A Beginning...

By
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 we can’t just tell our students to “Google it” and expect to raise productive members of society.  Now, teaching is more about showing students what they can do with their knowledge and less about the transference of that knowledge from us to them. We have to prepare our students for their future, not our past.

Time to teach for tomorrow's jobs, not yesterdays

We are still in the early days of this shift.  No one has all the answers but many people have some answers.  We believe that amazing things happen in all schools and classrooms everyday.  We also know that it’s hard sometimes to share those things.  It’s intimidating for some to invite outsiders into their classroom.  For others, it’s challenging to be away from school to visit another's class.  We’d like to be a conduit through which the great things that are happening in our board can be shared.

Let's shift this curve to the left

So who are we?
Matt Coleman

We are two high school teachers, teaching in Burlington, Ontario, Canada.

Matt Coleman is an art and photography teacher, with 12 years of experience.  He has taught at 5 different high schools in that time, mostly in Burlington and Oakville, with a stint teaching internationally in Manama Bahrain.  He has taught Ontario Curriculum as well as International Baccalaureate (IB).





Jamie Mitchell
Jamie Mitchell is a mathematics teacher who has been teaching in the Halton District School Board for 11 years.  He started teaching at Gary Allan High School in the STEP program before moving into a traditional high school.  He is currently working as the Program Leader for Mathematics and Computer Studies at Dr Frank J. Hayden Secondary School.

We both care about the “what” of each person's day to day learning  We hope you’ll join us as we go deep with the hows and the whys of truly innovative education.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Are We Reading?

By
Image
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...
Read more

What is a Pro-Pro Chart?

By
Image
  If you have been following along on with Shift twitter , you may have witnessed educators getting excited about something called a pro-pro chart.  You may also be wondering what on Earth the excitement is for this tool? A group of HDSB science teachers, led by the Instructional Program Leaders for Science in both elementary and secondary panels, teaching grades 7 to 10 from eight different schools are participating in a series of workshops to learn about Integrative Thinking, which is a creative way to problem solving. It was developed by Roger Martin at Rotman School of Management as tools for businesses to make important management decisions, it quickly became apparent that these tools were enormously useful in education as a way for students to think more deeply about problems in the world around them.   Rotman I-THINK tools are accessible to students in elementary and secondary and be can used to build empathy through tackling some really tricky problems and a...
Read more

Asking Questions

By
Image
“What do you want to learn?” “How do you want to show me what you’ve learned?” These are the questions we hear being asked on our visit to Aldershot High School.  We are sitting in Sarah Spencer's’ Grade Nine Applied Science class.  The students have just returned from a scavenger hunt in a nearby ravine and  they’ve been asked to record some of the things they’ve noticed on the blackboard.  From here, the teacher hands out the Overall Expectations for the course and ask the students to pay attention specifically to the Biology portion of the document.   This is the student's introduction to the Biology unit of the class, and it isn’t going the way we would usually expect.  Rather than the teacher guiding the students from topic to topic, the students are being allowed to find their own path.  Each student is identifying their own interests from the Biology curriculum and, presumably, their paths will diverge from here. But we won’t get to ...
Read more