Category Archives: Strategic Teaching Objectives

Like Spinning Plates

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As an English teacher I’m always looking for the apt metaphor, that one-of-a-kind allegory which will once and for all, 100% no-questions-asked-put-your-hands-down-please definitively define what it is we do, day-in and day-out, as 21st century educators. I believe this one comes close.

The reasons why I like the visual synecdoche of the plate spinner may surprise you. In my heart, I know this is the healthiest model to explain why teachers need to give themselves a break, before they break themselves. And more often than you might think.

In talking with a colleague recently, the age-old adage of teachers not having enough TIME reared its perennial head. If it’s not TIME than it’s surely RESOURCES; (un-PC trigger warning alert!) the two twin towers of educational stress and anxiety.

But if we simply re-framed what we do as already impossible, perhaps then (only then) glimpses of the possible and profound would peek through. If politics is the art of the possible, then teaching is the impossible art!

If we divide teaching and learning into four ready-made components, they might be:

  • Curriculum Design
  • Instruction
  • Assessment & Evaluation
  • Reporting

If you think of these as the 4 plates we are constantly spinning, then you would be forgiven for thinking teachers have it easy, perhaps even under control. But, we know, like all good magic tricks, control is an illusion. The reality is there are spinning plates underneath these 4 plates, and more spinning plates under those– turtles on top of turtles, all the way to spinning infinity (R.I.P. Stephen Hawking).

The secret thus becomes this: in order to survive the greatest show on earth that is our noble profession, we can only spin ONE PLATE AT A TIME!!!

Yep. That’s it. Sarcastically sublime. Not as memorable as “with great power comes great responsibility” (R.I.P. Stan Lee), but nonetheless, reflective respite.

In other words, if you are concentrating on updating or improving strategies with your Instructional practice this year, you can let your other plates wobble for a little while. If- as I am doing this year- you find yourself with an opportunity and willing department, to radically change how you approach Assessment & Evaluation, than your Reporting might just not produce those wonderful bon mots you have so carefully curated and copy-and-pasted in previous times.

We set our own priorities, then we define personal best practice by them. If we don’t measure up to this exponential diagnostic quagmire, we imagine our plates have smashed and we have failed. We also unfairly project this best practice onto our colleagues and schools and when we do this we are guaranteed to find discrepancy- you see, we are all spinning different plates! This discrepancy may lead to stress and anxiety if used as performance comparison, especially as school mandates and department initiatives pile up, distracting you from your default-setting favourite plate; you know, the one you have the most control over so you spend all of your time spinning because if anyone noticed that your other plates were not spinning (or, gulp, missing) they might not see you as that grand wizard teacher anymore.

What we need to remind ourselves of, when everything is spinning, we can only control that which tasks our immediate concern or is in our sphere of influence. From there we can decide which plate to spin next, which one deserves the most attention, AND, most importantly when it comes to innovation and cultivating a growth mindset, which one we haven’t spun in a while.

Who are the expert spinners I look up to? @gnichols, @jmedved, @lmcbeth, @adamcaplan, @nblair, @gvogt, @ckirsh, @lbettencourt, @ddoucet, @timrollwagen, @amacrae, @lmustard, @amaingot, @lfarooq, @dmonson, @shelleythomas, @vboomgaardt, @tfaucher, @lmitchell, @mmoore, @ljensen, @mneale, @egelleny

Wow, that’s a lot of sturdy plates!

UPDATE

Here is a handy graphic to help you prioritize. Turns out it was invented by former U.S. President, Dwight D. Eisenhower!

 

 

 

DISCOVERY DAYS: A Work in Progress

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PROGRESS REPORT

EARLY FEEDBACK (Day 6 of 12)

The initial six weeks of Rosseau Lake College’s DISCOVERY DAYS have had a mixed reception amongst a small percentage of students and parents. Early criticism came from our Grade 12 class who felt this type of “experimental” learning would interrupt their academic goals of achieving high marks for post-secondary applications. They initially preferred the old system of teacher-developed ISU’s (Independent Study Units) or CT’s (Culminating Tasks) delivered in the last two weeks of a course. DISCOVERY DAYS’ longer timelines gave some students increased stress.

Much of this student-created survey can be interpreted as resistance to change and aversion to risk, especially with those students who have succeeded at the “game of school”. Now that the rules are changing, the development of new skills in previously untested areas is uncomfortable.

