I. General Information
School Name: Nakusp Secondary School
School District: SD#10 Arrow Lakes
Inquiry Team Members: Julia Flesaker: julia.flesaker@sd10.bc.ca
Sheena Delong: sheena.delong@sd10.bc.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: julia.flesaker@sd10.bc.ca
II. Inquiry Project Information
Type of Inquiry: NOIIE Case Study
Grade Levels Addressed Through Inquiry: Secondary (8-12)
Curricular Areas Addressed:
Focus Addressed: Core competencies (for example, critical thinking, communication, problem solving)
In one sentence, what was your focus for the year? Student leadership growth practices in senior outdoor education.
III. Spirals of Inquiry Details
Scanning: Last year there was no junior outdoor education class, only a senior. There are relatively few opportunities for students to work together across grade and subject levels. All of the students know each other because we are a small school, but chances to work together are limited to house team events.
Focus: We would like to build capacity and foster interest in the program. One way to do that is to get students excited about outdoor education and being outside. Our senior students like to be given the responsibility to create something for their peers. This activity fostered relationships between classes and built confidence.
Hunch: Time tabling is a huge limitation to cross-curricular activities, as well as the time needed for organization and execution of an activity.
New Professional Learning:
- Leadership training (Powerful Youth organization; “The Student Leadership Challenge” J. Kouzes and B. Posner)
- Team-building strategies and exercises
- Building social-emotional learning/skills (constructing meaningful rubrics)
- Connections between senior and junior outdoor education programs
- Logistics of collaborating with such a large group of students
Taking Action: Senior outdoor education students were tasked with creating a challenge station based on a skill they had learned that semester: cooking, fire building, knot and shelter construction, bouldering, navigating with a compass, CPR and arm splinting, hypothermia burrito. The students had to determine supplies needed, how they were going to teach the information, manage the time, and create rubrics to assess the junior outdoor education students. They called it the Amazing Race. It occurred over 2 different days and was immensely successful. It will be an event we can build upon in the future.
Checking: Students really enjoyed the activity. Senior students felt empowered and junior students enjoyed learning from their peers. As evidence, we used anecdotal conversations with students, photographs, reflections, and reviewed the rubrics after the senior students evaluated the participants. We were absolutely satisfied and as we said earlier, we would like to do this activity again, but expand the scope and sequence.
Reflections/Advice: The extra time and supplies needed to organize this activity were entirely worth it. Next year, junior and senior outdoor education do not overlap, however, finding ways to promote outdoor skills and learning is important and we will attempt to find another group to work with in the school. We would like to expand the activity beyond the school property and make navigation a method to get to each station.