This has been a super-busy fall for me – beginning with helping launch another learning year – our 13th! – in SelfDesign, and extending to attending the Holistic Learning conference in Ashland Oregon, leading a couple of SelfDesign retreat-workshops for learners and families and giving various presentations. Whew! This coming week I’m excited to be […]
Back to School? Time to Learn Your Way!
The start of September marks back-to-school time across the land (though not quite yet in BC public schools). Legions of kids are walking through school doors for the first time in several months, my daughter among them. This week she is starting her fourth year at university. To all the children and youth re-joining the […]
Social Innovation Week – Let Learning Flourish in Schools
This is Social Innovation Week in Vancouver, with many events planned to stimulate thinking and collaborating about … social innovations (Find out more here). I have an innovative idea to share with SIW in mind, one I perceive as arising with starker irony given the province-wide teachers’ strikes that have also arisen this week. To […]
Daydreaming classed as new disorder – April Fools! (not)
What do Einstein, Nobel prize-winning scientist Barbara McClintock and Sir Isaac Newton have in common, besides being extraordinary scientists? They were diligent daydreamers who intentionally dropped into a state of reverie to enhance their thinking and conceptualizing. And were they alive today, and attending a conventional school, they might be diagnosed with a newly-minted disorder: […]
UVIC Sci-Faculty Testing Procedures a Big FAIL
This blog is intended to be blunt and to the point. My hope is that it will help to provoke change. Below is a letter I wrote last week to University of Victoria President Jamie Cassels. It follows an exchange I had with the UVIC Dean of Science Dr. Robert Lipson in the past 9 […]
(Authentically) “Flipping” the Classroom
It’s all the rage: Teachers from coast to coast are “flipping classrooms“. To wit, they are directing student to complete core learning via online resources (e.g. videos) at home or outside of class time. What’s happening during class time? That’s for reviewing assignments and homework before teeing up the next “flipped” assignment. According to proponents, […]
Re-conceptualizing the classroom
Just wanted to point readers toward an essay of mine in today’s Vancouver Sun newspaper, Op-Ed page. Read it here.The full title is Re-conceptualizing the classroom; New approaches to learning aided by technology will change how we deliver education. Basically, in the essay I profile the recently-launched ‘BC’s Education Plan’, the reaction from the BCTF, support from […]
Michael’s book, Learn Your Way! SelfDesigning the Life You Really Want, Starting Now is an ERAC-approved middle and high school textbook for career planning and health education courses (British Columbia), and it has received many endorsements. Contact Michael directly to obtain a pdf copy of the book.