A small percentage of dissension has come from traditional analytical learners who feel classroom instruction has been diminished and therefore their opportunities to obtain important information in knowledge-based subjects such as Science and Math compromised.

The academic team sat down with students to listen to their voices and concerns and develop workable solutions. One such solution involved the creation of a “University Preparation” club, for senior students, to run during the Winter Term Active Time block. Facilitated by Math and Science teachers, this period will be used for a multitude of senior academic purposes: individual study, tutorials, catch-up classes, guest lecturers, and post-secondary application workshops.

As well as surveying the students on their level of engagement, we also asked the faculty to assess our progress with individual DISCOVERY DAY initiatives. Again, the results were not surprising given how different and unstructured these days can initially feel. Learning Spaces are still not being recognized or utilized by students as differing to their classroom function. Many students are drawn to spaces because of friendship groups rather than project needs. The Discovery Projects themselves are open-ended and some facilitators find it challenging as to how to help motivate students or link ideas to finished products.

What does success look like?

As quantitative achievement data has yet to be calculated (realistically, we will have to measure this with a longitudinal study over numerous years), we have only anecdotal responses and engagement surveys to gauge initial reception. Active Time has already been received positively by the majority of students who tend to learn in this manner.

For most students, success with Design Time and Flex Time may look something like appreciation of new skills learned and broader knowledge shared. Often times general academic acceptance is retroactive and only given credence after the fact or in the case of individual recognition.

For teachers, success will be in the form of professional development, sharing exciting and innovative ideas around the concept of facilitation.

For me, success already looks like this:

Our entire student body is involved in Project-Based Learning and has developed “How Might We… ?” questions. Added to that, more than half of the students have fully integrated questions that cross most or all of their subject areas.

One definitive measure RLC will be searching for, however, is the quality of the projects themselves. Deep learning experiences should lead to more original and interesting end products. It remains to be seen if the grade-oriented Discovery Projects or the fuelled-by-interests Passion Projects will produce that much-lauded exemplar. In either case, successful projects will be shared and displayed for present and future students of RLC to gain inspiration for continued discoveries.

SUMMARY CONCLUSION

 

A desire to see what students can do with their hands inspired a recent change at one of the world’s most renowned campuses. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (motto: “Mens et manus,” Latin for “Mind and hand”) now gives applicants the option of submitting a Maker Portfolio to show their “technical creativity.”

Applicants can send images, a short video and a PDF that shed light on a project they’ve undertaken — clothing they’ve made, apps they’ve designed, cakes they’ve baked, furniture they’ve built, chainmail they’ve woven. M.I.T. also asks students to explain what the project meant to them, as well as how much help they got. A panel of faculty members and alumni reviews the portfolios.

– Eric Hoover (Education Life), New York Times, November 1, 2017

Post-secondary needs have changed. Universities and colleges are starting to require evidence of 21st-Century skill development as part of their application process. Technology, especially developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), ensures that many jobs will soon become automated, forcing greater reliance on those humanistic attributes that can’t be easily “Googled”.

Despite some resistance to this change at all levels of education (teachers, students, parents, board members) there is sufficient evidence to suggest the tide has already turned and those schools not incorporating at least some aspects of these learning modalities will quickly find themselves behind the times.

The DISCOVERY DAYS model is perfectly suited for smaller independent schools looking for ways to innovate teaching and learning within a traditional framework.

Benefits of a Discovery Day ‘Inquiry & Experiential’ Program:

  • Student autonomy helps foster resiliency
  • Cross-curricular projects help develop critical thinking skills
  • Longer time-scale for projects helps promote self-management
  • Interweaving direct instruction during the week helps students make authentic connections to their project as it unfolds
  • Passion projects help produce engagement and intrinsic motivation
  • Vertical integration helps foster mentorship and collaboration
  • Club creation helps promote entrepreneurship
  • Outdoor Learning helps promote mindfulness and environmental awareness

10 Next Steps

  1. Ongoing communication with all stakeholders (parents, community, board, CIS Ontario, CAIS, media)
  2. Targeted communication with students regarding weekly objectives (via Discovery Board, Google Classroom, Instagram, assembly announcements)
  3. Co-construction of assessment rubrics and templates for (discovery & passion) projects
  4. Further facilitator training (action plans) for teachers
  5. Observation, feedback, and support for teachers in new facilitator role
  6. Individual budgetary line items for various Discovery Day expenses
  7. Booking of whole-school activities and upcoming guest speakers (spring)
  8. Building of NEW Makerspaces (Tinkering Space & Music Recording Studio)
  9. Planning of Discovery Fair with Mastery Badges (https://credly.com/badge-builder)
  10. Planning and scripting of DISCOVERY DAYS marketing video (spring)

