David Russell-Loewen, the Director of Education at Live It Earth shares his reflections from the Kaleidoscope of Inquiry Conference in Vancouver. David reflects on the conference and shares some insights, while also reflecting on this season’s podcast.

Dave is a certified teacher, curriculum designer and learning technology expert. With over a decade of experience in blended learning, David brings his passion for experiential and inquiry based learning, creative problem-solving and educational innovation to the Live It Team.

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Podcast Transcript

Hi, my name is Blue. And I'm the host of this new podcast, The 21st Century Teacher with Live It Earth. And my job is to ensure that our teachers and students get the most out of our programs. This new podcast series is just one of the ways I'm going to be supporting our community of educators, with a monthly conversation with a special guest educator discussing a different aspects of 21st century teaching and learning. A reminder that if you're a teacher in British Columbia, thank you to Focused Education resources, you now have access to our hybrid learning library. If you'd like more information about our blended learning programs, please visit our website liveit.earth.  

Today I'm talking with David Russell Loewen, who is the Director of Education at Live It Earth. David recently returned from the Kaleidoscope Inquiry Conference in Vancouver. I was excited to have David on the show to reflect on the conference and share some insights while also reflecting on this season's podcast. David is a certified teacher, curriculum designer and learning technology expert. With over a decade of experience in blended learning, David brings his passion for experiential and inquiry based learning, creative problem solving, and educational innovation to the Live It Earth team. 

So I would like to start today by doing a land acknowledgment. And we are recording here in the Kootenays. I'm in the Slocan Valley. And I just want to acknowledge the traditional peoples that came before and raising kids as I am in the Slocan Valley, I'm very conscious of how I'm just very grateful for the fact that we get to live work, and play in this incredible area, surrounded by natural beauty. And I'm very conscious to raise my boys over three boys in a way that they appreciate the surroundings, but not just that, but also that they understand something of the history and the culture of the people that walk before us. So this is the unceded territory of the Sinixt, the Syilx, and the Ktunaxa. It's also home to many from the Metis nation. And my wife actually is one of my children are Metis ancestry. And as well, there are many people from many of the Indigenous groups that live in this area as well. So I really just want to start by acknowledging that. And yeah, just really showing my gratitude. And yeah, I'm just incredibly grateful that I get to, as I say, live, work and play here. 

So I just would like to start with that, before diving into this interview today with David Russell Lowen. David, welcome to the show. And thank you for making time to join us today to share some insights over the last school year as our Director of Education at Live It Earth.

Hi Blue, thank you for inviting me. It's an honour to be included in this podcast, which is which I was you know, number one, and I very excited about sharing with you some of the thoughts and insights that I've had, through listening to your podcasts and through the work we've been doing at Live It Earth through the year.

You know, just like to yeah, acknowledge as well, your support and collaboration on this podcast. And yeah, how excited we have been, I think as a collective at Live It for just to have such great, just fantastic educators joining us on the show to share their insights from different parts of British Columbia and also down in the States as well. And this is a great chance for us to do a bit of a round up. And with that, too, I'd like to start with this sort of question for you, Dave, is you went to maybe you can tell us a little bit about the Kaleidoscope of Inquiry Conference that you went to, you can probably tell me the official name of that conference. So what were some of the key takeaways from the kaleidoscope conference that you just went to?

Yeah, okay. So I am still kind of buzzing with the excitement that was generated out of this conference. It was a very high quality conference. That happened in the Lower Mainland. And it was, it had international appeal. There was a lot of teachers and educators and leaders that were from BC from independent schools as well as public. But there was also contingents from across Canada, United States and even as far away as South Africa that were coming there to learn and share what they know and what they do and learn from others. It happened over a weekend, and the conference was packed, it was sold out completely. And every single person there was just really excited to be involved in the workshops. And the, the way that the workshops were set up, they had really good quality speakers. And you submitted your list ahead of time, who you would like to kind of ranking in the time slots you'd like to see. So everyone kind of had a different matrix of the workshops that they got to, to attend, but there was also time to network in between and share what you learned. So it was really valuable. And another little piece of this Kaleidoscope of Inquiry Conference that I really like is that also offering follow up sessions on zoom with these workshop presenters. Because, like a lot of us, there's learning that happens after the fact. So this is a week past now. And I'm getting really excited to meet with some of them again on Zoom. And we're submitting follow up questions that we would like to discuss with them. So there's just an added level of value there for learning that extends far beyond that one moment.

And what was some of that, if you can give us a couple of snapshots? Like what are some of the short and sweet takeaways that you got from that conference in terms of like, the arcing themes? 

