Our Story
This is our story of our school moving our practice forward and “dreaming” with our students where we want to be in the future. This site shows how the Discipline Based Inquiry Rubric (Galileo Educational Network, 2013), the Effective Teaching Practices Rubric (Friesen, 2009) and the vision of Inspiring Education (Government of Alberta, 2010) lives in our school and has helped us to change teacher practice in order to intellectually engage students in their learning.
Looking for Change
In the process of looking for a new principal for O.S. Geiger, the staff was eager to try something new and different. When Lori Cooper came to our school, a deliberate emphasis was made in our Professional Learning Communities (PLC's) and Professional Development to increase student engagement to transform learning. Teachers began to visit other schools focused on inquiry-based teaching and learning; returning to share their experiences with the staff. This desire to make learning authentic, meaningful, rigorous and engaging led O.S. Geiger to form a partnership with Judy Martin and the Galileo Educational Network.
Year One (2011-2012)
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Year Two (2012-2013)
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Year Three (2013-2014)
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Next Steps
The staff at O.S. Geiger sees the relationship with Galileo as fundamental to our teaching and learning process and will continue to collaborate with Judy Martin to design meaningful learning for students. We would like to continue to educate our parents and families on the changes in education and the benefits of inquiry learning. Making our learning more visible through the use of technology (classroom websites and blogs) is a desired next step. Further, we would like our students to have greater choice in how they represent their learning by exposing them to many different forms of technology. A continuing challenge is removing the intimidation technology still holds for some of our teachers.
However, one constant that has remained over the last three years and will continue to be important to us as we move forward is to remember to celebrate our successes however big or small.
However, one constant that has remained over the last three years and will continue to be important to us as we move forward is to remember to celebrate our successes however big or small.