While private and charter schools may provide many of the flexible proving grounds for the brushfires of innovation, traditional public schools, which at least for now represent 90% of education in America, will be the field on which we succeed or fail. So it was great to meet up via phone yesterday with teacher Don [...]
Frequent visitors to this space will know and not be surprised that I am honored to find that educational thought leader Bo Adams and I think a lot alike. His beautiful piece a week or so ago about schools as natural habitats is just another example. Bo likens the common school experience to a zoo, [...]
If you or your school is struggling (and struggle is good and essential!) with what transformative learning innovation looks like, with painting that picture of where you want to go, well, here is a big freebie brush via Glenn Whitman, Director of the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School. Those [...]
Starting to affinity map key learning from the trip. The trip is over; now the hard work starts. I have started to synthesize binders full of notes, hours of video interviews, and weeks of reflections from long solo drives. During the trip I kept several main logs, and those will be key to [...]
As some of you will recall, I have blogged about and visited with Aaron Baldridge, the young AP Environmental Science teacher who created a class for seniors at the highly ranked Townview Center STEM magnet school in Dallas. Aaron has started putting out results from the course via his blog, and I encourage you to [...]
How is this for a glass-half full view of life: one of the benefits of flying to Europe in crowded coach class at the holidays is that jet lag leaves you lying awake the next night, plenty of time and space for thinking. Here are three such thoughts that specific school leaders solicited from me [...]
Many of you have followed along on my trip around the country, and it would not have been as well articulated without the weekly video catch-ups with Bo Adams of Unboundary along the way. We did the final episode last Friday, unfortunately just as the news from Newton was coming out. But after a moment [...]
I am catching up on my blog reading, and Peter Gow's observations about a middle school class discussion really resonated with me from my own many school observations on the road trip. Peter says that the discussion was ridiculously high level, and yet many of the trappings of "21C" were not present; it was just [...]
Mark Crotty is Head at St. John’s Episcopal School in Dallas, another great school that I just did not have time to visit on my recently concluded national tour. He has been kind enough to follow via my blog, and over Thanksgiving posted on his own blog some of the questions that my reporting raised. [...]
A journey is about what we learn, both intentionally and by being open. Thanks in large part to the incredible support I received from all of you who have followed and shared this journey, I had the enthusiasm to write up most of those intentional lessons. But I have kept track of some of those [...]