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Written by Loriann Salmon, Director of Inclusive Education I had the opportunity to attend the Leadership Now Conference and listen to names such as Dufour, Williams, Warrick, Reeves, and Cruz. A common theme resonated throughout – that of the power of PLCs. While the concept is certainly not new, I was challenged by the speakers to critically examine the essential conditions of our current PLCs both through a cultural and structural lens.  Warrick noted five factors of high reliability schools, with the first three being foundational.   A safe collaborative culture, he contended is best met by committing  individual teachers into better performance through the traditional classroom observation and evaluation process” (Dufour and Marzano, Leaders of Learning: How District, School and Classroom Leaders Improve Student Achievement , 2011).    Warrick challenged us as leaders to question how have we built capacity to work in these collaborative teams?  ...

Written by Lindsay Brooks, Instructional Coach at Percy Pegler After a hands on experience, group knowledge building supports the idea we can build knowledge as a collective group.  “It serves to identify shared problems and gaps in understanding and to advance the understanding beyond the level of the most knowledgeable individual” (Scardamalia, 2002, p.12).  Group knowledge building can be applied K to 12. Learners come together with the collective goal of idea improvement.   They share, pose questions, negotiate and refine their ideas. You can build group knowledge by following the three stages: Chiarotto, L. (2011). Natural Curiosity: A Resource for Teachers: Building Children's Understanding of the World Through Environmental Inquiry . Laboratory School at the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Circles are a great way to eliminate hierarchy as all students can have an equal place in a cir...

Hi all, As we continue to move from content driven work to competency driven work, it sometimes becomes necessary to rethink how we teach the basics of, say, mathematics. The act of programming a computer may seem a little unreachable to us let alone our students.  Coding seems scary because we've been taught that it has to look like this: And yet the act of writing code can involve a deep understanding of patterning, algebra, mathematical operations, number systems, shape, space, and even place value. It involves the processes of communication, visualization, reasoning and problem solving on a deep level. Most importantly it touches all 10 competencies of an Educated Albertan! The good news is that MIT have created a programming environment that is accessible to students as young as Div II.  It is called Scratch and is available to students and teachers for free at http://scratch.mit.edu . Last week teachers joined us for a 45 minute introduction to using Scratch in Mathemati...