The SHIFT Blog

  SHIFT Coaching Have you ever learned to play a musical instrument, or a sport, or a new dance step, or a new pedagogical approach?   Did you learn it alone? How long did that take? Do you think it would have been slower and more difficult, or easier and faster, if you had had someone to learn it with? Someone to plan with, someone to bounce ideas back and forth with, someone to try with, celebrate with, fail with, reflect with, and move forward with?  As SHIFT coaches, one of our main goals is to collaborate with people who would like the opportunity to SHIFT their practice, and innovate.   Innovation, as we define it here in Halton, is “an improvement to a product, process or understanding.”  So whether it is innovating a learning process - like flipped lessons or writers’ workshop, an understanding of something - like inquiry-based learning or mastery-based assessment, or a product - such as a communication tool used to better connect us with the community we serve, innovation and

Some days, don’t you just wish you could clone yourself ? Most days, probably.  Wouldn’t that be nice?! It feels like we spend so much time repeating ourselves, and teaching the same concept over and over, that we never have enough time to spend actually working with our students . Having a clone would certainly make things easier! The strategies of the self paced classroom help to address that need!  (not the cloning, but, the time for sure.) We first got excited by the ideas of the self paced classroom when Kareem Farah appeared on Jennifer Gonzalez’ Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.  It is there we learned about Modern Classrooms Project FREE Self Paced Classroom essential training (which is...of course also self-paced!) We realized that many of the things that educators are striving for in their students and classes (truly getting to know their students as learners and humans, responsible and autonomous learners in charge of their own progress, having a solid understanding of their st