The Journey to Google Reference School
Most recently, I had the opportunity to take the Aspiring Heads course with the Association of International School Heads. During the course we looked at the 5 Threads of Leadership from Kouzes and Posner’s The Leadership Challenge. These include Model the Way, Challenge the Process, Inspire a Shared Vision for Learning, Enable Others to Act,…
The End and The Beginning
LINK to SlideDeck with full teacher interviews and project information, including reflections and student evidence Background Moving into the 2019-2020 year I knew that a growth area for our school was Digital Citizenship (DC), especially in the elementary panel. There had been some work around DC in the past, but never in an organized and…
Community Connections
One of the great things about taking on my COETAIL certification is the connections with educators in my cohort, past COETAILers and other educators from around the world. For me, the primary way I have done this is through Twitter and LinkedIn. When I publish a blog post for #COETAIL it is pushed out through…
The Baker’s Dozen: 13 Reasons to go International
Recently, I read an article on LinkedIn by Ryan Sagare, entitled 13 Reasons to NOT go International as a Teacher. I felt that the author had some good points, but also felt that I could refute every point that was made. Below is my attempt to do so. Working internationally has been a fulfilling experience for…
Zooming into our Virtual Learning Program
Zoom has been getting so much attention lately, for obvious reasons, and I wanted to share some of our experiences, and our resources, to help those that might be thinking about using Zoom, or just starting to use Zoom. We are currently in week three of our Virtual Learning Program (VLP). You can find this…
The Potential of Blockchain
If you had asked me about Blockchain a year ago, I would not have been able to tell you a great deal. In fact, I assumed Blockchain was synonymous with cryptocurrency, and that was about it. It wasn’t until a chance social media encounter with a former student that my eyes became open to the…
Thoughts on System Change
Change brings about uncertainty, which brings about vulnerability. Vulnerability and uncertainty can be unsettling for employees and other stakeholders in an organization. In my case, in a school setting, system change impacts not only the employees (teaching and non-teaching staff), but students and parents as well, and potentially other community members. Remember, most people need…
Final Project
Next semester I will be co-teaching a grade 7 robotics course with our Design and Innovation Specialist at our school. As I have mentioned in earlier posts, our Design and Innovation Lab was newly opened this year, and our Design and Innovation Specialist is new to our school this year. She is also fairly new…
Deep Learning
This week is an opportunity for me to revisit some concepts that have had a huge impact on me not only as a teacher, but as a leader, and a coach. There are two big ideas from the reading that I want to focus my post on, that is Project Based Learning (PBL), and Design…
Thoughts on Courage
The SXSW talk by Brene Brown started with two powerful questions around courage: “Is courage the willingness to show up and be seen, even when you can’t control the outcome”? “Is courage something that is inherent in us, or something we can teach and develop in people and in ourselves”? These two questions caused me…
Deep Learning
This week I want to focus on one of our additional resources that really resonated with me. Fullan and Langworthy’s white paper Towards a New End: New Pedagogies for Deep Learning focuses in on deep learning, which is categorized by character education, citizenship, communication, critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity, and how deep learning can be…
New Pedagogies and Deep Learning
This week, I focussed my writing around Fullan and Langworthy’s work: A Rich Seam: How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning. To quickly recap, a key focus of the writing is the idea of New Pedagogies, which are comprised of three areas, New Learning Partnerships, Deep Learning Tasks, and Digital Tools and Resources. New Learning Partnerships…
The Art of education 