Finishing Projects

By
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 the entire process was.
The Mural, installed, finally!
Today was the formal dedication ceremony for the Mural.  Several people spoke, but no one impressed me more than the final speaker, Abbey Kunzli, a student at our school.  She spoke about, of all things, community building!   She spoke about how she feels most at home with her soccer team, when they are sitting around after a game sharing orange slices that one of the parents have provided.  She talked about how that act of sharing makes her feel like her team is a community.  She then compared that community to her school community, and how participating in projects like the En Masse Mural make her feel like a part of a larger community.  Is it any surprise that Abbey’s contribution to the project was to paint one of the orange slices that border the mural?
Abbey, posing with her orange slice
We’ve been focused on intentionally building community in our schools this semester.  Having a safe and inclusive classroom where all students feel supported is one of the ingredients needs to foster innovation.  It’s amazing how far building a positive community can get you, both inside and outside of the classroom.  Community building is how you convince 100 teachers to help carry pieces of a mural through the school and across the street to be installed.  It’s how we empower our students so that they will feel confident enough to talk to strangers about what piece of a mural they’ve worked on.  If I can steal a line from Jordie, community building is how we go from “cement and new build homes” to a place where students can produce and run an entire dedication ceremony.

And I think that is pretty rad.

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