The SHIFT Blog

  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 op...

  Do you have a Professional Learning Network?  Is there a group of educators with whom you enjoy connecting with, who push your own thinking and expose you to new ideas?  We like to connect with as many people as we can online. One of those people is Matthew Oldridge , an educator who is currently on secondment to the Ministry of Education.  He tweets about mathematics, or education, or pop-culture, or his family. We enjoy his online presence because it isn’t one dimensional, he is great at letting people in and showcasing the fact that yes, he is a human when he isn’t teaching. Matthew recently posed a series of questions on his blog which he challenged his own PLN to think about and respond to.  These are the types of questions that The Shift likes to think about and, by speaking about them, coach others into thinking about them too. The Shift sat down and talked through each question and have responded to the ones that we felt we had the most to contribut...

This week, The Shift is learning about Project Based Learning with the Buck Institute .   We are diving into what it might look like to coach other teachers as they embark on their own PBL journey.  A big part of what we’ve explored so far revolves around helping teachers feel comfortable and supported in trying something new.  Your first step into PBL doesn’t have to be perfect, and any teacher needs to accept that some failure might happen. Being transparent with your students about your own learning helps! Our biggest takeaway so far is an anecdote describing the difference between giving your class a “project” vs engaging in “project based learning”.  Typically, a project is something that is assigned to a class after the learning has happened. The amount of new learning that happens during the project is minimal and the students are generally regurgitating what they already know.  A project is like dessert. Project Based Learning , on the other h...

We were sent to High Tech High and the Deeper Learning Conference with questions, and we brought back a heap of answers. You can read our on the ground impression here after Day 1 , Day 2 and Day 3 of the conference. Before we headed to the conference we also asked others who had seen the documentary “ Most Likely to Succeed ” to provide us with their own questions.  We tried as best we could to answer them, splitting the work up between our Principal Nicholas Varricchio and ourselves.  You can read our answers here . If you haven’t seen the film, and would like to, you can still see the film here . And of course, if what you’ve read about our visit sparks new questions, feel free to leave us something in the comments

Day two of deeper learning had participants tackling the true essence of the name of this conference: diving deep into learning. The sessions today were not one or two hour sessions, rather a deep dive into one idea for 6 hours. Funny enough, those six hours flew by as we were led through a series of activities crafted around the design thinking process. Facilitating hacking to deeper learning at #DL2018 #DeeperLearning2018 with awesome learners! One S response: “I want to be in your school!” #BeTheChange pic.twitter.com/zOy3gWbxkv — Cassandra Thonstad (@Thonstad) March 29, 2018 The session we attended today, hosted by representatives from School Retool , was called “Empathy-based hacking for school-wide transformation”. Our session was facilitated by Jason Strong , Cassandra Thonstad and Marthaa Torres . As a starting point, we discussed insights learned from Shadow A Student challenge. In Halton, we had completed our version of this challenge and were able to bring o...

That’s the prompt we were asked to think about during day one of the 2018 Deeper Learning Conference.  We were expecting to learn about Project Based Learning and High Tech High when we signed up for this conference.  We were caught off guard by the tone of the day. High Tech High played second fiddle to a much bigger idea, Deeper Learning. The day started with 1200 educators in the High Tech High forum, with a salsa band playing energetic Latin-influenced grooves.  When they started to cover “Descpacito” and educators cut loose and started dancing, Jamie asked “is this Woodstock for teachers?”.  There was definitely an energy and buzz right from the beginning of the day. So what is Deeper Learning? Deeper Learning is... modelling the growth we want to see in our students.   Carlos R. Moreno , in his Keynote, stated that “Vulnerability is a part of good pedagogy”.  If we believe in teaching students the soft skills that they need to be successful in ...