Author: Larissa Pahomov
Review:
"Good schools are about people honestly and intentionally working together very purposefully."
What if your entire school was built surrounding an inquiry-based learning model? What would that look like? What policies would you adopt? What core values would drive learning? Would you foster a school-wide culture of learning and growing through inquiry or would it happen piecemeal on a class-by-class basis? How would you leverage experts in your city and around the world to help teach and mentor your students?
If reading these questions gets your creative juices flowing...or asking how on earth you could convince your administration to let you get started... you need to read this book.
Science Leadership Academy is a public high school in Philadelphia that opened in 2006. The goal was to build a school with the intent of being inquiry-driven and project-based. They partnered with Franklin Institute and put in a ton of work before the school year started to speak a common language and have common goals.
Maybe one day you can add a trip to SLA to your next Philly vacation, but this book pulls back the curtain to show you what makes this school tick. Even if your school will never completely immerse itself in inquiry-driven learning there are still some great ideas here for your personal practice to guide students in your project-based curriculum. In fact, I found this book invaluable in my Genius Hour studies this winter.
Incidentally, all this talk about the Franklin Institute brings up such happy memories of one of the greatest places on earth to go on a field trip while growing up in suburban Philadelphia.
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