Another Novel Route to Creating a True Strategic Plan
April 28, 2018In another sign that the era of traditional five-year school strategic plans are dead, take a look at the approach led by head of school Ned Murray and this team at Episcopal Day School in Augusta, GA. It is simple, clean, and generates action items based on aspirations and big questions, rather than the backward-looking distillation…
A Powerful New Teacher “Interview”!
April 26, 2018THE shortest route to a school with powerful, sustainable innovation capacity is to hire the right people. So I was so excited that, on a short-planned visit to Design 39 Campus, they were “interviewing” a prospective new faculty hire by throwing her right into the deep end of the pool: organize a design challenge with…
Where Should School Leaders Focus?
April 23, 2018Over the weekend I got to facilitate a board meeting at The Forman School in Connecticut. In planning the session, head of school Adam Man challenged me to mold my remarks and create active learning for the trustees around four big questions. I had not thought of our challenges in exactly this way before, and…
Lego Pieces and Leading Innovation
April 22, 2018What can a 15-year-old autistic boy from Iceland teach us about leadership? Last week videos went viral of a 28-foot-long model of the Titanic, designed and built out of 65,000 Lego blocks by teenager Brynjar Karl Birgisson. It is a remarkable feat of design, engineering, three-dimensional vision, and perseverance. But what I want to dig…
Miss Porter’s School May Revolutionize the High School Operating System
April 18, 2018Inertia is one of the two biggest obstacles to change. Some “great organizations” have been great for so long that the obvious question is “why change; if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. General Motors up until 2008 would have fit into this category. So would companies like Kodak, Pan American Airways, and Lehman Brothers. …
Upcoming Sandbox: The Human Side of School Change
April 6, 2018Transforming schools is about changing mindsets and cultures; it is a very human-centered process. My close colleague, Julie Wilson is launching her new book next month, and we have her as Guest Rock Star in The Sandbox this coming Tuesday, 4/10 at 7 PM ET. She will share keys from her book, and we will…
A Very Worthwhile Hour of Powerful Learning
April 5, 2018Most of you don’t have many spare hours, or maybe you do, but only when you are driving somewhere or on a plane. Fine; here is a great way to spend that hour. It is a podcast that is not about the nuts and bolts of education, but here are a few reasons why you…
Teacher Walk-outs Are the Result of Choices We Make
April 2, 2018We all must live with the choices we make. This is what we teach our kids, and we, the adults, should live our message. Today’s walk-out by teachers in Oklahoma is about choices, not money. One could make the argument that in a state like West Virginia, where the economy has been in decline for…
Five Drivers of Effective Strategic Thinking for Schools
March 22, 2018I have an upcoming meeting with members of a school board to help them understand how strategic planning is evolving. There is so much to talk about, but I wanted to lay a foundation, so I challenged myself to put together about a ten slide, ten minute summary of what I think schools are doing…
How Will Our Ideas and Practices Evolve?
March 20, 2018Education is a mirror of societal interactions. For millennia, knowledge and information have been vastly more “push” than “pull”. The big ideas of a few rulers, politicians, philosophers, celebrities, scientists, artists, authors, and the like have molded the evolution of human thought and action. In logarithmic terms, the 10 have led the 100,000, or perhaps…
The Learning Opportunities of Walkout
March 15, 2018The Walkout on school and gun violence yesterday was not political. It was a profound opportunity for learning. I deeply applaud every school leader who, regardless of opinions about gun ownership and the sources of violence in our country, both encouraged and allowed students to take advantage of this opportunity. Some school leaders did not,…
MIT Study: People Spread False News MUCH Faster Than Real News
March 13, 2018While we may differ on the best definition of the role of education, most of use probably agree that providing students the tools to seek truth during their lives is an important part of the mission of education. So, what do we do when falsity is winning the battle? A new study by three MIT…
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