A New Type of Summer Camp What do you do when it’s a pandemic and for over a decade 100 elementary students have been attending summer camp? Was cancelling the only option? For ten years, The Cmolik Foundation has run a one week-long STEM focused summer camp for students from an inner-city school in Surrey…
The Best Day of My Life
“Tomorrow is going to be the best day of my life.” He floated off to bed. He was talking about school. Sometimes, with everything we read, we can be hard pressed to hear a student speak that way about attending class. But he was full of hope and promise about what a good day it…
Learning Labs: Incubators of next practice
In our school district, secondary schools have been invited to participate in the Learning Lab Project. The Learning Lab is designed as a learning laboratory where teachers are able to creatively innovate and explore new forms and structures for learning. Learning Labs are an opportunity to commit to being innovative in practice and to share…
Engaging the Digital Learner: Learning by Design
Our district continues to push the boundaries in understanding how to engage the digital learner in more effective ways. We have not achieved success but acknowledge and appreciate that this is a on-going journey. This is the notion behind our district’s vision of “Learning by Design.” We are the intentional architects and designers of these…
My Top 3 for 2015 (with apologies to Chris Kennedy)
The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always. Arthur Miller I tried not to do it but I couldn’t resist. I have parodied Superintendent Chris Kennedy on two previous occasions, taking his masterful Top Three List and brutalizing it a bit with my…
Producing Quality Assessment in Digital Portfolios
The digital portfolio embraces the challenge of making learning visible and mirrors quality assessment where the learning and student choice, voice and ownership are central and core. How does one capture quality assessment evidence and produce an ongoing digital portfolio for every student? The point is not to regulate but to re-orientate what we…
Reporting in a Digital Age
If you change the way you teach, you change the way you assess, and if you change the way you assess, you change the way you teach. Tammy Hartmann, Principal, Ocean Cliff Elementary School Our district has been looking at and changing the way we communicate student learning for several years now. We recognized in…
Maker Day at Princess Margaret Secondary
Guest Post: Thank you to Zale Darnel, and his colleagues, for contributing this guest post. On September 28, 2015 Princess Margaret Secondary School held a “Maker Space” workshop and it was amazing! Here is our story and some pictures. With ninety educators in attendance, some from our school and some of our local elementary schools the…
The Structures of Innovation
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. Steve Jobs I have a fascination with structures. Whether these are the physical structures of cityscapes, the formal systems in organizations or the informal structures hidden in organizations, how…
Our Journey into Pedagogical Documentation
Stand aside for a while and leave room for learning, observe carefully what children do, and then, if you have understood well, perhaps teaching will be different from before. Loris Malaguzzi “Inquiry shaped our belief that pedagogical documentation furthers a strength-based image of children, makes their thinking visible, provides for student and teacher reflection and helps…