Last week I posted Part 1 of the evolving role of a school or district admin leadership team. I want to dig deeper into this: How might we really amplify the power of this team of leaders? Think about your admin leadership team and your team meetings. Like any group within an organization, your admin [...]
What does your administration leadership team actually DO? That is not a rhetorical question. What are the actual tasks of the team that gathers around the conference room table every week or month for an hour or two? Are these meetings just an aggregation of pieces, or is there something that is greater than the [...]
I had the honor of addressing about 100 public school superintendents last week, just as we were unpacking copies of Thrive for all of them! (If you have not seen it yet, I have updated the home page of my website, where you can click a link for a free download of the Introduction). They [...]
How important is group diversity? If a group is NOT diverse, should we discount the group outcomes? How serious are we as educators about promoting diversity, and why? Adding to this discussion (this one happens to be about gender diversity only) is a study on the impact of gender diversity to group performance published in [...]
Danvers Fleurry at TalentedApp reminded me last week that behavioral change is almost always a function of courage. We don't change our personal or professional behaviors, even if we cognitively know we want to, unless we have the courage to walk over that bridge. Where do we find that courage? Major sources, and probably increasingly [...]
Education is better off when we all share as much as we can. I decided to not hold anything back in my new book, THRIVE: How Schools Will Win the Education Revolution. In addition to what I hope you will find is a wealth of ideas about how to make your school or district what [...]
Last fall I realized I had an important book contained in my work of the last 3-4 years; I just needed to write it. K-12 education is undergoing a period of rapid evolution unlike any we have seen in at least 150 years. Some schools, public and private, will rise to meet this evolutionary challenge; [...]
What does it mean for a student to go to a "college prep"-focused school today? In a provocative, well-researched, and often disturbing article in the New York Times, leading author Paul Tough takes a deep dive into the profound challenges that most colleges and universities face in balancing the desire for diversity and the reality [...]
What really drives your big, long-term school-wide decisions? In a video call yesterday with Corwin Press president Mike Soules and a group of Corwin authors, I noted that at virtually every school I have visited in depth for the last couple of years, student well-being has been at or very near the top of stakeholder goals and concerns. We [...]
Our colleague Miguel Guhlin started a good discussion on Twitter and in his blog post about so-called innovative practices in K-12. Miguel was prompted by an article by Mike Schmoker that questions if "innovations" like design thinking and makerspaces actually improve learning more than time-tested, research-proven activities. My response: Yes, and! By definition, innovation leads [...]
