If the group of presenters lined up for the Martin Institute Summer Conference (June 12-13) were a March Madness team, the opposing players would take one look, give up, and run screaming back to the locker room. In the common tongue, this team is ridiculous. And they are going to do what great educators do [...]
You don’t need to pack your Prius and drive around the country to fan brushfires of school innovation. Here was my Friday, and I never left the window seat. Click on a few of these links and you will be as excited about the future of education in America as I am! First Tweet of [...]
Here is my talk from last week at the TEDx Denver Teachers event sponsored by Colorado Academy, Denver Public Schools, and the Association of Colorado Independent Schools. I hope you enjoy it and will share. As you know, TED is not about telling everything you know, but about teeing up the big ideas. I hope [...]
How much time and treasure does your school spend on creating master plans for campus facilities, capital campaigns, marketing and communications, strategic plans, and accreditation reviews? Go ahead, count it all up. I know; I have done them all. Over a 5-10 year period it is a TON of money and focus. For most larger independent schools [...]
With all my own travel and writing, I have fallen way behind on my blog reading; I know this because I always read posts from Chris Lehman, visionary leader of Science Leadership Academy as soon as I see them. This time, Chris Thinnes beat me to it and Tweeted me this post as a “must [...]
Was it Mark Twain who said something about it being easy to write a long story and hard to write a short one? No? Somebody smart and something like that. For my first-ever TEDx talk, the strict 18-minute limit was a stern master. I worked five times harder getting the talk down to 18 minutes [...]
Three deeply intertwined strands of thought blew in through the blogosphere and Twitter feed in rapid succession yesterday. Any or all of these would make rich fodder for a faculty workshop or administration team reading. I received the links because earlier in the week I wrote a blog post “Join the Flamethrowers”, arguing that incipient [...]
If you followed my blog during the middle of February you had a chance to share in some of the remarkable learning experiences of a group of 14 high school students from Francis Parker School in San Diego on our two-week trip in the rural Philippines. My EdJourney last fall was about finding unique, innovative [...]
The conflagration grows, and I could not be happier to be amongst the flame-throwers. The questions now: how quickly will the fires catch? Will they reach the places that we densely inhabit, or die out on the prairies, largely unnoticed? Will the steady monsoon of inertia drown them out, not because monsoons have ill will [...]
I did two things last week that, just a few years ago, I could not have imagined. I spoke to a group of teachers gathered in Philadelphia, without leaving my dining room table. And they were math teachers and the subject was the Art of Questioning. Why the sense of breakthrough? First, I was lousy [...]