The SHIFT Blog

Amanda Williams-Yeagers has written a number of guest blog posts on the Shift. She is also leading the HDSB Empower Book Talk. Jordie Burton has also written a guest blog post on the Shift. He is an Art Educator passionate about creativity and design thinking. Amanda and Jordie have teamed up with other HDSB educators to use an innovation grant to delve into teaching creativity and design thinking in our schools. Sir Ken Robinson begins his famous 2006 Ted talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” by speaking about the evidence and the range of human creativity. He also begins by talking about the uncertainty of the future. The irony of this, is that this brilliant talk took place twelve years ago . Today we are still wondering what the future will look like and we are still hoping to prepare our students for jobs that don’t even exist yet. We are also curious about the range and extent of human creativity: What is the definition of creativity? What environment is conduci...

It’s hard to believe that one year ago today we formally launched The Shift.  It feels like an amazing coincidence that this blog surpassed 20,000 views today too! We’ve learned a lot over the past twelve months by talking to other educators, reading lots , visiting other teachers classrooms and generally taking risks and being open to failure. We both are looking forward to more time in this role.  We like to think big and we aren’t done dreaming yet.

Amanda Williams-Yeagers wrote a guest blog for us early this month.  She is also leading the HDSB Empower Book Talk.  We’ve enjoy learning with her every Thursday night so much, we asked her to share her thoughts on learning environments and why the classroom landscape needs to change. I recently held a community circle with a grade seven science class. The students were feeling stressed about looming deadlines and tests, and I wanted to give them a forum to get things off their chest and discuss strategies for coping with management of the feelings they were having.  After a few referenced that this was “Good preparation for high school,” I decided to change the dialogue. I asked them, “If they could change anything about their current school system and the way that they learned, what would they change?” Some students talked about wanting more opportunities for hands on experiences and less tests, some talked about wanting more opportunities for creativ...

I came across a thread on twitter a month or so ago.  It was about a professor who discovered that her students had spent all semester collaborating on one large google doc.  They took notes together, asked and answered questions of each other.  It was a great example of collaboration. I learned today that a group of students used a Google doc to take lecture notes-- they all took notes simultaneously in a collective file. — stephanie (@mckellogs) December 20, 2016 And I thought to myself, “I wonder if my students would be willing to try something like that”.  I knew I’d be running a classroom where students were up at the whiteboards daily, working on problems together.  I also realized that this might impact their ability to take coherent notes. So, at the start of this semester, I created a mostly blank google doc and shared it with my students.  I provided the first few lesson titles and suggested that they use this space to collect their ...

Amanda Williams-Yeagers is a Librarian Glitterarian who works at John T Tuck Public School in Burlington.  We asked her what it means to be empowered as a learner and she turned around and wrote a guest blog on the topic. Empowerment. This word is being talked about more and more in the world of education.   John Spencer , talks about the shift from compliance to engagement to empowerment- where students are in charge of how they learn.  When I think about how big that word really is, I feel two things: excited and overwhelmed. Excited at the possibilities of where education in the 21st century is headed, and overwhelmed at the challenges faced by educators in order to get our students to that place where they feel “empowered.”  When I think about what “empower” means to me, I think about students engaging in self-directed learning; those moments where the curriculum is there, but there is a certain magic that is happening because students are in charg...