Nothing Standard about Standards-Based Assessment

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STANDARDS-BASED CURRICULUM CHECKLISTS

A common criticism of PBL is because each student’s end product differs, connections to the ministry of education curriculum objectives suffer. It is often thought even more difficult for teachers to properly assess these types of projects because of this summative difference. This realization led teachers at RLC to develop Standards-Based Curriculum Checklists for our DISCOVERY DAYS inquiry-based projects initiative.

We have encouraged our faculty to choose exactly 50 specific curriculum objectives from the myriad of examples each ministry document gives for knowledge and skill building. Why 50? Because less than that would be difficult to properly cover each learning strand or unit and more than that would be next to impossible to teach within a regularly scheduled semester. As Rosseau Lake College also uses a Level 1-5 Achievement Chart, it is an easy move to create both a quality descriptive rubric, as well as one that could potentially act as the entire grade book in a competency-based system. The final touch with this easy-to-administer standards-based template is a column for reflection upon which both students and teachers can record conversations and observations and link to products. I have used this column as a formative feedback and reflection activity with my Grade 12 English class. Their role was to find examples from previous classroom lectures and activities to satisfy the potential mastery of each skill. Level 5 Mastery can be further enriched by co-constructing criteria around possible 90%+ “gamified” extensions of competencies (eg. real-world connections, ability to teach the material, etc.)

By incorporating student conferences with subject teachers early into the DISCOVERY DAYS schedule, students have the ability to directly link their partial or fully cross-curricular project ideas to specific curriculum objectives. A Google folder carrying the entire faculty’s curriculum checklists allows any student or facilitator the ability to easily locate aspects of a subject area to build projects upon.

This reflective component has so far proved crucial to maintaining academic rigour with PBL and in focussing students Discovery Projects on expected subject outcomes. It also has the added bonus of increasing student autonomy and voice-and-choice around interest areas. Resilience and flexibility have been a by-product of these check-ups as many students have had to “go back to the drawing board” if their culminating project ideas didn’t satisfy enough curriculum outcomes.   

“More than one in 10 (12 percent) students educated at independent schools said they had been inadequately prepared for university. And the most common criticism was that they’d been given over-structured support at school and wanted to be more academically independent.” (Furedi, 2016) 

Big thanks to former Cohort21 alum, Ed Hitchcock @ehitchcock @SciTeacherEd for his initial work in Standards-Based Grading (watch his video here). Also thanks to @egelleny for mentioning him to me in the first place. The Power of Cohort21!

Organized Chaos

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Nothing ever goes as planned, and that is why we teach.

Think about this statement for a second. Isn’t that what teachers do, don’t we create lesson “plans”? Don’t we try and structure learning so there is proper scaffolding of knowledge and skills in developmentally appropriate methods of transmission? Isn’t this the reason we became educators? Because the world doesn’t make sense and we are here, dammit, to help children make some sense of it!

If I dig deep into the psychology of it all, I would probably find some truth to that. Am I teacher because I secretly want control over aspects of my life I can’t control? Am I a teacher because of something lacking in my own upbringing that I want to correct? Either I was great at school and therefore never left, or I had a learning disability and now want to share my experience so no one has to struggle again.

Maybe you are one of those noble few who was so inspired by a teacher in your life you just had to join the profession, to keep the flame going. Or maybe, like me, you come from a family of teachers and this profession was always going to be the “backup plan”.

No matter the reason, at some point you will have come up against this great irony of education, the perennial bulwark: nothing ever goes as planned! And it affects all of us at some point in our career, whether you are a messy person or a clean person, a cat person or a dog person, a Beatles fan or a Rolling Stones fan. We have all reached that moment of saturation when your To-Do List needs a To-Do List.

All I can say is, thank god we are teachers in the 21st century! Whereas this statement in the recent past would have been swept under any available carpet out of shame (for some reason I’m thinking of those oval cord carpets from the 70’s), now, it is not only par for the course, THIS IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF TEACHING.

The reality of the classroom these days is, there is always something or someone going to undermine all of your carefully crafted secret plans.

