The SHIFT Blog

Tony Churchill is a Principal at Harrison Public School . He is working with staff at his school on promoting a growth mindset in students through design thinking challenges. He is our very first contributor to the Shift from the perspective of a school principal. One school’s journey towards innovative thinking... “So, what is innovation or innovative thinking? How do we foster it...promote it? Once we start to see it, how do we get comfortable with assessing and reporting on it? How do we cover all the curriculum and allow students time to explore without worrying about this lost teaching and learning time?” These were some of the questions that staff on our leadership team and I worked through last year. The reason: I was the new principal and during the first PD day as I got to know everyone, I took the staff through a process...to draw and write about their ideal school. As we worked through the process, similar themes emerged and we narrowed things down toward the beginning...

Last year, Halton was able to send 25 teachers to the 2017 OAME Conference.  There was lots of good learning and discussions during the three day conference.  What many realized was that there wasn’t much of a secondary conversation after the conference.  People were inspired, but what was lacking was a way to share that inspiration with other teachers in the board. Enter Janet Juby and Laura Gatey , who were inspired enough to propose a Halton Mini-Conference in order to promote sharing.  Part of this mini-conference was a series of Ignite talks.  If you aren’t familiar with the concept, participants get 20 slides that auto advance after 15 seconds, giving you five minutes to speak about one topic. Constructing an Ignite talk is a challenge, as you are forced to be very purposeful with what you decide to share.  I spent my five minutes speaking about Risk Taking and why I think encouraging our students to be risk takers is so important. ...

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...