For most of you who follow my blog, the conversation I had with Don Wettrick and Hunter Stone yesterday will likely be old hat. That is because you are on the leading edge! Perhaps there are others at your school who are now ready to transform to a deeper learning system...so share! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLONWfgbDaE Don and Hunter [...]
A thoughtful colleague at one of my client schools (anonymous now but not for long) wants to create a "portrait of a teacher" for and with her faculty. It is a great challenge: we need to know what we are aiming for if we want to hit it. She sent me some proposed questions for [...]
The way Bo Adams tells it, a couple of weeks ago they had a large group of visitors touring the iDiploma Hive at Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School, meeting with one of the student cohorts who are working in teams on various self-selected, long-term design and development projects. A cell phone range and one of the [...]
I have spent less time in early childhood pre-schools than at higher age and grade levels, so it was a treat to learn from Erin Carey at the pre-school division of Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta. What I saw was not only a huge leap beyond the color-and-paste days of my own pre-school days; [...]
In this turbulent and historic election season, how might we engage students in the process as a great learning experience? Stanford University is offering a course this fall that brings together a pantheon of experts on the political process to digest and discuss, in panel format and through seven sessions, the election. It is all [...]
Pizza always helps thinking! What is your school's aiming point? What do you want for your school in the future? Have you had this discussion? Does your community know what the words you use actually mean? If not, how can you aim at, and intersect, a distant target? Many schools use words like [...]
I rarely if ever endorse a product, but I am finding a number of us switching to Zoom from Skype for video chats. I don't know why, but the quality of the experience, in terms of both clarity of the video feed and vastly fewer glitches and freeze-ups, is much better with Zoom. You can have [...]
What does it mean to be a great school? If you work at a school that is not struggling to survive, there is a good chance that the message you and your colleagues, perhaps even your parent community, tries to communicate, is "we are a great school". There is nothing wrong with that; we should [...]
A tidbit from the last chapter of my upcoming book: The great news is that education does not need to remain stuck in the past. There are many, many examples of individuals, schools, and districts that have found ways to push past the crippling inertia that has imprisoned so many others in a system that [...]
Some advice i just gave to some school colleagues as we launch a one-year design project: Friends, You are about to launch on what will be a 9-month to one-year design project. For some of you this approach is unusual; for others completely foreign. I want to give you some critical advice at the outset. [...]