Do changes at your school follow any logical model? Or do things happen because some one or group have the pull or push to make them happen? Is change intentional, or do you get the sense that "we are going to throw a lot of stuff against a wall and see what sticks"? Logic models are [...]
THE most critical element on the path to school innovation is to align precious resources with a forward leaning vision. If your school recognizes the need for innovation, for changing the assembly line model of learning, it is NOT enough to just talk about it. Sooner or later your customers will realize the disconnect between [...]
This is what PD should look all the time! We had some very active, noisy, collaborative workshops at ULearnNZ this week...and then there was the best conference workshop I have ever contributed to, and possibly attended. Students from Hobsonville Point Secondary School gave up a day of vacation per the request of my co-presenters, Steve [...]
How might we integrate innovation practices across our school culture, breaking down myopic silos of "that's not my job"? This is one of the true challenges of innovation in any organization, and particularly in schools where teachers, administrators, students, and parents frequently and strongly identify with their respective "tribe" more than with an organizational imperative. At [...]
What if teachers had access to a "commodities market" of time? Last week at the Hun School in Princeton we were prototyping some bold new experiential learning units, challenging the traditional boundaries of time, space, and subject. As almost always happens given this opportunity to expand our thinking, we ran up against the barrier of time [...]
Stop. Don’t waste another Back To School Night, a rare opportunity when you have many or most of your parents and all of your teachers on campus, a large, diverse swath of community stakeholders. Traditionally we shuffle people as fast as we can from room to room so teachers can hand out sheaves of paper that they [...]
What a dream come true it would be to go hang out at Pixar Studios, a place where the only real goal is to "make the product great", where they not only say that, but demonstrate it in a deep culture constantly evolving to "be great" in new, undiscovered ways? I think that dream, though, [...]
Our schools are built around a quantum packet, a "box", formed with rigid sides that assume learning takes place in a confined physical space, during a defined period of time, along subject-based thought lines, via the transfer of knowledge from a teacher to a group of students. The boxes move along an assembly line calibrated [...]
What is the future of libraries at schools? Does the word "library", rooted as it is in the concept of books as the primary transactional medium of knowledge, limit our imagination? Rather than a space where we store books and study quietly, might we evolve a place to imagine, dream, create, manage, and share knowledge across [...]
How might we engage community stakeholders more deeply in what happens at school? It is a critical question regardless of where your community lies on social and economic curves. Take this short story I heard this week and translate it into something powerful for your school. We visited Vista Innovation and Design Academy this week. Last [...]