The SHIFT Blog

Matt and I listen to a lot of podcasts.  I’ve recently gotten into a podcast called Gen Pop - A Pop Culture Podcast and I really enjoy the podcasts created by Bald Move around the television and movies I like to consume.  Matt’s go to podcasts are 99% Invisible , a podcast about design and The Art of Education , which is a podcast about art education (of all things). No judgement on this next statement please, but I’ve recently started playing Dungeons and Dragons with a small group of friends.  I enjoy playing board games and I try to use this passion as much as I can in my teaching.  Dungeons and Dragons was something I’ve always wanted to do in my youth but I could never find a group of others to play with.  Plus, when I was younger there was always a sort of stigma attached to certain types of games.  Now that I’m older...well, game on! Jamie on the weekends... So obviously I fell down the rabbit hole, as one does when they pick up a new h...

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...