High school students gather in cross-grade teams to ideate ways to advance one of four big themes for the future. Strategic plans should reflect the vision of a school community. Most do not. Most plans are the result of relatively shallow input from some school stakeholders, followed by a rapid synthesis by a [...]
Most educators who read my blog or follow me on Twitter are already in the "deeper learning" choir. You believe that learning should be increasing student-centric; inquiry, project, and thematically-based; incorporating creativity and design more than recitation and regurgitation. Some educators need to re-tool their skills to shift classroom practice to "get there". I don't [...]
I absolutely could not give the rationale nor tell the story of school transformation better than Tim Quinn and Liz Schmitt of Miss Porter's School on this podcast with Peter Baron and Hans Mundahl of Enrollment Management Association. I was honored to be able to help guide MPS over the last year as they began to [...]
Happy start of summer! In the past 10 days, I have worked with superintendents from north-central New York, stretched in a 3,000-strong yoga jam with Michael Franti at Redrocks, hauled myself up and down the Colorado front range, intersected with 130 forward leaning educators to kick off the annual Traverse gathering in Boulder, and prototyped [...]
THE 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 [...]
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 [...]
Most of the schools I get to work closely with have already started along an arc of transformation from the old, rigid, teacher-centric model to something that approaches deeper learning. Most have crossed the mental Rubicon, at least at the leadership level, that standing still is not an option. The task of these communities is to broaden [...]
You can watch the video below from Iolani School in Hawaii, and in the first 30 seconds your response might be: We are not a wealthy private school. We don't get to hand pick our students. We don't have millions of dollars for this kind of facility. We don't have alumni like Apple guru Guy [...]
Many of us have been struggling over how to teach our students, and ourselves, about a new world of widespread fake news. I have argued that the skills of filtering real and fake news must become a large element of what we call "literacy", every bit as important, and perhaps more so, than our traditional [...]
I apologize for largely ignoring by blogging duties for the last month or more. I have been nose-down in a semi-final draft of my new book, which is on schedule to be published by Jossey-Bass in September. Now that is turned in, I will try to be a more regular writer in this space! Next [...]
