91�Թ� grad wins Chopped Canada, uses prize to send his pupils on adventure of a lifetime

sgupta — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 09:25:13 +0000

91�Թ� grad wins Chopped Canada, uses prize to send his pupils on adventure of a lifetime sgupta Tue, 01/20/2015 - 04:25

Eileen Thomas

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Eileen Thomas

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OISE

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“I’ve never competed in anything before, and I want to show the kids that they should go for it too,” says OISE alumnus and culinary arts teacher Keith Hoare

Four chefs. Three courses. Only one chance to win. The challenge? Create an unforgettable meal with the mystery ingredients before time runs out.

For OISE grad Keith Hoare, former caterer and now a culinary arts teacher at Thistletown CI, going the extra mile for his students means putting his own culinary skills to the test. On January 10, Hoare’s goal was realized when he won the Chopped Canada competition in the show’s season 2 opener on the Food Network.

“My students won a lot of gold medals, but if I came home with this, they’d be impressed,” Hoare says.

Hoare plans to use the $10,000 top prize money to help fund a culinary field trip to Spain and France for his students.

“The culinary program produces all the food for the school. I teach the kids proper cooking techniques so they can produce a meal from scratch at home or working in a restaurant. I hoped to win Chopped Canada so I can send 20 students to Spain and France for the culinary adventure of a lifetime. I’ve never competed in anything before, and I want to show the kids that they should go for it too,” he said.

Hoare and his fellow chefs competed in three rounds: appetizer, entrée, and dessert. Each course comes with its own mystery basket of ingredients, and the chefs are told to use every ingredient in some way. Each course is timed and the judges critique their work on presentation, taste, and creativity. If your dish does not cut it, you will be chopped.

In the first round, the clock started ticking as soon as Hoare and company opened their baskets to discover cherry drink mix, ground beef, rutabaga, and Kataifi. “Kat-A-What?" exclaimed the other three contestants. Having learned about Kataifi by accident (watch the show to learn how), Hoare pressed his advantage to win the first round and the acclaim of the judges, and kept it up the through the remaining rounds to capture the title.

"Keith is a wonderful example of skilled trades people who have been coming to OISE for decades, transitioning from the world of work to that of education. Hoare and technological education teachers in Ontario's secondary schools provide real world knowledge and experience to students throughout our school system,” says Bernie Burns, Hoare’s teacher in OISE’s Technological Education program.

Hoare has opened career and post-secondary pathways for many of his Thistletown students: he enters and coaches them in Skills Canada competitions, encourages them to enter co-op programs, and arranges and leads fund raising drives for international hospitality and food field trips for his students. He has also been active as a soccer coach for Thistletown.

“I always tell my kids they can do whatever they want to do if they put their minds to it and they work hard,” says Hoare, “and me winning Chopped Canada just gives my words a little more meaning.”

With the Chopped Canada winnings, Hoare and his students have raised $150,000 over the last seven-and-a-half years, including $45,000 for an earlier culinary field trip to Italy, $60,000 for the upcoming culinary field trip to Spain and France and $45,000 for equipment for the Thistletown CI football team.

Hoare's winning Chopped Canada efforts were broadcast January 14 on the Food Network, and are available online on the Chopped Canada website.

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Finnishing School: what Canada can learn from Finland’s education system

sgupta — Fri, 02 May 2014 11:42:53 +0000

Finnishing School: what Canada can learn from Finland’s education system sgupta Fri, 05/02/2014 - 07:42

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We are trying to work for a situation where parents and children and everyone will be happy with the service we are providing in our schools." (photo by Gary Beechy)

Eileen Thomas

Author legacy

Eileen Thomas

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Education expert Pasi Sahlberg delivers RWB Jackson Lecture

Better teachers do not necessarily lead to better students.

That’s the myth-busting message that Finnish education expert Pasi Sahlberg brought to a rapt audience at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) recently as he delivered the annual RWB Jackson Lecture.

Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons: What the world can learn from educational change in Finland, told the audience that Finland is guided by a common vision, of a great school for each and every child, equity and quality, and a commitment to having the best school system in the world by 2025.

Since Finland placed first in the first PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) results in 2001, educators, bureaucrats and researchers have been visiting Finland to try to discover the small country’s secrets to quality education.

Sahlberg is the former director general of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation in Helsinki and currently a visiting professor of practice at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. In introducing Sahlberg, OISE Dean Julia O’Sullivan called him “a teacher, teacher educator and policy advisor in Finland who has studied education systems and reforms around the world.”

After regaling the audience with jokes about Finnish hockey superiority and shyness (“How can you tell the difference between a Finnish introvert and a Finnish extrovert? The introvert stares at his own shoes, the extrovert stares at your shoes,”) Sahlberg argued that having better teachers in schools does not automatically improve students’ learning outcomes and that teachers alone cannot overcome the societal issues affecting children’s opportunities to learn.

"The research doesn't support the idea that teachers would be the most important single factor," Sahlberg said. "We know that the most important single factor in most countries is the family background."

Even if researchers consider only factors related to schools, Sahlberg added, teachers "are just about the same level as leadership of the school."

Sahlberg also contrasted what he calls the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) to the Finnish way: competition vs. collaboration, standardization vs. personalization, test-based accountability vs. trust-based responsibility, choice vs. equity, human capital vs. professional capital. In concluding his talk, he said that the quality of an education system can exceed the quality of its teachers if teachers work as a team, and moral purpose, collective autonomy and shared leadership are the keys to performance beyond expectations.

Sahlberg praised Ontario and Canada for having “some of the most successful school systems in the world” and noted that his first visit to OISE came 20 years ago.

“Everybody knows this institute – not only here in North America but everywhere. I want to thank you for your service and for your work for education and public education in Canada and beyond.”

Watch the full lecture at https://webcasts.welcome2theshow.com/OISE/2230

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