Category: Critical Thinking
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Building a Digital Escape Room
What is an Escape Room? Escape rooms are a whole new way of experiencing storytelling and of adding gamification to your classroom. Typically, they are a room in which people are locked in order to play a game requiring them to solve a series of puzzles within a certain amount of time to accomplish a…
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Increasing Student Voice, Creativity, and Technological skills with Multimodal Writing
I recently attended an engaging and impactful multimodal writing workshop led by Angela Stockman. While I’ve included multimodal writing in my high school English classes for a while now, the workshop reinforced its importance. The typical focus on the alphabetic mode as being better or more important than the other modes (haptic, aural, visual, gestural,…
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Teaching The Skin We’re In
As part of my Grade 12 University level English course this year, I decided to create a unit on the book by Desmond Cole – The Skin We’re In. Over the last few years, our department has been updating our book choices, and last year my colleague, who was then teaching ENG4U, did Stamped: Racism,…
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Learner Variability
What is the one constant in education today? Well, it varies. Something I’ve spent a lot of time on lately is learner variability. This focus grew out of my interest in supporting social emotional learning. In learning about supporting student’s emotional health and incorporating practices and strategies to encourage social-emotional growth I began looking carefully…
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Single Voices, Global Choices Project
Planning is well underway for Single Voices, Global Choices having begun a few months ago. The project, already boasting 107 teachers from 95 schools in 46 countries, plans on centering social emotional learning and connections-based learning by focusing on international events created by the United Nations and other organizations and by analyzing current events. International…
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“X” Marks the Spot
I began writing this series a year and a half ago to explore the many considerations we need to contemplate regarding the changes that will occur in the next decade and what our students will need to be successful in that time-frame and beyond. Access, happiness, mental well-being, reflection, patience, social-emotional learning, and mindset are…
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S is for System
“talking about divergent topics in other classes would encourage students to see the interconnectedness of our world”
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Q is for Questions and Not Getting Caught in the Quagmire
A teacher’s job is full of questions; that’s what we do really, live in questions. Answering, asking, composing, rephrasing — all those questions fill our day. And then we ask some more questions — questions that we hope will challenge our students, push them deeper, and foster critical thinking. We perfect our questioning skills to…
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O is for Outside the Box
“Once you stop learning, you start dying.” Albert Einstein We hear the phrase “outside the box” a lot and it can get tedious through overuse. It can also be scary to people who feel they aren’t that creative or who don’t want to be WAY out there. The thing is I don’t mean outside the…
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N is for Navigation
I love old maps. They speak to me of adventure, exploration, new worlds. Ultimately, they tell stories, and being an English teacher, I love stories! A cool thing that occurred to me is how maps show the big picture, not just point A to point B like GPS gadgets do. I think that is really…