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...
It is well established at this point in 2020 that these are complicated, trying times. The days blur together, work/life balance is totally out of whack, we worry about our health and the health of our loved ones, our families and friends are reeling from the economic implications from a shut down economy, not to mention the incredible challenges in engaging our students in learning, it takes determination, resiliency...and LAUGHTER to get us through. Laughter and fun are antidotes that build our resiliency. How might we find opportunities for fun, laughter and play in these times? As Bryan Robinson, PhD notes in his article , ‘Too many of us take daily challenges with grim, crippling seriousness and humourless determination, thinking our lives have to be all work and no play, which can straitjacket us. If you’re like many people, you believe you must toil and sweat before earning the right to have fun. You might even feel guilty laughing and smiling...
“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 ...
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