How might we integrate innovation practices across our school culture, breaking down myopic silos of "that's not my job"? This is one of the true challenges of innovation in any organization, and particularly in schools where teachers, administrators, students, and parents frequently and strongly identify with their respective "tribe" more than with an organizational imperative. At [...]
I received both strong support for, and passionate pushback to, my article last week, "Re-building the K-12 Operating System" that was selected to kick off the Transforming Teaching series organized by Jal Mehta, Tyler Thigpen, and others at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Specifically, I had immediate responses on Twitter from Ilana Horn, a [...]
For two years I have been collecting notes from blogs, books, school observations, and more discussions with more educator colleagues that I can remember or cite. I keep hearing many of the same ideas about how to transform the factory model classroom into a deeper learning experience more relevant and attuned to the future needs [...]
Yesterday I published what I think is my most important contribution in the last year since #EdJourney hit the shelves. It is a short article that was chosen to launch a new collaboration, Transforming Teaching, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education by Prof. Jal Mehta and his team. In Rebuilding the K-12 Operating System I outline [...]
What if teachers had access to a "commodities market" of time? Last week at the Hun School in Princeton we were prototyping some bold new experiential learning units, challenging the traditional boundaries of time, space, and subject. As almost always happens given this opportunity to expand our thinking, we ran up against the barrier of time [...]
The start of a school year is always a time to re-energize, but at four schools I worked with in the last week or so I think it was more than that. It was a time to focus on how we as educators want to change our practice in order to help our students prepare [...]
One year ago this week teaching and learning at the underserved, underperforming Ortiz Middle School in Santa Fe, NM was pretty much what you would expect: students lining up quietly in the hallways; sitting quietly in rows and pods of desks; completing worksheets; raising hands one at a time to answer questions or read a [...]
Yep; this is going to get me in trouble with the marketing folks. IMHO school tag lines are mostly a waste of time. Tag lines are those pithy one or a few words that we struggle to find that tells the world exactly what we stand for. They come from the for-profit world where Avis [...]
Stop. Don’t waste another Back To School Night, a rare opportunity when you have many or most of your parents and all of your teachers on campus, a large, diverse swath of community stakeholders. Traditionally we shuffle people as fast as we can from room to room so teachers can hand out sheaves of paper that they [...]
The myth of Pandora's Box tells us that we can unwittingly unleash terrible and unexpected things into the world through rash action. Might we re-construct this metaphor just a bit for the future of K-12 schools? "Terrible" and "unexpected" are two very different categories. We should not be afraid of the unexpected. The world changes [...]