How do you as an individual, your school as an organization, and the group of all schools and educators as a system increase the odds of successful innovation? Consider 100 pollywogs, each in 100 different small ponds; that is 10,000 pollywogs. Will they evolve? Probably, given enough time and a sustained ecosystem of resource supply, [...]
What is the future of libraries at schools? Does the word "library", rooted as it is in the concept of books as the primary transactional medium of knowledge, limit our imagination? Rather than a space where we store books and study quietly, might we evolve a place to imagine, dream, create, manage, and share knowledge across [...]
What is the future of the school "library"? Last month I took my stab with "Replace 'Library' With 'Portal of Idea Flow'?" on Edutopia. It built on ideas shared by Beth Holland and others, on discussions we see all over the country/world about how these library spaces might evolve and be re-imagined in the future [...]
Once in a while I get the pleasure of working deeply with students, asking the adults to sit back and watch how their students expand and rise to unbounded, untested, unknown mini-challenges. That was the kind of day we had at the Shipley School last fall; here are just a few minutes out of our [...]
If I had to pick a single piece of advice for school leaders it would be this: if you keep asking questions rooted in your past you are never going to get to your future. Bless the hearts and minds of those who have come before, but so much advice given to schools rests on [...]
This is the fourth post in a series that asks "why is Silicon Valley the Magic Kingdom of innovation, and what lessons can K-12 schools learn about how innovation succeeds in times of rapid change?" If you have a management team or board that is asking "how do we know we are actually becoming more innovative [...]
What might we learn by looking in our own rearview mirror? In reading Rise of the DEO by Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland, I noted the quick sketches of life/career by some of their interviewees. I grabbed a flip chart pad and knocked together my own career/passion pencil scribble in less than ten minutes. And [...]
This is the third post in a series that asks "why is Silicon Valley the Magic Kingdom of innovation, and what lessons can K-12 schools learn about how innovation succeeds in times of rapid change?" If you have a management team or board that is asking "how do we know we are actually becoming more [...]
What questions should schools ask as they embark on a process of innovative change? What are critical expectations they must have of their community? What are the big challenges they will face? Here is a lis of questions and challenges you can use to provoke the discussions of "are we ready" and "are we serious" [...]
What if we could evolve a new "teacher" who was 1/2 great leader-learner and 1/2 entrepreneurial start-up fiend? What if we could weave those two strands of personal and professional DNA together? Isn't this the model we want our students to follow? Schools that are moving quickly off of the traditional assembly line model of [...]