After a day of workshopping this week, a teacher gave me some honest feedback. “You need to be more clear on the questions you ask. It wasn’t really clear what you wanted us to do or what you were looking for.” After thanking the teacher for this honest and helpful feedback, another teacher at the [...]
What if every kid at your school had the experience of this little girl on her first day of kindergarten? What if every day of school, even in the later grades? Enjoy, share, and maybe set this as a goal? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5cqJrEWoSU
I can only wish I had the chops to have written Building School 2.0: How to Create the Schools We Need. I read a lot of books, many on the current state and future of K-12 education, best practices of organizational change and innovation, and the nature of creative individuals and organizations. I don’t recommend [...]
In his latest article in Salon, big edu-thinker and always provocative Alfie Kohn takes on one of the icons of K-12 learning, Carol Dweck and her catechism of "growth mindset". As I tweeted, I would pay good money to attend a debate between these two! My thoughts are not at their level of theory, but more like [...]
Yesterday I tweeted “Innovation is limited by minds, not $$”. I am in Houston to work for a day with a highly respected independent school. In response to that, a Twitter colleague suggested that innovation is easy for those with money and not for those less well funded. Both historical and current evidence supports my sense of what [...]
What can making a fire teach us about the nature of learning? I have had an ongoing dialogue with Dr. Adrian Bejan of Duke University, one of the preeminent scholars on the science of connectivity and flow through human, organic, and inorganic systems. He recently sent me his latest article, Why Humans Build Fires Shaped the Same [...]
Here is something I bet we can all agree on: simple is almost always better than complicated. What if we could take those messy problems at our schools that always seem to circle back on us, that confound us with inertia, dead ends, and multiple stakeholder turf battles, and find some simple guidelines to sort [...]
Innovation in K12 education is about shifting our practice from a rigid, proscribed one-size-fits-all-every-year model to one that is more adaptable, flexible, and relevant to student interests and passions. As you think about the coming school year, here are two simple guides via @Edutopia to help shift your classroom practice towards a deeper learning student experience: The [...]
One of the goals I see most frequently in school strategic plans in the last half decade is an increased focus on STEM courses. The rationale is powerful: there is little debate that job opportunities in STEM fields will continue to far outpace that for students who have majored in the humanities. Recognizing, however, that creativity, perhaps [...]
I am truly honored to receive a generous and superlative book review of #EdJourney from the prestigious USC Rossier School of Education. They call the book "...a must-read for educators that is both clear-eyed in its appraisal of the obstacles faced by the education community and refreshingly upbeat in its reporting about innovations that are [...]