The Real-World Learning Podcast

“So, imagine we taught baseball the same way that we teach science currently. What we would do is we would have children read books about baseball rules. When they got to high school, we would let them reproduce famous baseball plays of the past, and it wouldn't be till graduate school that they would actually ever get to play the game. And that's pretty much the way that we teach science. It's no...

The UCDSB’s We Were Here Project is a concept. It is also an evolution of a concept. Let me explain:   Over 20 years ago, Blake Seward discovered opportunity at the nexus of his personal and professional life as an educator. His fascination with history became personal and emerged in his family. He confronted the gap in a forgotten family tragedy, a scar left by the Great War. He asked, how did it...

On a beautiful sunny day in June,  June 15th 2024 to be exact, students at R. Tait McKenzie Public School attended the Rededication Ceremony at the Almonte Cenotaph where Private George B. Monterville’s name is now remembered.   Do they really understand the magnitude of what they did? Can we even understand that magnitude? Can you look back to the year you attended school as a grade 6 student? Di...

It may come across as trite, but if you want to know – if we want to know – what students are asking for, what they want and need, really, just ask them. I did just that when I sat down with Ben Russell and his students that make up Cave Studios at Carleton Place High School. After telling me all about making music, learning the technical approaches to recording from equipment to theory to applica...

Shop local.    Top of mind these last few months, and years before now when the zeitgeist encouraged “knowing your farmer” and eating within one hundred miles of your home, the idea has an appeal even in a world where so much of what we spend our money on comes from places we don’t know, made by people we don’t know.   I mean, what is local. Recently, in an act of admittedly passive activism I bou...

This is the entire series in one episode, combining chapter 1 and 2 of the interviews done with the Principal, teachers and students from Russell High School.

Think of asking questions. How often in a day do we hear, “does anyone have any questions?”. The answer is so obviously “yes”, and yet the response if so often silence. Last week I walked the waterworks of a community development with students – we were following how the water in all its wonderful utility would travel from the town’s water tower to the homes and back to the water table. It was fas...

We need to talk about purpose.   We need to talk about contribution.   We need to talk about meaning.   We need to talk about belonging to something larger than self, and feeling like what we do can change the world.  I met with a friend recently. In a lovely moment of positive-angst he asked, “Can I share my one-liner with you?” In a perfect example of the French phenomenon captured by the phrase...

In my desk drawer I have a key. It’s a replica antique key. Ornamental, meant to recall a time when things like keys were made not by machines, but crafted by hands; when ergonomics and efficiency were not on the radar, and so beauty and longevity rained; when a pocket was functional, and you were likely to find one weighted down by a key.   The key was a gift. The card that held it said that I wa...

Do we spend enough time talking about identity as part of the student experience of school? The question is rhetorical. We don’t. If we’re honest, we allow the concerns of quote/unquote “stakeholders” to be more noteworthy than the upheaval of adolescence. During a time of great-transformation, unlike any other stage of human life, a time when identity is the fundamental, the most profound concern...

This Podcast has a purpose: to share stories of learning in the Upper Canada District School Board as told by the teachers and students leading them. Our conversations focus on projects that have happened. It’s often the ultimate reflective exercise: sit behind a microphone and tell the story. The shortcoming of this is that we often miss how projects continue beyond the school calendar; how stude...

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about superheroes. Not the capital “S” kind of superheroes, but lower case “s” superheroes, the everyday kind of superheroes that we often neglect to recognize. Sometimes, it seems, the extraordinary efforts of a caring soul, an individual that seeks to improve the world they encounter leaving it in a better state than what they discovered it in, sometimes we fail...

In this episode, the first of our ROOTS series, we talk to former Chair of the board Jeff McMillan and Principal Rich Tamblyn about their time as educators in the UCDSB and how they developed an approach to learning that they called the Current Experience Program. When you read about and watch video of the experience they helped promote in their classrooms, you see first-hand the connection betwee...

As the saying goes, it takes all kinds of different people to make the world go round. Or, at least, it helps.  We make our unique imprints on the earth – footsteps maybe – that only we can make. Without our feet those footsteps would simply never walk the earth.   Ideally, our children, over 14 years of schooling in public education will encounter all kinds of different ways of knowing, and doing...

In education, and beyond, we hear it all too often. It’s a disdain for youth. How this generation of young people is failing – at the essentials, at life, in school. It is a comment of frustration and apathy and disregard.  Kids today.   If you work in our schools you witness a different reality. In social media vernacular, despite the challenges of being young and growing up, the kids are alright...

Erika Christakis, the author of the bestselling book The Importance of Being Little argues that when it comes to children and learning, adults have “a profound lack of faith in what young children are capable of.”   Christakis also points out that “children are wired with the capacity for learning.”   Let’s start with capacity, then: the depths to which an individual can reach into their superpowe...

Can you see it? No, no, over there. Look closely, can you see it now?   It’s a classroom.   Well, yes, you’re right it’s ALSO a trail, a nature reserve, a land trust, a provincial park. No doubt this classroom is also those things too. First and foremost, it’s a classroom.   And the best part is this classroom doesn’t need anything else to become a learning experience. It’s an all-inclusive optima...

What if every class began with the provocation, “What if our class could help even just one person?”   What if the response to this possibility began a year-long learning adventure that helped people?   What if the curriculum was contextualized to serve the help a community needs, as a toolbox, and students saw their labour, their learning, as contributing to a better community? One, maybe, in the...

Sometimes we can make things just a little too complicated.   We miss the metaphor for the words, lose sight of the lesson trying to guess at its meaning. Sometimes the answer is right in front of us.   Take for example water, and how it ripples beyond our view to shores we don’t consider after the initial ripple leaves our awareness.   Or, take learning: we measure moments with blunt tools often...

What's in a story? Words. From the words that we speak come the stories we tell. In time, these words, these stories, are transferred to text shared in ink, a permanent record of our stories. With a renewed focus on the science of reading, making sense of the words, learning to connect the code to the meaning our words convey, learning to READ, one might make the mistake that reading is like breat...