The New People in the Room

There is a moment every four years when a newly elected Board of Education gathers around the table for the first time. The room looks much the same. The table is the same, the agenda follows a fam…

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What We Notice

A few months ago I wrote a post marking thirty years in education, 30 Things I Believe About Education After 30 Years. In the comments, longtime educator Paul Bogush asked me a question that I have…

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Teacher Is Still the Best Title

World Teachers’ Day has always been one of my favourite days to mark on this blog. That is probably not a surprise. I come from a family of teachers. I started teaching at 22. I met my wife t…

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The AI Crutch?

For years, I had a pretty simple writing process. I would write something. Refine it. Read it again the next day. Send it to Tricia. Make a few changes. Then publish it. It was not especially sophi…

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What Should Change? What Must Endure?

I love the first day of school. No matter how long you have been doing this work, there is something about this day that still feels like a beginning. For the last couple of weeks, our schools have…

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The Easiest Post to Write

The easiest post to write this fall would be the one against it. I could open with a warning about screens, line up every worry about AI, about cheating, about the slow erosion of thinking, then ca…

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AI, Cybersecurity and a Room Full of Trustees

We opened our session at the Canadian School Boards Association conference with a show of hands. How many of you have personally used an AI tool in the last month? Almost every hand in the room wen…

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Eleven Summers

Regular readers know this space is usually about schools. This post is a little different. It is summer, the pace is different, and I want to write about something work-adjacent that has been part …

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Still Running – A Long Read

My friends have a running theory about how this ends. One is convinced it will be a torn Achilles. Another has placed his bet on a catastrophic flight delay, the kind that traps you in an airport i…

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30 Things I Believe About Education After 30 Years

For the past few years, I have ended the school year with a list. One reflection for every year I have worked in education. It has become a bit of a ritual for me. A way to mark the end of the year…

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Going Home to Riverside

Some chapters in a career close the way they should, with time to say goodbye properly, to thank the people who made the work meaningful, and to mark the ending before the next beginning. And some …

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My Words to the Class of 2026

At the start of this year, I chose a word for 2026: ALIVE It was a word I picked because it felt like both a reminder and an aspiration. Stay present. Stay curious. Stay connected to what actually …

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Forty Years and Still Connected

Daniel Woodward Elementary School is just across a field from the house I grew up in. Last Saturday, forty years after leaving Grade 7, I walked back in. We were there for a reunion of the Grade 7 …

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The Long Game

My colleague Sandra-Lynn Shortall recently published a post, Ten Years Strong: Building Physical Literacy, One Move at a Time, and it got me thinking less about physical literacy itself and more ab…

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Considering Running for School Trustee? A Few Things to Know First

Full disclosure upfront: I am writing this post about an election where the trustees who are elected will become my bosses. Make of that what you will. I will try to be objective anyway. In October…

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The Snap Back?

There is a bit of a snap back happening in education right now. You can feel it in the conversations, see it in policy, and hear it in the tone. A renewed emphasis on basics. A return to exams. Att…

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Disagreeing Without Dividing

There is a particular kind of book that arrives at exactly the right moment and knows it. George Couros’s Forward, Together is one of those books. Not because it is timely in a trendy way, bu…

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Breaking News: AI Report Cards! Because Why Should Teachers Have All the Fun?

It seems like everywhere we turn these days, AI is there to help. It writes our emails, plans our meals, reminds us to breathe, judges our parallel parking, and tells us whether we would look bette…

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What’s Your EGOT?

It started with TikTok. Not the way I usually begin a blog post, I know. My 22 year old son was sharing something he had come across online about the EGOT. If you are like me and this was a new ter…

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Repetition Is Part of the Work

We were putting significant energy into bringing Sarah Ward back to speak with families and staff about executive functioning in late January. It is important work, and we know it matters. Still, a…

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Steadiness as Strategy

In my year-end reflection last December, I found myself dwelling on something that might seem unremarkable: there wasn’t a lot of drama in BC education this past year. No major controversies.…

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The Educated Citizen, Revisited

In December 2011, I wrote a blog post asking whether British Columbia’s 1989 definition of the Educated Citizen still held up. The question felt almost rhetorical. Despite two decades of chan…

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The Persistence of Yes

This is Post #500. Writing that sentence feels both surreal and deeply satisfying. More than anything, these posts have taught me that leadership and life are sustained by one simple word: yes. Tha…

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In Praise of Assistance (And the Myth of the Unassisted Writer)

I have been thinking a lot about assistance lately. Who gets it, who does not, and why we suddenly get moralistic about it the moment the assistance comes from AI. The spark for this post is Nick P…

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ShiftED Podcast #78 In Conversation with Chris Kennedy What We Hold Sacred in Education: Leadership, Trust and Change - LEARN Blog - learning from each other and building a community

What does a basketball court have to do with leading a school district? More than you might think. In this conversation, we sit down with Chris Kennedy, West Vancouver’s Superintendent of Schools, who...

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My One Word for 2026: Alive

This marks the 11th year of my One Word tradition. Eleven years. When I started this practice back in 2016, I was 42 years old and hungry. Literally, that was my word. Hungry. I wanted to compete, …

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My “Top 3” List for 2025

Here we are again. A final post for calendar year 16 on Culture of Yes. As I close out another year, I find myself in an unexpected place. This was the easiest year of writing in the 16 years I&#82…

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The Tutoring Revolution We Did Not See Coming

For years, there has been a quiet understanding in many high schools that success in certain courses, especially senior math and sciences, required something extra. Not more effort or better attend…

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What a Changing Profession Is Trying to Tell Us

There is a shift happening in our schools, and you can feel it. You see it in the staffroom, in the parking lot, in the subtle ways younger teachers talk about their work. They draw clearer lines b…

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