Last week we had a visit from Oak Bay High teacher Trevor MacKenzie, who’s also the author of a new book on teaching with an inquiry-based approach called Dive into Inquiry. He joined us from his home via Zoom, as everybody’s been doing lately.

This is a short clip from his YouTube channel, where he’s explaining the purpose of his book and the inquiry approach in the classroom.

Despite Trevor’s advocacy for teaching with an inquiry-based approach, I actually found that was the last thing I was reflecting on after his talk. It was his stories, especially the story about ‘Garrison’ and his troubled brother that really got to me. I admire the fact that he didn’t give up on Garrison, and took the effort to find out what this youth was genuinely interested in—graffiti art. Trevor’s efforts to engage Garrison, despite resistance from his family, are admirable. He may have prevented Garrison from choosing a dark, dark path.

The real reason this story affected me so much is that it relates to me on a personal level. My younger brother was a teen just like ‘Garrison,’ but unfortunately, he never had a school mentor who made any effort to connect with him. He ended up hanging out with the wrong crowd and eventually dropping out of school altogether. My parents and I spent years trying to get him back on a positive path and to help him sort his life out, but he has still managed to get into all kinds of serious trouble. It pains me to think how much different his life could be if he’d had a role model or someone who cared other than his immediate family, as that clearly wasn’t enough.

To be honest, inquiry-based teaching sounds like an engaging teaching approach, but that wasn’t what I took away from Trevor’s talk. What I feel more resolve to do now is prevent another teen from making the same decisions my younger brother did. I firmly believe that as a down-to-earth adult, I could make a difference in a troubled teen’s life by showing them I care and steering them away from life choices that cause nothing but heartache and regret.