look forward to seeing it continue to grow in the future. I also look forward to doing my own personal research on this subject and learning ways to incorporate this type of learning into our public system.