The SHIFT Blog

“Why the heck did I DO that?”   Have you ever found yourself asking that question after teaching a lesson?  I did, a week or so ago.  I delivered a classic “powerpoint”, with teenager eyes glazing over but I’m powering forward and getting through my slides because “that is the lesson”.  Immediately after finishing the period, I realized I messed up. Students had probably retained 5% of the information that I just talked at them about.  This stung a little, especially since what I just did flew in the face of my current “WHY” as a teacher. One iteration of the creative process we are playing with. Let me back up and give you a bit of context.  I’m an art and photography teacher and my colleagues and I are really pushing hard to reimagine the creative process. WHY are we doing this?  We are finding that when students’ experiment within the creative process and are not evaluated, they engage more in the risk taking and truly embrace their creativity.  Being set up as an e

Students say the best things when they think I’m not listening.  It’s pretty funny actually, if not more than a little frustrating.  Students can be having excellent conversations about mathematics but as soon as I come over to listen they get just a little bit self-conscious and the conversation ends. I’ve gotten really good at listening from far away. We’ve been dabbling in project based learning with our grade nine academic classes this semester.  After our first project , we introduced our students to Dandy Candies .  This activity has been around for awhile.  I first was introduced to it at the 2015 OAME conference when Dan Meyer ran it with a packed room.  Since then, I’ve used this activity on and off with my classes, but never as a project. The premise is pretty simple, show students the video of a preset number of small cubes assembling into packages (prisms) of various dimensions.  Then ask them some questions about what they’ve seen. “What do you notice?”

There is something satisfying about seeing a project come to its conclusion.  I think it’s safe to say that the longer the project takes to complete, the more people involved, and the larger the scope, the more satisfying the conclusion. I’ve been sitting on the outer reaches of a large project for the past six months, watching my friends Matt Coleman, Jordie Burton and Toge Heersink put crazy amounts of work into the En Masse Collaborative Mural Project .  My involvement started and ended at carrying pieces of the mural between classrooms.  Hindsight being what it is, I wish Jordie explained what the “canvas” was made of, because it felt like granite! There were many people who were much more involved with me.  Three teacher advisors, 66 students, 3 outside artists, school admin, HDSB facilities staff, City of Burlington employees, City Councillors, the Mayor.  To hear the students involved with the project talk about their mural, it was easy to see what a labour of love t

We started this year with a Community Building Call to Action.  We can sum up the work that many educators have done over the past month.  However, we’d rather present to you the experiences of one Halton Teacher. Nancy Zigrovic is an French teacher at Iroquois Ridge High School.  She took up our Community Building Call to Action and ran with it! I have often heard it said that with so much content to cover, how does anyone have time for community-building?  Team-building activities such as classmate bingo and “two truths and a lie” seem to happen in the first week of school and never again.  I have often found myself caught in this same dilemma - is it community or curriculum?  I am here to argue that in a 21st Century learning environment, one cannot happen without the other. I am currently teaching Grade 9 Applied Core French with a lovely bunch of students who have made it very clear to me that this will be the last time they ever take French.  They tell me that Fren

“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 find out, because thanks t