Late last week I was able to join a Twitter conversation with three great educators, Bo Adams, Laura Deisley, and Jill Gough about the nature and role of failure in schools. We all expressed our discomfort with how schools define, describe, and deal with failure, what an aberration it is from how success and failure [...]
Catching up on great blogs and reads over the weekend. Here are links about innovation, revolution, creational thinking, and customer service that all pertain to how we need to upgrade what we do tomorrow from what we are doing today: Catherine Constaninides describes a “customer-centric” environment that increases how we interact with our clients to [...]
For most of us, the downside of not asking the right questions or not organizing information in the right way is that we do poorly on a test, lose money in a business deal, have to re-work a design drawing, or take another shot at drafting that proposal. For young men and women in uniform [...]
How many speeches by graduating high school seniors have you heard in your career? Tens? Dozens? There are three varieties. One offers insight into the heart of the speaker. The second suggests that the class should go out and do wonderful things with their lives and talents. The third looks back and summarizes the yearbook [...]
I was sitting on the sofa with my 23-year old daughter over the weekend, scrolling the TV menu, and up came “Out of Africa”. I asked my daughter if she had ever seen it and she replied “Oh, yeah that’s the one about the Swedish lady who grows coffee; we watched it with you when [...]
Schools are knowledge-based organizations. We may want to change the balance of skills and content instruction, but our core business is and will always remain rooted in knowledge. We don’t make things; we make “things” (people) smarter through the management of knowledge. Two blog posts grabbed my attention over the weekend as I am working [...]
High school graduations speeches tend to all sound the same. Bless the students and guest speakers, but after sitting through 15 graduations in the last 15 years, most of the wisdom and reflections are worn out. Yesterday, Carson Scott, the valedictorian of our Francis Parker School graduating class provided two words that will stick with [...]
Yesterday I was writing a chapter of the new book dealing with innovation in schools. This singular point stuck out: Innovation is hard because it is about the future, and most predictions about the future turn out to be wrong. This creates the highest level of risk for organizations that have to commit large amounts [...]
Annie Murphy Paul posted a short commentary to a quote from Tony Wagner’s new book “Creating Innovators”. Wagner states that the millennial generation is particularly attuned to treating work as play because they have grown up in a digital world, and that they are more passionate about making a difference in the world than in [...]
Innovation Excellence let us know that Florida opens a business incubator in Gainesville, a place for people to set up shop and share ideas on getting their dreams off the ground. Why don’t we have these for education, or why don’t we, as educators send our people to hang out in these places and share [...]