In the last two days, I have had the honor and joy to deeply engage with more than 60 colleagues from across the US and New Zealand, all from my home desk, for free. That's nothing new for me; I am not tied down at a school. But here is what is new: so did they. How [...]
What is the value of a school? What will it be in the future, for your school? Are we anywhere in the ballpark on this discussion? We should always pay attention to ideas at the margins of our own experience; this helps keep confirmation bias in check and brings fresh DNA into the pool of [...]
I teared up watching 3-star Air Force General Jay Silveria speak to the entire Air Force Academy yesterday, praying that we find and elect THIS kind of leader to our political system. But more so, I found myself wondering how powerfully educators could heal the widening divisions in the American and global social fabric if we ALL [...]
One of the most common through-going themes of deeper learning schools is a marked increase in project-based work. One of our best resources for training and implementation of PBL is the Buck Institute. I was happy to contribute my observations to their blog this week with three lessons I have learned from visiting so many [...]
I'm pretty good at distilling, summarizing, synthesizing, and then sharing; it is what I do best for my fellow educators. I certainly don't arrive at big ideas by myself. Most are the products of interactions with "others", which stew for some time in my mental crock pot before they are ready for consumption. I am stumped [...]
It is a pretty fair estimate that 7,000-10,000 American educators participate in at least one education Twitter chat each month of the school year. I also asked the EdCamp foundation to estimate about how many American educators attended at least one of these day-long events in the last year. Their best estimate is in the range [...]
Simply: welcome to the end of the Twitter Chat Era for educators, and the start of the Sandbox Era! Twitter has been educators' most powerful tool for professional collaboration for at least the last five years. It is quick, efficient, free, we can access it whenever we want, and millions of us have joined to [...]
This week in New Orleans, I once again have the honor of co-presenting with John Gulla, Executive Director of the EE Ford Foundation. Between us we have visited and worked with something like 400+ schools over the last five years. This will be the fourth time that John and I have shared our thoughts about [...]
Claire Amos is a leading educator and visionary in New Zealand; she has been one of the key founders of Hobsonville Point Secondary School, about which I have written and shared extensively. Now Claire is launching newly designed City Senior School at the Launching Pad, and rather than me re-drawing the picture, just read her blog [...]
I don't pretend to be an expert on competency-based education (CBE), but I know two things about it: there is a lot of discussion about how to build CBE into our schools, and there is a lot of dissonance about what actually constitutes effective CBE. Thanks to Kim Carter, a long-time guru in developing CBE [...]
