The SHIFT Blog

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

Students say the best things when they think I’m not listening.  It’s pretty funny actually, if not more than a little frustrating.  Students can be having excellent conversations about mathematics but as soon as I come over to listen they get just a little bit self-conscious and the conversation ends. I’ve gotten really good at listening from far away. We’ve been dabbling in project based learning with our grade nine academic classes this semester.  After our first project , we introduced our students to Dandy Candies .  This activity has been around for awhile.  I first was introduced to it at the 2015 OAME conference when Dan Meyer ran it with a packed room.  Since then, I’ve used this activity on and off with my classes, but never as a project. The premise is pretty simple, show students the video of a preset number of small cubes assembling into packages (prisms) of various dimensions.  Then ask them some questions about what they’ve...

“What do you want to learn?” “How do you want to show me what you’ve learned?” These are the questions we hear being asked on our visit to Aldershot High School.  We are sitting in Sarah Spencer's’ Grade Nine Applied Science class.  The students have just returned from a scavenger hunt in a nearby ravine and  they’ve been asked to record some of the things they’ve noticed on the blackboard.  From here, the teacher hands out the Overall Expectations for the course and ask the students to pay attention specifically to the Biology portion of the document.   This is the student's introduction to the Biology unit of the class, and it isn’t going the way we would usually expect.  Rather than the teacher guiding the students from topic to topic, the students are being allowed to find their own path.  Each student is identifying their own interests from the Biology curriculum and, presumably, their paths will diverge from here. But we won’t get to ...