Students are also encouraged to pursue their curiosity through personal projects, lead school assemblies, work in one of the school's makerspaces, and more. Student-driven inquiry is now the norm at Wildwood, as teachers regularly use student questions and lines of inquiry to drive their lessons. " realizing that when you let the students take the reins," reflects Cunat, "you get even better results than when you try to plan every detail, and that if you give students real time, resource, opportunity, support, and feedback to explore something that matters to them, you end up with more than if you just assign a project." "All of the sudden, we see our students doing things that really matter to them, and they're excited and they're passionate, and they want to talk about what they're learning," says Cunat. This event catalyzed the school's a deep dive into inquiry-based learning once the teachers saw how invested the students became in their areas of research and inquiry. The event was similar to a science fair, where students demonstrated their personal inquiries/projects and results, some of which aligned with unit content and some of which drew from their own personal interests.
Wildwood was already using inquiry-based learning to some extent, but things took off for them when, in Principal Mary Beth Cunat's second year, the school put on an Inquiry Fair.
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