There are some personal takeaways, and then there's some professional takeaways in terms of its relationship to Live It Earth. I'll start I guess, with the personal side of things which so just some context, when we designed the programs for Live It Earth, we did consciously decide that right from the beginning, we wanted an inquiry-based framework to be the foundation for the learning, which would make it flexible, and allow it to become personalised learning. If the teachers were going to facilitate that, as well. But I realised about the inquiry approach, I guess I knew this, but it's been a while since I really dove into the realm, the full universe of inquiry. Because it is very much a holistic approach if you're, as an educator, if you are aware of what's possible. So there's definitely the cognitive approach, the art of asking questions that are open-ended and facilitating time to end read and finding resources to help kind of nurture that or deeper learning. But there's also like a heart centred approach, which sometimes coming from a high school background, I sometimes forget about this whole heart centred approach, which is so powerful, it's so often used in early childhood, childhood, but it's actually even more powerful with adolescents because so often, students come to school with a very kind of closed, protective shell. And so you're not really open to critical thinking and creative thinking and expressing yourself or collaborating with others if you're feeling you know, in danger or closed from each other. So there are methods of inquiry, that get to deeper learning. But sometimes, it's not a direct route to the final goal, the learning goal. Sometimes there's other methodologies that you can employ to get your learners to a place where they're ready to learn. That's in a nutshell what the Kaleidoscope of Inquiry was.

And I have, I have to say, I guess the reason why I'm talking to you right now, is a result of season two, episode one. When you had an interview with Trevor MacKenzie, who is a BC based teacher, and has written some books about inquiry mindset. His podcast with you kind of reignited my interest in learning more, and you connected me with Trevor and we had some conversations and it turned into an invitation on his behalf for us to visit the Kaleidoscope of Inquiry and participate in that conference.

I love how you circled back to the first episode of season two. Good plug there. If you have missed this particular episode, it is a really great one around inquiry learning. And actually, I'm wondering, based on your experience at this conference, and the conversations happening from people across the world, but also, you know, people from various districts within BC, is inquiry-based learning and approach. There's being widely adopted right now at the elementary level, particularly, because that's our focus that limit is why folks, my interest is there. Or is this something that's been niche, and now it's growing, and the interest is really broadening with the work of people like Trevor MacKenzie, and all the others that are involved in, you know, in a conference like this? Yeah. What's your sense with that?

Yeah, okay, the most profound observation that I can make is that every teacher that attended this conference loved their job. Nobody was overwhelmed. They were all happily spending their weekend to do learn more about inquiry, and they were all excited to take on more professional development and more resources. And it was just really inspiring to see how that mindset shift changes their whole perspective on, you know, what's possible, and what they don't need to worry about, versus what they what they can do. And, yeah, there's just a lot of excitement. So the, I guess this flip side of that is, I don't actually believe that it is a majority of educators that have made that transformation. And probably, I'm just gonna go on a hunch here. But I think for teachers who are sitting on the fence, between those two worlds, that's probably the most overwhelming because you see, you get a glimpse over the fence of what's possible. And you want that, but you're also not letting go of anything. And that's when you're really overwhelmed.

I think it's a yeah, that's a great answer. Actually, I really liked that, sitting on the fence. Yeah, it's taking the first couple of steps, isn't it and just being brave enough, almost. And I've heard this from other guests as well, just trying something new, you know, not being afraid to sort of dive into the unknown a little bit. Because it's incredible, the reward that you can get from that. Taking those things, there’s some questions you can, there's some questions you can ask yourself as an educator, that sometimes you might not even really know where you're at. But in terms of that mindset shift, because like, these presenters are internationally renowned, and they are, you know, even looked to from as from the leadership within BC. But Trevor McKenzie, he's advocating for 90% of your assessment time, even as a high school teacher, is just through informal, observation, and peer to peer conversation. That's informing the learner, about where they're at, and what they can communicate about what they now know. So your time should not be at home, writing comments on papers, or grading things. There should be just more process, conversation happening. And awareness of you know, if you're using rubrics, where the student is at the rubric at that moment, and what is their actual goal to get to? And what steps do they need to take to get there. And that can all be happening in the context of your classroom time. So you're not actually being burdened with all of these things you have to plan for, or spend time marking, which is, historically, the bane of, of teaching in high school, especially in the humanities, is the amount of time you're spending getting comments, and then you grade it. And then you kind of realise you're demoralised, because your students aren't actually reading your feedback. And they don't seem to be learning from it. So this is flipping everything, the practice on its head of kind of where you're spending your time and energy. And teachers are finding their students are getting more out of it. So they're getting more out of it. And it's just up-lifting.

