David Truss

“Educators who work in isolation improve incrementally, while educators who collaborate transform exponentially!” I said this in a Twitter Chat a few days ago in response to the question: “Why do you believe that a shared vision and belief system is important to transform education?” This was one of the Twitter Chat questions posed by […]

Risky Business

It is very risky to choose not to take risks. Thought 1. You can’t look at averages when everyone isn’t moving. When some people are doing amazing things and others have done nothing new, measuring the average tells us absolutely nothing. Everyone needs to be moving in the right direction, and when someone is standing still, […]

3 Injustices in Education

Last month I was honoured to be interviewed on Corey Engstrom’s Teacher Tech Trails. Near the end of the podcast, I mentioned the ‘greatest’ injustices that we tend to do in more traditional schools and classrooms to three different kinds of students. While I would question my choice of the word ‘greatest’, I think these […]

“Learn to live with ambiguity.”

am·bi·gu·i·ty noun • uncertainty or inexactness of meaning in language. synonyms: vagueness, obscurity, abstruseness, doubtfulness, uncertainty; • a lack of decisiveness or commitment resulting from a failure to make a choice between alternatives. Ambiguity has potential to be a catalyst to new learning. It can be the spark to kindle lateral thinking and creative solutions to huge problems […]

Creating the time and space for self-directed, personalized, inquiry learning.

Background (Part 1 – Purpose) The following image and description were created for an application for an award. ‘Assignments’ like this are great because they force us (teachers John Sarte, Alan Soiseth and myself) to think about what it is we value, and strive towards as we build our program at Inquiry Hub Secondary School. […]

The Unconference

I have to admit, that I’ve avoided edcamps and unconfernces for a while, because they have felt to me like group hugs… warm and cozy, but not a lot about moving my learning forward. However, I participated in the Institute for Innovation in Education (iiE) conference at Vancouver Island University this pass weekend and the afternoon of […]

3 Questions Before Supporting Innovation

1. Is this best for students and their learning? 2. Is this scalable? 3. Are you willing to share? In a conversation with my good friend, Dave Sands, we were talking about the challenge of investing in systematic change vs supporting the outliers (and the Lone Wolves). There will always be limited resources to work with, and […]

Relevance Amplifies Learning

Last year two grade 11 students, Josh & Brandon, started creating an app using iBeacon technology to help our teachers take attendance. A year later, that app is not completed, it probably won’t be completed any time soon, and yet this is one of a number of very successful projects that happened last year. The plan […]

Questioning Your Inquiry

As educators, we often refer to ‘Wait Time’ as the time between when you ask a question and when you expect an answer. Cast out a question to your class and if you don’t provide wait time, then when the first student begins to answer (takes a bite), all your other students are ‘off the […]

17,000 Emails

17,000+ emails in a year. That’s not a guess, that’s how many emails I had in my inbox for one calendar year. That doesn’t include a few hundred deleted items. It also doesn’t include emails to my gmail account… 17,000+ is a total for just my work email. Excluding holidays and weekends, that’s about 85 emails […]