The SHIFT Blog

Last Thursday evening, I travelled to Milton District High School for their showing of the documentary Most Likely To Succeed .  If you haven’t seen it, check out the trailer b efore you read any further.  I’ll wait here until you finish.   Done?  Pretty cool, huh? . The screening I saw was put on in collaboration with the school and their school council and it was my first opportunity to view the film.  I’m currently reading Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith’s book , on which the film is based, so it was a timely event for me. High time for a rethink on the model. The film makes the argument that our school system is built on an outdated structure designed in the 19th century, during the beginning of the industrial age. It places greatest value on knowledge acquisition and standardization of education. The Committee  of 10 made decisions like the division of subjects, and at what age students would start to cover different subjects and content...

I spent last Friday morning presenting with Joanne Eliuk at the Canadian Safe Schools Network 20/20 Conference.  This conference, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Safe Schools Network had a focus on Technology and Digital Citizenship, Diversity and Inclusion and Health & Wellness.   While we were identified as being a workshop that fit into the "Technology and Digital Citizenship" focus, what keeps being reinforced the more we dialogue with educators is that these practices are all interconnected. It all comes down to the relationship we develop with our students and how that relationship can help students learn and grow that creates a 21st century classroom. Joanne and I gave a presentation on The 21st Century Classroom .  This was a presentation we’ve given before at Halton’s Innovation and Technology Symposium in the fall.  At that time, our presentation highlighted our own “Ten Easy Steps” and then some points within those steps for an educator to...

Here we go! If you are interested in the background thinking that's gone into this project, follow the link .

For some reason we thought it would be easier to move forward with this project now that we had some direction.  We were wrong. Last week ended with us sitting down with Cindy Cosentino and Nicole Jarvis to talk about what innovation means and what it takes to create innovative people.  We used this conversation as an opportunity to write a draft script for what will eventually become our first video.  More than that, the conversation really anchored our own understanding of what we can accomplish with this project.  We feel like we are innovative, but why?  How is that reflected in our classrooms?  Cindy helped identify some traits that are common among innovative people and sparked some deeper thinking about the direction of this project. So, armed with a script we approached this week with a lot of optimism.  “Of course we will have the first video done by the end of the week”, we thought.  We were wrong. The mic was plugged into ...

Let’s put all the cards on the table before we get into our book list. When we say “reading”, what we really mean is “what pages do we look at after putting the kids to bed”. It’s hard to fit in reading, for professional growth or for fun into a day that is full of work and family. And yet, we try, as we imagine most of you do to. Given the nature of this project, reading for professional growth has become more important to us. For sure we still try to find the time to read for pleasure but that time is shrinking as we get closer to launching The Shift. Certainly, if we are going to be the conduit through which innovative teaching practices are shared we better have some evidence to fall back on. We both started by reading Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era . This book was the basis for the companion documentary Most Likely to Succeed, which was screened twice last semester in our board. The documentary itself was attended by over 500 Hal...

So are you innovating? That’s the question we seem to be getting a lot.  It’s all in good fun right now as everyone who stops by to visit us while we are working are just curious about what this “pilot project” is.  From the outside looking in, it probably looks like we aren’t doing much right now.  Innovation is hard.  On demand innovation is even harder! We started last week with a very nebulous end goal; build a culture of sharing within the board while making it easier for teachers to connect with each other and generate conversations about innovative pedagogy.  Sounds easy, right? We’ve spent our first week in conversation about how we might accomplish our goal, given our time constraints.  We had lots of great ideas, but lacked direction.  We obviously needed a clearer framework for this project.   Thankfully, we were able to spend some time with Superintendent Newton, and two Instructional Program Leaders, Cindy Cosentino and P...

Welcome to The Shift. This is a place where we hope to discover, explore and highlight the cool and forward thinking teaching practices, ideas and philosophies around the Halton District School Board.  Who knows, we might even branch out and look around the province for interesting ideas.  This is the messy beginning to what we hope may spark conversation, ideas and further sharing amongst teachers, administrators and staff in our schools.   Here we are at the start of this project asking ourselves some big questions (mostly without answers).  Who are we doing this for?  How can we design this so that it will help to shift your practice? Are people willing to share? Because we do want to shift people’s opinions and ideas about what school can be.  Education is changing, there is no denying that.  Knowledge, which was once the commodity we traded in, is now available for free to anyone with an internet connection.  But w...