The SHIFT Blog

  Sarah Cronin is a teacher for the Halton District School Board and the program leader for Special Education at Milton District High School.   She has written previously for us, sharing her work leading other teachers through their own passion projects .  You can learn more about her journey on her blog . After reading about teacher passion projects in the book Hacking Leadership ,  I wanted to support professional development in this meaningful and purposeful way with members of my team.   Teacher passion projects are when teachers take control of their own professional learning through choosing an area of education on which to focus.  Topics are varied and learning is centred around working toward becoming a better teacher overall. Learn about it here !   When I started leading this project I focused on my inspiration, implementation and leadership strategies.  As the project began, we had 5 people participate. Topics included Distributed Learning and how to use it to introduce

  Last year, the Shift was fortunate to experience the Deeper Learning Conference in San Diego.  Ever since, we’ve been hard at work with various educators around the Halton District School Board to push our learning even further.  Today, after a year of hard work, “try, fail, learn” and so many emotional ups and downs we are pleased to launch the next phase of The Shift. Are you ready for Even Deeper Learning ? We had thought, with the expertise of our partners in the School Programs Department, that we had taken our learning as deep as it could go.  But of course, after months of trying, failing and learning, we realize that we haven’t taken our work deep enough .  As it was discussed in Ted Dintersmith’s film, Most Likely to Succeed, in order for students to investigate a subject with depth, one does sacrifice some breadth.  This was made clear to us when we started working with Rotman and their I-Think Program.  Last November, we were given the opportunity to expand on our underst