Tag: 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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“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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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…
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G is for Galileo
Galileo experimented, pondered, and tested theories thereby laying the foundations of what we now know as the scientific method. He was also a keen observer, inventer and thought deeply on almost everything – definitely a Renaissance man. It’s an understatement to say he was very clever, and he was very clever at many different things, so…
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F is for Frankenstein, Focus & Future Ready
In considering education and how it should evolve to best prepare the class of 2030, we should look at it like we look at Frankenstein. Remember? That cautionary tale warning of the evils of science? Well, not really, it is more the tale of a scientist who longed for things in the past and, using science,…
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D is for Debate
This house believes… “It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.” ― Joseph Joubert Debate is the cornerstone of freedom and democracy and without healthy debate, we lose. Noam Chomsky outlines the dangers of not having truly free debate: “The smart way to keep people passive…