Learning to surf the process of discovery, to embrace happy accidents along the way, is a 21st-century skill, for students and teachers alike. Being flexible enough to adapt strategies quickly, resilient enough to hear criticism as constructive feedback, and transparent enough to admit you don’t always know what the end dismount of that wave looks like; these are qualities far more cherished and sought after these days than a perfectly designed syllabus.

I have had the recent experience, as Academic Director at Rosseau Lake College, to witness the joy of disorder first hand. After working tirelessly for the past 18 months on developing our new whole-school, inquiry-based learning initiative called DISCOVERY DAYS, the launch day finally came this past September 29. After spending much of the last year and a half living comfortably in the Simon Sinek “WHY”, I had to shift gears very quickly to consider the Grant Lichtman “HOW”. It’s one thing to imagine what a non-traditional progressive approach to learning might look like— changing timetables, training teachers, building learning spaces, reading books and blogs, edu tweeting— it’s another to organize 100 students and 16 faculty for an entire morning of informative-yet-growth-mindset building activities. And then it rained. Actually, for the purposes of this analogy, it poured. Students were wandering around not knowing exactly where to be, or how to stay dry. Teachers were out of their element, facilitating a group of students that weren’t necessarily their own. The concept of a “How Might We…? question was met with raised eyebrows and blank pages. Some got it, some didn’t. Questions abounded.

But here is the beauty, the cherry on top, my fin de siecle. A crucial part of the Design Thinking process is built upon questions that don’t require answers, which inevitably leads to a foundation of failure. Failure, in fact, is at the very core of modern learning. We must fall down in order to get up. We must make mistakes while we prototype. Our plans must go awry.

Organized chaos, then, is that sweet spot of engagement that every teacher yearns and learns to conduct. When the noise level of your classroom is peaked, not with dissent, but with interest. When the questions just keep coming, not out of desperation but out of curiosity. When technology breaks down and your lo-fi solution produces even greater results because the shared experience is more vital. When co-constructing curriculum with students produces an idea you could never have planned for on your own. When what you have created has become something more than you could have possibly imagined and you know the next crucial step in your journey is letting go.

 

 

 

Gamifying 21st Century Skills: Part 1

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Cohort21 continues to be a game-changer for me.

Mentally shifting my previous professional teaching experiences, from schools of well-intentioned colleagues, to this collaborative learning hive of like-minded ed-heads, has transformed my teaching practice in ways I have yet to truly reflect on. Except here:

I walked into the last F2F meeting with more than just a head-cold; I also had a head full of ideas and scatterbrain proposals from which to dump on this unsuspecting source of formative feedback junkies. My new role as Academic Lead at Rosseau Lake College has awarded me the freedom to develop areas of interest that “might” just indeed help our school move forward. Of course, almost instantaneously, the dreaded symbolic starting block reared it’s cosmetically challenged head, in oversized, day-glo sky-writing: Where do I begin?

LEVEL 1: THE WHERE

Luckily, our esteemed facilitators (@jmedved & @gnichols) and coaches at Cohort21, are well-versed in the language of stumble, and had problem-solving solutions waiting in the wings (literally, the wings of the York School hallways, used brilliantly as limbic nerve-system galleries of crowd-sourcing). The Design Thinking worksheets, sticky-note brainstorms and timed exercises, provided by @lmcbeth and Future Design School, were also a wonderfully scaffolded entry point into generative thinking, well away from the usual Saturday PD day-dreaming and doodle sessions of my past.

My original intention was to use the Cohort community as supercharged leverage for reimagining and rebooting our Master Schedule— a commitment to change which RLC (Roseau Lake College) is currently highly invested in. The unique process of design-thinking around this challenge, we began as a school last spring; with typical brainstorming results benefiting most from a speculative standpoint, with the not unusual— sometimes confusing and muddling— side effect of losing some staff through endless permutations of opportunity and critique. Ultimately, I concluded, that, as a school, we were already well ahead in unpacking this sticky-note problem— already at the prototyping phase, really (exciting stuff, TBA!)— and this being too specific a challenge, to be used as my Cohort21 action research springboard.

So, as a poet of pedagogy, as an agent of change, an adjunct adaptor of assessment, and as I am wont to do, I revised my original plan. Not changed tactics so much as I lessened the scope of my (ego)concentric circle to focus on another of my whole-school pet passion projects/peeves: 21st Century Skill Development.

