New education initiative turns teens into problem solvers

Letting go of the reigns

Each year Carlton Comprehensive High School’s extracurricular drama club puts on a play, and each year David Zulkoskey’s theatre arts class is in charge of putting together their set.

He designs a set, and students build it based on the plan or model he constructed.

This year he’s shaking it up.

“I thought, ‘let’s try something completely different.’ So I did not have a plan and I said I wanted to use scaffolding. I had the idea I wanted some temple and some sort of jungle, but that’s it. Which, in many ways, was wide open,” said Zulkoskey.

Students proceeded to follow his loose guidelines and parameters for the school’s production of “The Jungle Book.”

For example, they needed to be able to take the set down and re-assemble it because the play is a touring production.

They split off into groups to work on different aspects of the set.

Students embraced their strengths and weaknesses in a way that allowed them to take on new roles.

“The wonderful thing is that out of this group we have at least five leaders emerging and they might not necessarily have done that in another class. But they were so enthusiastic about the project and they demonstrated the ability to speak to others respectfully, to share ideas and… to listen,” said Zulkoskey.

Students started off by bringing pictures into class to come up with ideas for how the set would look and formulated ideas to create their basic set.

“Once we had that idea, we just started building off it, seeing what works and what doesn’t,” said student Alexis Mantie.

There were a few road blocks, but Zulkoskey said he didn’t have a problem stepping back and letting them solve problems independently.

“It was not hard at all to literally let them carry themselves forward. Because this class, right from the start, you could get the feel that they wanted to take ownership of their learning. And as a teacher, that’s a wonderful moment.”

He did occasionally point out when issues were popping up. For example, when flowers were going up to create a tropical feel, Zulkoskey pointed out they were creating more of a “funeral” feel.

However, Carly Fraser and her classmates tackled the problem by bunching the flowers and braiding them together.

That’s only one of the roadblocks the students faced, but after two months of hard work they now get to step back and feel the accomplishment from their hard work.

“I don’t mean to sound cocky but I do think the set looks really great, and it came out the way we did plan for it to turn out. And we see it kind of reached what we wanted,” said student Malissa Paul.

Her classmate Fraser went a step further.

“I think it almost exceeded what we wanted. It was great, it was all of our ideas together exceeded what I could ever have thought of, and I think what anyone here could have thought of.”

What is inquiry-based learning?

The style of teaching that lets students problem solve on their own and take a project from inception to completion is called “inquiry-based learning.”

The teacher is more of a facilitator for the kids to follow through on their ideas, rather than being the one who provides all the answers, said Zulkoskey.

He read up on inquiry-based learning and decided it would be a good fit for his drama classes.

He didn’t just follow it through with the one theatre arts class. He also had students in another class design a tour set for their favourite rock band. They then created a model to represent that plan.

One benefit of inquiry-based learning is that it appeals to all kinds of learning styles, according to several students.

“You can learn by reading and build that set… visually, and hands-on. All the learning types are in the building of that set,” said Fraser.

In fact, the energy and excitement caused by the project makes Mantie and Paul look forward to heading to class each day.

With the success he’s had so far, Zulkoskey plans to use this method as his theatre arts class moves onto their props lessons.

claskowski@panow.com

On Twitter: @princealbertnow

by Chelsea Laskowski

New education initiative turns teens into problem solvers

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