Just shifting online or shifting the learning?

Across the globe schools are closing due to Covid-19 and the learning is being moved online. I recently shared in my Daily-Ink post, ‘Novel ideas can spread from a novel virus‘: Discussion about the possibility of remote learning invites questions about blended learning where some of the work, both asynchronous and synchronous, is done remotely. […]

Been there, done that? Actually, no.

Alec Couros shared this on Facebook: Every “new” revolution or trend in education is inevitably accompanied by the critics who wisely note “We tried this back in the x0’s. If you want change to happen and to stick, engage your historians to better understand why things failed the first time around. I then shared his post on […]

Excellence is a Habit

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. ~Aristotle  I think that we sometimes lose sight of what is important. We focus on individual acts, or in schools, individual assignments, and on praising final products and presentations. We often lose sight of the continual work, the tireless editing […]

Scaling Out and Scaling Up Innovation

What do we, as leaders, need to do to scale innovation? From the C21 Canada ~ Shifting Minds 3.0 document, ‘Redefining the Learning Landscape in Canada’: As stated above, “The transformative view is that learning is a social process…” Later in the document, “There is no doubt that innovation is disruptive. But the disruption can […]

Isolation vs Collaboration

“Educators who work in isolation improve incrementally, while educators who collaborate transform exponentially!” I said this in a Twitter Chat a few days ago in response to the question: “Why do you believe that a shared vision and belief system is important to transform education?” This was one of the Twitter Chat questions posed by […]

“Learn to live with ambiguity.”

am·bi·gu·i·ty noun • uncertainty or inexactness of meaning in language. synonyms: vagueness, obscurity, abstruseness, doubtfulness, uncertainty; • a lack of decisiveness or commitment resulting from a failure to make a choice between alternatives. Ambiguity has potential to be a catalyst to new learning. It can be the spark to kindle lateral thinking and creative solutions to huge problems […]

Creating the time and space for self-directed, personalized, inquiry learning.

Background (Part 1 – Purpose) The following image and description were created for an application for an award. ‘Assignments’ like this are great because they force us (teachers John Sarte, Alan Soiseth and myself) to think about what it is we value, and strive towards as we build our program at Inquiry Hub Secondary School. […]

3 Questions Before Supporting Innovation

1. Is this best for students and their learning? 2. Is this scalable? 3. Are you willing to share? In a conversation with my good friend, Dave Sands, we were talking about the challenge of investing in systematic change vs supporting the outliers (and the Lone Wolves). There will always be limited resources to work with, and […]

Solving Interesting Problems

What interesting problems have you posed to students recently? What interesting problems have students asked you? Yesterday I was listening to Tim Ferriss interview Seth Godin on his 4 Hour Work Week podcast: ‘How Seth Godin Manages His Life — Rules, Principles, and Obsessions’. When I got to this quote, I noted the time on the show […]

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Transforming Our Classrooms – Ignite Presentation

Here is an Ignite presentation that I did in Delta on January 2oth, 2016, titled ‘Transforming Our Classrooms’. It is based on the presentation ‘7 Ways to Transform Your Classroom‘, but squeezed into less than 5 minutes, after I describe what our team has been working on at Inquiry Hub Secondary School over the last three and […]