Year: 2021 — Province: Ontario
Certificate of Achievement Recipient
Lord Dorchester Secondary School
Grades 9, 10 and 11 - math and science
Dorchester, Ontario
Quote
“Lisa Floyd is one of those rare educators who enters the profession and raises our collective imagination about what is possible. Her generosity as an educator and scholar, and commitment to making mathematics, coding and computational thinking ideas accessible to everyone are genuinely appreciated, especially over the past year. She is a highly valued classroom teacher and colleague, winning heartfelt praise from parents, communities, government and colleagues.”
Teaching Approach
Lisa’s philosophy of teaching reflects her own engagement in lifelong learning and her deep appreciation of the three dimensional lives of her students. She values the deep and meaningful learning that happens in students as they engage in authentic experiences. She honours the capacity for children to be ‘makers’, learning together through what she calls ‘computational participation’.
In the Classroom
Flowing from Lisa’s educational philosophy are the structures and opportunities she creates in her classroom environment that enable digital and creative literacy to thrive. Routinely pushing herself to go outside of her own comfort zone, she creates a context within which it is safe to take risks, try things out, and value mistakes as opportunities to learn. As a result, her students learn to be deliberate in their decision-making, to collaborate with others through having to rework and revise their initial ideas. They build confidence in the learning process itself, and the quality of the ultimate outcome is higher as a result.
Lisa’s realm is not limited to the classroom. Across all her work teaching high school, facilitating Professional Development for teachers, and teaching in the Teacher Education program at Western, she uses a variety of technologies to engage students. While her focus is on coding and emerging technologies, to achieve competence in those areas, she brings her own spirit of playfulness and curiosity into the integration of coding at all levels of education.
Outstanding achievements
Lisa is one of the rare women currently leading education in STEM Education across Canada and internationally. She was one of the first to champion the move to teach coding to children. Her work as a Research Associate over six years at three different universities has solidified her understanding of the critical connection needed between research and practice. She has authored/co-authored eighteen academic articles and book chapters, which is remarkable for a practicing classroom teacher. A highly skilled and compelling presenter, her zest for knowledge mobilization quickly increased the demand for her keynote addresses, professional development sessions, and research collaborations.
Lisa shares her innovative and creative ideas with students and teachers across Canada, and digitally, with the world. She has supported two CanCode Organizations – Canada Learning Code and Let’s Talk Science - creating digital literacy resources used by students across the country, and notably her contribution in 2018 to the Computational Thinking Framework while serving as Director for Fair Chance Learning, a Canadian change management organization dedicated to education reform.
Get in touch!
Lord Dorchester Secondary School
61 Queen Street
Dorchester, ON N0L 1G2
519-268-7351
Email: lorddorchester@tvdsb.ca
Facebook: @ Lord-Dorchester-SS
Twitter: @LordDorchester