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Blog: Monday, February 29th, 2016

How Are The Schools? (Pt. 1)

By Abbotsford School District

For those of you in attendance at our recent district Shared Learning Conference, you will know that we had an exceptional presenter in Garfield Gini-Neuman. Garfield is one of Canada's foremost thinkers on critical thinking in K-12 classrooms. As I sat in the Abbotsford Arts centre Theatre listening to him, I could not help but reflect on the challenge before us in public education to continue to strengthen the relevance of our classrooms for tomorrow's learners. It is in fact the very pedagogical shift embedded in our redesigned curriculum. While Garfield punctuated that the changes we need to make are more akin to 'renovations', I think they are nonetheless significant enough that we must be systematic in our efforts to clarify the critical attributes of the thinking classrooms we aspire to build.

This cartoon above comes to mind. It is one that I have used whenever I speak in public about our district or our public education system. It is not particularly funny; rather, it punctuates the importance of the work we do in our classrooms (so much so that an alien upon landing on earth would make it his first query). We can never overestimate the importance of a strong public education system, one in which the public has unsurpassed confidence, and which consistently does what it aspires to do: build promising futures for tomorrow's generation. It is not enough that it does so for most of our children; it must do so for each of them. A tall order, I know, but that's why we are here.

Garfield highlighted three 'renovations' for our classrooms if we are to realize this promise:

  • Products/performances: Students need to be engaged with meaningful assessments, authentic tasks and real audiences.
  • Students' thinking tool kit: Classrooms need a suite of digital tools to work in consort with the thinking tools we provide to students.
  • Curriculum design: We need to problematize learning, and invite students to into sustained inquiry.

I was sufficiently impressed with Garfield's thoughts that I would like to further explore his ideas over the course of my next few blogs posts.

~ Kevin
Kevin Godden
Superintendent of Schools/CEO
Abbotsford School District

 
 

By Abbotsford School District

The Abbotsford School District has approx. 19,000 students and 2,500 employees at 50 sites.