Perhaps the most powerful driver of traditional, standards-focused education in America is the sense that we have fallen behind many countries in student performance. In our sound-bite world, the nexus of this concern are the results of international exams of math, reading, and writing. As I have written in the past, educators for whom I have [...]
Are your teacher teams working at peak performance to help bring about school innovation and change? It's sometimes easy in the late spring or dog days of August to gather ourselves and build a vision of deep, impactful learning for our students and ourselves. Then the hard work and long days of the school year take hold [...]
At the very core of learning, I believe, is the recognition that “I” have a problem I want to solve. Lacking that, we are engaging in exercises placed upon us by some external force, exercises in which we either have no stake or do not understand the stakes. For decades I have believed that at [...]
Her principal told librarian/technologist Laura Fleming "I don't care how you do it, but build a system for training Web 2.0 skills to the faculty". The rest is history. Laura created a library of instruction and practice tools, and has now shared them with the world. She purposefully holds the actual instruction videos to under [...]
Last year I told educators around the country that Design 39 Campus would be a destination not to be missed, and I was right. While small private schools can more easily claim the mantle of 21st century progressivism, a large public school, in the state with some of the lowest per-student funding in the country [...]
I love working with students! Yes, most of my work these days is with adult educators, but I am in my personal teaching wheelhouse with high school students. So I was truly honored to be included on the list of visiting scholars in the inaugural year of the Tad Bird Honors College at All Saints' [...]
"Perfect is the enemy of good and good is the enemy of great." I think this is what I would post in my classroom if I had one. Maybe I would add to it: "Great is the enemy of that one step beyond into a void for which we don't yet have a name." For how [...]
We all know that the friendliest people on earth live in New Zealand...and so do many wonderful, passionate, forward-leaning K-12 educator-learners! We had a wonderful live video chat and Twitter back channel this week attended by MANY Kiwis as well as colleagues from Australia and Asia. I was happy and honored to stay up late to share [...]
Are "no excuses" the new "grit"? Last year in this space we shared a deep dive into the evolving meanings and educational efficacy of "grit" as popularized in the studies and writings of Angela Duckworth and others. Yesterday I bumped into similarly disorienting experiences with the term "no excuses". I visited ground zero of the growing [...]
How might teachers and students learn and engage in the revolution supporting global gender equality? How about this first step: what if classes around the country watched this short video of Emma (Hermione Granger) Watson addressing the UN; followed with a discussion; and gave the boys in the class (with enthusiastic support from the girls) an [...]