The SHIFT Blog

Do you have a professional learning network (PLN)? When you are planning a lesson, thinking about pedagogy, or learning about something new, do you have a group of people you turn to for guidance and support? It used to be the people who worked in our teaching offices or schools that we would rely on the most.  Today, access to social media gives us a much deeper pool of colleagues to draw ideas from. If you have an idea for a lesson, chances are there is someone else online who has done something similar and can help. So while The Shift has lots of people we rely on in person to bounce ideas off of, we also have a much wider PLN online that we can draw inspiration from. After June 4th and the #LoveMyHaltonSchool event, it would appear that this is true for many of us!  Just how big is the PNL of teachers in Halton? How far does it reach? Surprisingly, pretty far!  There were almost 400 different twitter accounts active on Monday tweeting about why the...

It’s the last week before the holiday break.  When I teach grade nine math my goal is to always wrap up the teaching of curriculum before the break.  I do this for two reasons.  First, so that we can spend two weeks engaging in review activities to help prepare for the final exam, which in this case is the EQAO.  The second reason is so that we can play around with a final performance task that is a bit more open than usual. I had no idea if this plan would hold up now that our grade nine course team was trying a blend of project based learning.  When I step back and think about what our team has accomplished over these four months, I’m pretty pleased.  We started the semester with a question that was very loosely defined, “Can we teach Grade Nine Math using projects?”.  We took a risk and dove in. After playing with Barbie Bungee , Dandy Candies and some intentionally frustrating algebra problems we decided on our next focus:  We wanted t...

Matt and I are fast approaching our one year anniversary in this role.  When we started, last February , with the roughest of plans.  We were going to demonstrate how the Halton District School Board is building a shared culture of Innovation.  How we did that was left, for the most part, up to us.  No pressure. We both really wanted to create our own Podcast, but some advice from Phil Davison and Cindy Cosentino led us to believe that it might be better to start with a Blog first.  So we dove in, blogging and then eventually launching our “ Case For Innovation… ” video series, followed by a few Calls to Action .  We’ve Shifted at The Barn, we’ve presented at conferences both inside and outside Halton, we’ve been vulnerable and silly.  In short, we’ve tried our best to put our own individual learning on display. Matt and I have a lot of fun in this role.  We have a very fluid “to-do” list that gets pretty fuzzy around the edges. ...

I’d like to introduce you to Alex.  She was a student of mine who graduated last June.  I met her for the first time when she was in my Grade 9 Academic Math class.  My first impressions of her was that she was a hardworking student who seemed to be interested in school.  I don’t know if a teacher can ask more from a student. It was midway through the semester when I learned that Alex was also a competitive diver.  I’ll plead ignorance in that I didn’t really know what this meant, except for the fact that sometimes she missed classes for competitions.  Every so often Alex would travel on a weekend to B.C. or Nova Scotia and miss Friday or Monday, or both.  From my perspective, these trips didn’t impact her achievement very much.  She was always on top of her homework and would seek me out when she needed to make up a test. I saw Alex every once in a while when she was in Grades 10 and 11, but never taught her during that time.  Sh...

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. ...

Hey there Shifters, Matt here with an interruption to your regular scheduled programming. You see, my fellow shifter, Jamie Mitchell was presented with a pretty huge honour today at school.  Some of you may have already heard that he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence Certificate of Achievement .  That is a kind of a big deal.  Out of thousands of nominations, only 10 teachers in Ontario were awarded that honour!  What I found really striking about the ceremony we just had at our school to mark the award, was in fact a student Maggi Djurdjevic.   Maggi went to the considerable work (it is a 21 page application!) to nominate her teacher and she spoke eloquently on why she nominated Jamie for this honour.  She said that Jamie Mitchell was able to take a subject that she isn’t particularly strong in, math, and make that period the best part of her day.  That is pretty awesome!  Two more ideas really hit home with...

Yesterday was a great day.  Matt and I spent much of our time simply watching the #LoveMyHaltonSchool tweets roll in.  We laughed, we liked, we retweeted, we saw things that were happening in other schools and we talked about how to bring that greatness to our building. And this is why we think sharing our best practices is so important.  We both work in a great school, with supportive colleagues and students.  But we can’t continue to improve as teachers if we only look within our building for inspiration.  We have to broaden our horizons by looking outwards.  Yesterday, everyone who participated by tweeting opened a window into their classroom or school. Watching the tweets were fun, but we couldn’t help but wonder about the reach of the hashtag.  Was a small group of teachers just tweeting at each other?  Were we making an impact online or were we all just yelling into the void? Well of course, there is an app for that.  We ...