1. Essential Skills from Most Likely to Succeed on Vimeo.

LEVEL 2: THE WHY

I’m certainly not the first teacher to notice the writing on the pedagogical wall; the recent paradigm shift in teaching and learning, away from content and towards competencies, has been slowly evolving over the past decade or more (http://www.p21.org/our-work/resources/for-educators#SkillsMaps). The internet is a far better provider of knowledge than any one teacher could ever hope to be. One only need look at the proliferate example of Khan Academy, how its open-source adaptive technology has enabled a whole new generation of students to effectively tech-learn numeric knowledge in a scaffolded way, previously only possible through linear textbook instruction (Khan has naturally set their sites on literacy and grammar as well: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/grammar)

This evolution is a great relief to me, I’ve never been interested in any aspect of teaching that has me churning out cookie-cutter lessons or exacting standardized assessments like a machine; unfortunately, this delicate transition has been an obstacle to some teachers who have, perhaps unconsciously, staked, not only their professional claim, but also their identity around a proven silo of knowledge and/or singular interpretation of curriculum (especially at the secondary school level). I say, let the robots take over all the deductive aspects of school and learning! The computer has already made obsolescence a fact of life in other disciplines such as banking, manufacturing, health, military— why not education? If we, as educators, want to not only stay relevant, but also stay employed in the 21st century, we need to use content to teach skills. We need to become critical and creative facilitators of deeper learning skills and life skills. We need to become Poets of Pedagogy!

LEVEL 3: THE WHAT

After much reflecting and validating (… the Discovery Process…) on a possible teaching problem, and through the integral help of a feedback partner (@vboomgaardt), I finally widdled-down my “mighty” action research question:

How might we gamify 21st century skill development, so students can track their own learning, and teachers can gain meaningful evidence for feedback and reporting?

In order to arrive at this question, I first had to empathize with TWO END USERS in my design problem: both students and teachers. TWO END USERS!?! I think that’s okay, isn’t it? Yes, I think that’s just fine. The students will, of course, be the benefactors of a more streamlined, transparent, credential-focussed, success-driven criteria program around 21st century skill development. The teachers, as well, will need to be able to adapt these competencies and rubrics into their curriculum in ways that deepen and heighten curriculum expectations. If, along the way, we can get all edtech and add an app somewhere in the mix, well, hell, as my grandmother used to say, we’re cookin’ with gas!

Throughout this iterative process, I asked around the cohort to see if other CIS schools had identified “soft skills” as a potential problem worth solving. Similar questions around competencies did indeed exist, however, the conclusion I came to was although every school reported on work habits and had even made inroads into critical and creative thinking, there didn’t seem to be a whole-school system out there for assessing competencies in an intrinsic or adaptive way. It seems to very much still be at the mercy of individual teachers, which doesn’t really signal to the students or parents the importance of this shift in education. One of the simple questions I asked my fellow teachers was this: “What is the difference between a Grade 7 collaboration and a Grade 12 collaboration when it comes to assessing work habits?”. No one was able to give me an answer with any authority or consistency. With this Action Plan, I am to change that.

LEVEL 4: THE HOW

“Curious kids learn how to learn, and how to enjoy it – and that, more than any specific body of knowledge, is what they will need to have in the future. The world is changing so rapidly that by the time a student graduates from university, everything he or she learned may already be headed toward obsolescence. The main thing that students need to know is not what to think but how to think in order to face new challenges and solve new problems.” (p.14)

This is from Amanda Lang’s, The Power of Why. I haven’t read her book, and I probably won’t have time, sadly. Nevertheless, this quote, taken from a MindShift blog about skills education (https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/11/14/why-academic-teaching-doesnt-help-kids-excel-in-life/), resonated with my predicament.

When I arrived at Rosseau Lake College last year, they had already started a transition into a new strategic plan (Future Forward) which I am lucky to help continue to shape this year. One of the hallmarks of this plan is a personalized approach to education, using what we call a PLP (Personalized Learning Profile). Partnering with the learning and development company, LIKA (http://www.lika.ca/home2/), our students are able to approximate their learning preference through a multiple-intelligence, psychometric online test. Simply, this allows each student and teacher to see individual learning strengths and weaknesses as a visual quadrant infographic.

In addition to the PLP, LIKA has recently developed a list of 7 Skills which have already been Ministry approved and will form the foundation of RLC’s 21st Century Competencies.