Yeah, it's great feedback. So, building on that, from the conversations you had at the conference, and just your awareness, you know, within your network of educators in BC how a teacher Practice is changing?

The context of our podcast title, the 21st century teacher. Right? This transformation process, I think, can happen, can happen very quickly, or it can happen very slowly, depending on the school culture and, or the individual teacher. But I do think that there is one disruptive element, just like the pandemic was disruptive. The developments in artificial intelligence, are actually going to really push the envelope for teachers to drop their focus on final products, and really get to know their learners about what they can do, what they can demonstrate. Or even, for example, as we've all heard about Chat GPT, being able to write college-level essays, and he can give bibliographies and all that kind of stuff. So there's no need to have students submitting papers and marking them, you know, so that there's a big shift there. And so, it's really, also going to require students to demonstrate personalized learning, rather than rote learning. There's, there's no need to master rote learning, we can get all of the information from the internet. And we can even get chat GPT to customize it in certain ways. But you can never really make it personalized to yourself. Right? So if you can demonstrate how that learning has been meaningful to you personally, which is one of the core competencies of why you go to school. Right? It's communication, creative and critical thinking, and your personal and social awareness of yourself in relationship to your learning. I'm not sure I answered the question there. But so teacher practices, okay, that's the disruption disruptive element of how you're going to need to change what you're looking for, to assess learning, right. Those competencies that I mentioned, are built into when we're talking about the BC context of built into the curriculum as the foundation of something that we want our own learners to understand about themselves, throughout the year, the progression and growth, not just over one year, but actually year to year, all the way from kindergarten, to grade 12. So it's interesting, we talked in season one about the core competencies and how we're going to be talking about that to families, as educators. And really, when you think about what, record what K to 12, education is for, it's not for validating that they have acquired information, it's for seeing that they have grown up, they have become a human that will be able to do a multitude of different things, they'll be ready for the world at large in the world that they grow into, not the world that we understood 20 years ago. There's a lot of different metaphors that could be employed. But a facilitator is a great description of the 21st century teacher versus a gatekeeper of knowledge of a subject area like that is the old way that needs to be removed from our, our consciousness as what teachers do. If you think of a coach that you might have had, that was a good coach, a supportive coach in your development in any area, the coach is another good metaphor for the 21st century teacher in that if you think about it, coach might have been good at their craft in their prime, but now, they may not have all of the skills and knowledge, but they understand they have some wisdom to impart. And they have respect some mutual respect for learners who they are working with. And so they may not know how to do something themselves, but they can help guide each learner to get there if it's their goal to do so.

Yeah, it's great. Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. And so, that's gonna bring me to live it Earth, and our platform and all the resources that we have and the way that it's been built. And so so let's bring that in because you know, the podcast is here to support teachers and law and some really interesting tidbits from educators in different areas. So bringing Live It into that. And, you know, if we reflect a little bit on the podcast episodes this year to some really interesting points have come up, I think around where learning is at and how the platform can be useful. So why is live it Earth relevant right now? And what role can Live it Earth play, given that where education is at and this move to more inquiry-based learning and the interest around that as well.

So first of all, for context, Live it Earth is being kind of billed as a K to seven learning resource. But I would actually say like, let's think bigger than that, because it's, we know, Blue you and I from experience, it's a lifelong learning resource. It's bringing the opportunity for teachers to be playful, with their learning with their students and the learning that can happen. It's doing a lot of the heavy lifting of all of the pre planning that would go into something, too, present a kind of a provocation to learners to ignite a spark of inquiry. Along along with a kind of a wide range of different challenges that are presented that work with the Universal Design for Learning Framework, which you interviewed Katie Novak at length, in our last episode describing that, we use a universal design for learning every resource that we build. So that no matter the ability of the learner, no matter what grade they're in, if they operate in English or French, they will be able to interact with. And so again, the multimodal either text, visuals, sound all of those are available for the student. So again, if they're not at a reading level, they can still listen, with text to speech. And in the challenges, we always start with something simple. And then the challenge is just build layers of possibilities. That if the learner is up for that challenge, if they're engaged with that learning, they will take it far beyond where we even imagined.

So Live It offers some self assessment tools. And I'm wondering, what is the thinking behind these tools? Why have we put that into the programs? Why have we chosen the particular tools? Is there any thoughts you could share on that?

