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...
“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 ...
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...
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