These skills will be the basis for my Action Plan:

  • Self-Management
  • Teamwork
  • Thinking
  • Networking and Communication
  • Information Management
  • Learning
  • Design and Innovation

Finally, through the crowd-sourcing inspiration stage of our last F2F, I received a heap of ideas, many of them game and tech-related, to help me on my quest.

LEVEL 5: THE WHEN

It’s all happening in Semester 2. I am lucky to have both Junior and Senior Division Curriculum leads to help co-construct criteria around these skills. There is much research to conduct around badge creation, interactive motivator apps, Google Suite apps, JoeZoo, Doc Appender, and LMS systems. As well, I will be interviewing both of my END USERS throughout the process for feedback and suggestions.

A huge thanks to @ddoucet, @shelleythomas, @jsmith, @brenthurley, @jweening, @egelleny, @timrollwagen, and others I may have failed to mention, for their continued assistance, guidance, and encouragement.

To be continued in PART 2.

Multidisciplinary Thinking Begins by Looking at Yourself

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One of the most common criticisms from high-school teachers, around the topic of cross-curricular implementation, is how hard it is to schedule. Everyone loves the idea of multidisciplinary activities, but other than actual interdisciplinary courses (IDC)— where two or three subjects are mandated to mix and mingle— few schools can boast of regularly achieving this gold standard of 21st century knowledge integration.

Instead of spending last summer trolling ministry websites or updating persistently nagging AQ credentials, or even skimming chapters of the latest guru on innovation and personal branding, I did what I assume most teachers need to do on their off time— I vegged out. Now, becoming a vegetable on my vacation did not mean I stopped thinking about pedagogical approaches to curriculum design, no, no, no (I am, like most lifers, a 24/7 teacher). Far from it. I did what millions of teachers do best– I turned a television show into a future lesson plan!

The show is Netflix’s superb documentary, “Chef’s Table”, which, if you haven’t already had a chance to watch, is an absolute delight of the senses and the spirit. The episode that stood out for me, and got my pedagogical flavours flowing, was the first of Season Two, with the esteemed American chef, Grant Ashatz, showcasing his experimental art project/restaurant, Alinea.

What makes the food that we do at Alinea so interesting on the outside is that we really don’t let ourselves say no to an idea.

What struck me immediately about his imaginative approach to cuisine, was how similar it was to lesson planning. He always starts with a question: In his case, “why do patrons have to eat on plates?”; in my case, “why do multidisciplinary activities have to involve other classes?”

screen-shot-2016-08-29-at-7-31-58-am

In designing an ISU for last year’s Grade 12 English class, I wanted to encourage a personalized and multidisciplinary approach by providing choice over what topic of English they wished to involve in their project. Through much discussion and co-construction (and some critical processing of my own) we came to the realization that there were at least 4 major subjects within English (Science, Sociology, Art, and Philosophy). Anyone who has taught Theory of Knowledge in an IB setting should recognize the similar pattern here. What was important to me was the senior students themselves came to this vital conclusion— that all subjects have other subjects within them, that the concept of “subject” is just a label, a way to organize information. From there the “buy-in” was easy, as most students were able to find a comfortable entry point into their project, based on a subject they enjoyed more than English, or were more skilled at. I also encouraged each student to talk to a teacher from the subject area they chose, to further deepen their research. No major rescheduling was necessary.

Grant Ashatz set the culinary world alight by challenging the basic assumptions of fine dining. He saw the simple ritual of eating to be full of potential for awe inspiring moments. Asking yourself the hard, reflective questions regarding your own practice, especially around subject stereotypes, is precisely the path towards innovation all teachers can use to reinvigorate their practice, and all students are waiting to ask. Why do we use textbooks in math? Do English students have to read the entire text? Does learning need to take place inside? Why do we need grades? Would this topic be best learned online? Do I have to write this down, can’t I just tell you?

Sometimes thinking outside the box means gaining inspiration from disciplines other than your own, other than education. Challenge the status quo. Give yourself permission to fail. Set limits to increase your creativity. These are not article links off Edutopia, they are lessons I learned from binge watching Netflix!

Teachers Can Help Market a School

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We have recently expanded our marketing approach at Rosseau Lake College to include teachers writing “well-being” themed articles, to help promote one of our core strategic objectives— outdoor education. I found the experience insightful, as it focussed my energies into taking a different perspective of what our profession can add to the holistic development of each child. Take a look!

http://cottagesinmuskoka.com/step-by-step/?utm_content=buffer194cf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer