This will be a somewhat abbreviated post, not because The School at Columbia University has little to report, but because it has become a well-known stop on school tours of the northeast and many of you know their story. I spent an hour and a half with Don Buckley, Director of Technology and Innovation and [...]
Big discussions can lead to big changes, not necessarily in rapid-fire fashion, but at a more comfortable pace. This post is about a school that saw the need for big discussions, had the leadership and courage to enter the arena, and has created some profound ripple-on effects. A dam broke, not only freeing up time [...]
Teaching context, the weaving together of content, is more powerful than teaching content alone. But teaching context to our students allows them to understand that one set of contextual relationships. Teaching them the skills of how to acquire context allows them to develop context on their own for the rest of their lives. This is [...]
Some organizations innovate because someone comes up with a brilliant idea. Some innovate because they are facing existential risk and failure to do so means closing the doors. At the venerable Marymount School just off Central Park in New York City, a wave of intentional and highly successful innovation started with a problem: “no space”. [...]
This won’t be my longest post, but it will be rich in very specific details about how an old, highly respected prep school on the Upper East Side, arguably the Gold Coast of independent education, is changing what K-12 education looks like. It is not radical, but 10 years from now, learning at The Dalton [...]
On this journey I want to visit schools of all kinds to find out what innovation means, and how it is, or is not, taking root. Today’s post is about a school with more than 200 years of tradition, history, and success at fulfilling their mission. Why would a school like that worry about innovation? [...]
I made an unscheduled visit to St. Andrew’s Episcopal in Middletown, DE this week. A colleague of a colleague Tweet messaged me in the morning to see if I could come down from Philly. Think about that: someone I had never met face-to-face got ahold of me via a pathway I did not have until [...]
I made it to the Atlantic. Top Ten Pieces of Advice for Anyone Else Thinking of Leaving Home for 12 Weeks to Drive All Over and Stay in Cheap Hotels and Eat Bad Restaurant Food: Don’t; you must be crazy Sometimes crazy is what needs to be done Don’t really need more Things I Find [...]
The existential issue in education of our time, particularly in the public sector, is the tension between teaching to the test and teaching for the skills that students will actually need in their futures. It is unlikely that I will see that issue playing out any more clearly on my journey, and with a good [...]
The good news is that thousands of American Educators know the story of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, and are working to incorporate much of what Principal Chris Lehman and his talented team are building there. The bad news is that leaves about a million great educators who don’t know this story and either don’t [...]