The SHIFT Blog

We had the opportunity to witness an amazing project last week, and rather than write about it ourselves, we have asked the lead teacher on the project, Jordie Burton to share.  Here is what he had to say: We laughed about our day over homemade burgers and a potato salad recipe perfected by Oma. We had just finished the second full day in a blitz of a four day project to complete nearly 700 sq ft of mural. I was eating dinner with three “En Masse pour les Masses” artists visiting for the week from Montreal, who happened to be crashing at my house. The halfway point was a perfect evening to have a dinner with the three artists and three of the teachers from our school involved in the Norton Community Park Mural project.  We could debrief the project, plan for the next two days and further develop conversations that we had pulled threads on all day while painting. Our mural project was already successful, as our community was working together. Brainstorming on the theme...

During the April subject-specific PD Day , the Arts teachers had the opportunity to watch “Most Likely To Succeed”, which I previously wrote about here .  This documentary film really resonates with Arts teachers, as it aligns with ideals of project based learning so prevalent in Arts courses.  Next up, a video presentation and discussion on equity in the Halton Board, as well as a presentation and discussion on bolstering the numbers of students taking Arts courses in Halton. So after absorbing a lot of information over the course of the day, the last session, the visual art teachers tried a different method of processing and discussing the topics of the day by doing what they do best: drawing!  The question posed was “what are the ideal outcomes of art education”?  Some of the answers were resilience, collaboration skills, grit, student driven learning, and confident students.  Really, that list of outcomes are desired in any class. However, the art clas...

Halton Goes Back to Class As we mentioned in a previous post, this year the Halton District School Board has gone to the movies.  Keeping with this theme, last Monday the board went back to class.  Two hundred staff from the board spent their Monday evening watching a video discussion on the first chapter of the Innovator’s Mindset and participating in a live chat as part of a massively open online course.  It was fun seeing so many colleagues participating in professional development outside of the normal working day.  It was especially great for us because the conversations revolved around innovation and how it applies to the classroom. In addition to some reading and thinking, participants in this MOOC have been asked to respond to the video chat with a blog post.  Well, here is what we thought about the discussion on Monday night. 1. What do you see as the purpose of education?  Why might innovation be crucial in education? Man, George, talk a...