Summary form only given. The mainly used islanding detection techniques may be classified as active and passive techniques. Passive techniques don't perturb the system but they have larger non-detection zones, whereas active techniques have smaller non-detection zones but they perturb the system. In this paper, a new hybrid technique is proposed to solve this problem. An average rate of voltage change (passive technique) has been used to initiate a real power shift (active technique), which changes the real power of distributed generation (DG), when the passive technique cannot have a clear discrimination between islanding and other events in the system. Simulation results show that the proposed method is effective in detecting islanding of distribution systems with DGs.