What we have currently, on a limited platform for self assessment is kind of a proof of concept. So if you're listening today, I urge you to try out putting the self assessment option at the bottom of every program. And there's a number of options there. Pretty simple. Because as self assessment tools for K to seven, they need to be accessible for those kids. And understandable. And we've provided is a list of “I CAN” statements. So this is like it's not really enough to just be exposed to information, right? A competency based curriculum actually is going to the end goal is to show that learners can do things. And so be aware of what you can do or want to do that inquiry piece. Right? Self Assessment, it's like what I can do, and personal inquiry, what would be meaningful me meaningful for me to be able to do next. And that's kind of I mean, that's also super valuable anecdotal information. That helps the teacher get to know their student that much better. Circling back to podcast series, it's also going to be very valuable documentation, because the learning conversations with families is supposed to be about this kind of thing.

So just building on your comment there about core competencies. Can you talk about core competencies, and how live it earth actually has proved to be a great teaching resource around that

I'm really excited about teaching in British Columbia with the core competencies being the foundation and the framework for learning K to 12. Now Live it earth provides opportunity at all levels for allowing for engagement in all of the core competencies, we we actually are thinking about them when we're developing resources about how they can communicate and use critical thinking and how has it become personalized. So there is opportunity in every resource to demonstrate these competencies. And allowing teachers to have a breath, and be able to have a sense of joy as they actually observe their learners demonstrating these competencies. If they use the self-assessment tools, they even have documentation of it, which they can report on at a future date.

So moving on from that, How are teachers learning to embrace this new way of teaching? Again, given that you've just been to the conference? There's a lot of conversations coming from different districts around BC and around the world also. Yeah, what did you get around that?

I'll have to just give a shout out to a presenter at the conference named Alice John Klaus, she's a VP and the school board at a French immersion school. And she did a workshop on personal inquiry, that was really a deep dive into why you want to teach like, and no matter where you are, at, in your profession. When you actually think about what you want, why you want it. To be it's, it's not to test people and confirm that they are good at something and others are less good at it. It's all it's all these kind of more altruistic things. But like, there is the potential to live into that why through inquiry as an approach to everything in your life. And that's not just with facilitating student learning. It's your own lifelong learning. And it's also your relationships with your colleagues, which if you if that rubs off with your colleagues and you kind of have a reciprocal approach, it will just build you up and give you more capacity to, to kind of spread that joy of learning. And another valuable lesson was my last one. With presenter, Misty Patterson, and called her shivery, they provide, they facilitated this heart centered approach to inquiry. And it didn't really matter what the topic was going to be about. Because the real powerful thing that you could imagine, for any teacher who struggles with behavior management, and it's like a really a burden to just kind of wrangle these students. It was a very centering activity, very reflective, it was very personalized. And yes, it's sort of was kind of a lesson in art. But it wasn't like the embedded piece was everyone can express them, how they're feeling with these objects, make a sculpture kind of thing. And after some time, there's an ability to share what it represents to your table. And what that does, is it creates this facilitates vulnerability between peers. And it was extremely powerful. This was just done as a case like a lesson for a bunch of educators. So that can be done in a staff meeting. If there's anyone who's experienced a staff meeting where it's all bristly, and everyone's agitated, and nobody wants to receive any instruction from the principal. I thought it was very, it was a very powerful method that could could be applied in many different contexts. Again, like I said, the top how powerful it could be for adolescents to see each other and share themselves, and then be ready to learn about something constructively. So yeah, that's just my whole journey for the last week, I urge you to check out Trevor McKenzie, Misty Patterson, and Alice junk close. And calf murder. Doc also was at this conference, and she's kind of the guru of inquiry. And there's, I think everybody has a book they can go and look for. But I would also look for podcasts. We'll probably have some of them on podcasts in season three. Looking forward to it. 

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to Yeah, have some reflection time around the conference. And yeah, we actually, yeah, we did. We looped in some of the episodes as well from this season's podcast. Yeah, super excited for the next season of podcasts, which will become all the episodes, which will be coming out starting in September. And on that note, as well, I think it would be useful, we will share some of those, the links to some of those presenters that you've just been talking about as well. Maybe we should share the link for the kaleidoscope conference as well. If anybody's curious to look into that. So yeah, so thank you so much. And I'm looking forward to more great conversations with more fantastic podcast guests. And it sounds like we'll have some from the conference as well, some of the people that you've just mentioned. So yeah, so stay tuned for more. And in the meantime, David, thank you so much for taking time out of your day.

Yeah, it's great Blue. And I have to say, this is a great format for me to share my learning. If you'd asked me to write a paper on it, I would have probably submitted it in about six months from now. So very timely way to get my feedback. Yeah. Keep up the great work. I can relate to that as well. So yeah, no, thank you so much. 

Thanks for joining us on the 21st century teacher. And we'll look forward to see you next time. Please do subscribe so you don't miss out on the next show. And also don't forget to check out our fantastic online learning platform which is liveit.earth. Thanks again and we'll see you soon.