Limitless Learning

Have you ever been completely immersed in a project that inspires, challenges, and keeps you constantly learning and engaged to accomplish your purpose?   In this series we will follow some orchestrated learning experiences that do this.  They are varied, but we will mention a few to give you the flavor. 

We will follow the work of students focused on a sustainability endeavor that includes, to begin with, a particular focus on net zero buildings.  We will spend time with a teacher working with a Blackfoot Elder from the Siksika Nation to facilitate learning opportunities in nature.   And we will visit a teacher whose students over the course of the school term create and operate a ‘Town’ with all the related commerce and politics and community elements that you would expect of any town.

Some of the common ingredients of these diverse leaning opportunities include:

• Authentic, purposeful, engaging work
• Questions and more questions that provoke critical thinking and ever-more demanding learning
• Student choice and voice and ownership for the work that increases over time
• Challenges that encourage, flexible thinking, creativity, innovation and perseverance—the encouragement, therefore, of both intellectual and emotional agility
• Students learning to manage multiple dimensions such that it reflects the reality of actual jobs
• Opportunity to mesh multiple disciplines, perspectives, and possibilities for unique outcomes
• The natural need to access expertise and partners beyond the classroom walls and the resulting interplay with these sources of information and skill serves to further deepen learning
• Educators who know curriculum expectations well and both orchestrate and energize learning while also following and developing it based on students’ strengths and interests as well as naturally arising opportunities
• Development of competencies that generalize to any discipline or job of life success – the kind of competencies so highly valued in the work force (critical thinking, connecting & collaborating, creativity, citizenship, communication)

To participate in these experiences is to live learning continually.

Enjoy meeting some of the people powering possibilities in this area.