‘Ask Them!’

  In my latest project with ASCD, Ask Them, we travel far and wide to answer simple question: Why should we ask our students about their own learning? To answer the question we spoke to a lot of people. A sampling includes: We travelled to Melbourne to ask John Hattie what his research suggests. Celeste

It takes a village…

I am so very excited to announce that our DVD is complete and ready for others to see. In November of 2015 we visited three high schools in my district where we entered the classrooms of some fantastic educators to see what they do around grading, homework, unit plans, re-assessments and creativity. Special thanks to

Sharing Circle – My foray into the unknown.

Last Wednesday I went looking for a branch. It was just prior to my first grade 9/10 leadership class of the year, and I found myself searching frantically for an ‘object’. Never before had I needed an ‘object’ to start the year, but this time was different from any of my other 18 starts to

An Exciting Month…

July 2014 will go down as one of the more exciting months for me professionally. After more than 2 years and a total of about 400 hours of planning, writing and editing, I am very excited to announce that my first book has been released through ASCD!     The book is currently available for

Double Dip: One Idea in the When vs. If Power Struggle

  The more I look at school grading schemes, increasingly I wonder: ‘why do schools put an unhealthy amount of emphasis on WHEN learning took place compared to IF it took place?’ For whatever reason, many educators continue to award a higher rank (or grade) to the student who learned something sooner than another student.

I can’t assess that…

Imagine a student delivers her math project in the form of a song.  In response the teacher declares, ‘I am not creative, so I can’t assess that.’ While I understand this sentiment, I don’t think it is necessarily true. The teacher is not the person who needs to be creative in order for creative projects

Learning on the Rocks

Elijah has become a very good mountain bike rider in a time span that baffles me.  He just turned 9 and he is riding sections of our trail that I would have predicted he would consider tackling in his teens. I have tried to dissect this experience in an effort to isolate some of the

“That is a nice big target, especially if I can see it.”

I really enjoy my subscription to Scientific American Mind.  I stumbled upon a small article from July/August 2011 about a visualization experiment conducted by researchers at the Free University of Amsterdam. The experiment was really simple: –         Ask three different groups to putt a golf ball at a target 5 feet away. –         Let each

The Best Learning is Difficult to Define

Our district has a program running within it called Through a Different Lens (TADL).  As best as I can tell, it is a whole bunch of things that serve to personalize learning, without being one thing in particular. Even people in the project seem purposefully vague when it comes to attaching labels to it.  Here

Hockey, Measurement and Cognitive Dissonance – What do I do with what I know?

So it is that time of year again…hockey season.  Perhaps not for the NHL, but seemingly everywhere else in Canada.  My wife and I braced for the inevitable this fall – two kids in minor hockey and all the related practices, games, meetings and miles. As a parent I lace ‘em up for my own