The SHIFT Blog

Well Shifters, it has been a great semester!  Since starting this blog in February of this year, we have had so much fun learning about what teachers are doing in their classes and talking about what they hope to do next. We hope that we did a little to inspire you to think differently about what you teach and how you teach and that you got excited to take some risks.    Working on this project forced us to learn a lot, and most of that learning was driven through trial and error.  Jamie used a Mac for the first time.  Matt built several rigs to help us with our sound recording.  We learned how to blog, edit video, talk on camera and listen to ideas.  We made lots of mistakes that hopefully nobody noticed.  Although, to quote Marisa Cavataio when we visited her Productions Class at Nelson High School, “The most important thing you will do in this class is make mistakes”.   Our mistakes bore fruit!  We just recently passed 10,000 v...

So, we have nearly made it!  Another year down.  Hopefully you have been reading the blog (heck, you are now at least!) and you have been thinking about ways that you’d like to experiment, to push, to shift.  The end of the school year, however is a bit of a tricky time to implement big changes.  Well, how about connecting with fellow shifters a little bit before the next school year ramps up?  We are offering you a chance to “Shift Your [Blank]”, a summer symposium on Thursday, August 24th.   It will be a chance to connect, think about some ways to shift your _____ for the upcoming school year.  There will be a free lunch and Shift swag to boot. So, what do you say?  Want to shift gears with us and start dreaming about September?  We know, it is a tricky thing to think ahead to August, but the early Shifter gets the worm.  Open to All Secondary Teachers.   Register Here to Embrace the Shift!

Hey there Shifters, Matt here with an interruption to your regular scheduled programming. You see, my fellow shifter, Jamie Mitchell was presented with a pretty huge honour today at school.  Some of you may have already heard that he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence Certificate of Achievement .  That is a kind of a big deal.  Out of thousands of nominations, only 10 teachers in Ontario were awarded that honour!  What I found really striking about the ceremony we just had at our school to mark the award, was in fact a student Maggi Djurdjevic.   Maggi went to the considerable work (it is a 21 page application!) to nominate her teacher and she spoke eloquently on why she nominated Jamie for this honour.  She said that Jamie Mitchell was able to take a subject that she isn’t particularly strong in, math, and make that period the best part of her day.  That is pretty awesome!  Two more ideas really hit home with...

First, as we learn about our platform for blogging we’ve come across some shortcomings.  We often embed videos in our posts.  If you are reading this post in an email update, you can’t see the video.  It’s worth it to click through to the actual blog to see all of the content we add.  We’d hate for you to miss something. Second, this post is deviating from our norm a little bit.  I’m ( Jamie ) offering up some of my opinions and I’m probably being a bit more direct than I usually am.  As always, we welcome feedback in our comments.  Discussion is good. This was an interesting week for me, as I came across several unrelated things that really got me thinking.  While unrelated, I think they go hand in hand. The first was the short animated film Alike, which was shown to Matt and I when we were talking about iteration with Wendy Spence, Sarah Alexander, and Kelly-Ann Cameron. Do take a few minutes to watch, if you can.  It is an out...

The end is in sight; can you feel it?  A few weeks of hard work, then that dock/porch/yoga mat is calling your name.  A well deserved rest after a year of teaching, engaging, ...and shifting.  June is also a great time to take stock of how the year went, think about our “good to greats” and start to imagine a little bit about next year.   The year is still fresh in our heads and we have a good vantage point to think forward at this point of the year.  During this process, we invite you to think about how you can take a risk next year.  These could be risks that you take in how you lead a class, a course, or building culture in your school.  This could be how to set the framework for encouraging your students to take their own greater risks in their learning.  It is a fun time to start thinking BIG, because the BIG is buffered by some serious summer YOU time first.  Here is The Case for Risk Taking.

Yesterday was a great day.  Matt and I spent much of our time simply watching the #LoveMyHaltonSchool tweets roll in.  We laughed, we liked, we retweeted, we saw things that were happening in other schools and we talked about how to bring that greatness to our building. And this is why we think sharing our best practices is so important.  We both work in a great school, with supportive colleagues and students.  But we can’t continue to improve as teachers if we only look within our building for inspiration.  We have to broaden our horizons by looking outwards.  Yesterday, everyone who participated by tweeting opened a window into their classroom or school. Watching the tweets were fun, but we couldn’t help but wonder about the reach of the hashtag.  Was a small group of teachers just tweeting at each other?  Were we making an impact online or were we all just yelling into the void? Well of course, there is an app for that.  We ...

There are lots of reasons. But today, we don't want to list our reasons for why we #LoveMyHaltonSchool.  We'd rather highlight someone else's reason. Melissa Hickey is an English Teacher at Aldershot High School.  She tried something new this semester that allowed her students to explore their own strengths.  Here are her thoughts: A long time ago, in a galaxy far away… Grade 12 College English students at Aldershot High School were given an assignment: Write an original horror story, then turn that story into an original short horror film.  Students were assigned the task of creating an original short story based on common horror tropes and elements that were covered in class.  Students created script versions of their stories, and storyboards to refer to when the actual filming took place.  It was not only an exercise in creativity, but also in collaboration and innovation, as the grade 12 students were expected to problem solve the details...