The SHIFT Blog

Shifting back to the Barn On Wednesday night, 175 educators got to play together with a revisit to the Barn in Milton. The theme of the evening was “Can creativity and innovation be taught?”.  We’ve come to believe that the answer is a resounding YES!  As we have been exploring here at the Shift, there are learning conditions that foster innovation, in our schools and for our students.  This is where we started with The Case for Innovation and exploring these conditions, followed by Community Building and Risk Taking , and more to come soon.  Rethinking the structure of our classrooms and our schools is what we are aiming to do as we aim to answer the important questions of whether creativity and innovation can be taught.  This is our BIG why as shifters.  This goal is in context to changes happening at the Ministry level as well.  Our report cards are on the verge of a major overhaul.  The stated goal by the Ministry of Education is to...

Well Shifters, it has been a great semester!  Since starting this blog in February of this year, we have had so much fun learning about what teachers are doing in their classes and talking about what they hope to do next. We hope that we did a little to inspire you to think differently about what you teach and how you teach and that you got excited to take some risks.    Working on this project forced us to learn a lot, and most of that learning was driven through trial and error.  Jamie used a Mac for the first time.  Matt built several rigs to help us with our sound recording.  We learned how to blog, edit video, talk on camera and listen to ideas.  We made lots of mistakes that hopefully nobody noticed.  Although, to quote Marisa Cavataio when we visited her Productions Class at Nelson High School, “The most important thing you will do in this class is make mistakes”.   Our mistakes bore fruit!  We just recently passed 10,000 v...

The end is in sight; can you feel it?  A few weeks of hard work, then that dock/porch/yoga mat is calling your name.  A well deserved rest after a year of teaching, engaging, ...and shifting.  June is also a great time to take stock of how the year went, think about our “good to greats” and start to imagine a little bit about next year.   The year is still fresh in our heads and we have a good vantage point to think forward at this point of the year.  During this process, we invite you to think about how you can take a risk next year.  These could be risks that you take in how you lead a class, a course, or building culture in your school.  This could be how to set the framework for encouraging your students to take their own greater risks in their learning.  It is a fun time to start thinking BIG, because the BIG is buffered by some serious summer YOU time first.  Here is The Case for Risk Taking.

Oh hey...in addition to road tripping, we've also been working on The Case for Community Building. How do you build community?  We'd love to know!

Matt and I dove headfirst into this pilot project.  We had goals; highlight innovative practices in education; get more people sharing what they do; publish our observations.  We had a vision on how to share; blogging, videos, podcasts.  We knew these things would take time to establish. What we didn’t have was a clear idea about what innovation is.  Thankfully, we had experts we could rely on.  Cindy Cosentino, IPL of Science for the Halton District School Board, provided us with a great foundation of what it means to be an innovative person.  Add to that our participation in the Innovator's Mindset online course and we were ready to roll! So here is what we’ve come to understand about Innovation: 1) Innovation is a process that improves something Innovation is a process Let’s be clear on this, if something is labelled “Innovation” but it isn’t improving something, it isn’t innovative.  Innovation is needed to improve products...