More than a year ago, Keith Evans, Head of Collegiate School in Richmond, and one of the brightest, most forward-thinking educators I know, sent me a list of about five metrics that he had created (yes, a bit tongue-in-cheek) to measure true effectiveness of his school. I added to the list. I swear I cannot [...]
About 25 years ago a very wise mentor gave me a piece of timeless advice: always pick the path that provides the greatest number of options. To this day I cannot recall a single instance where it has failed the test of hindsight. I remember telling my own children that the reason prison or jail [...]
Most of my readers live in the U.S., but some do not. Regardless of nationality, remembering those who have sacrificed their lives in service of their country, as Americans do on Memorial Day, is something we share across borders and time. This weekend we remember. On these days we don’t argue about the value of [...]
What does real innovation look like in schools and how do we know we are not just stirring up a bunch of cool, but unrealistic, new ideas? Rita Gunther McGrath, responding to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, admonishes us that lots of companies talk about their focus on innovation but empirical data suggest [...]
In yesterday’s Boston Globe online Mary Carmichael summarizes a new report being released by think tank Ithaka S+R that shows little, if any, difference in learning outcomes between online and face-to-face instruction in higher education. She provides quotes by James McCarthy of Suffolk University, Brit Kirwan, Chancellor of the University of Maryland system, Michael Horn [...]
We might refer to the last 20 or 30 years in independent school management as the Era of Strategic Planning. Schools recognized during this time that they were businesses, not mom-and-pop start-ups or old boy clubs. Businesses need to plan for the future, not just believe in it. We learned to do five-year look-aheads according [...]
THE argument of our time in education may be that of content vs context. Every time I talk to a group of faculty, there are those who want to switch off and dive back into their love of the content-rich familiar. Then there are those who pull the other way, like in this thoughtful blog [...]
Education is in need of evolutionary game-changes. There are two important aspects to that simple statement. First, we need evolution, not revolution. Our foundations and traditions are strong, so we don’t need to blow up the walls. What we think of as revolution due to fear of the unknown will present as evolution once we [...]
We have all used the expression “thinking outside of the box”. What do we really mean, how far are we willing to go, how hard are we willing to work, how disruptive are we willing to be, and how much are we willing to change to actually think outside the box? Picture a bridge; on [...]
One of my key areas of focus in the next year is the financial implication of innovation in our schools. Relative to even two years ago, there is an enormous agreement to the proposition that rapid global changes really do require schools to adopt a vastly more innovative approach, or risk irrelevancy. Actual implementation of [...]