What are some key steps to ensuring that innovation takes root at your school, that it is not just a spark in the dark or checking-off-the-box on a laundry list strategic plan? In their article in Harvard Business Review (HT Bo Adams), Scott Anthony, David Duncan, and Pontus Siren of Innosight suggest a 90-day framework [...]
Is it possible for a school to make a rapid and dramatic shift away from the assembly line model of education? Is it possible in a public school setting with all of the normal demands, political pressures, and budget constraints? Is it possible in an underserved community and a traditionally underperforming school? I have been keeping [...]
Just finished #thefalconer. Pretty sure my life (& career) will never be the same. So in love with every word. Thanks, Grant! Pretty nice to come home to that Tweet from Erica DeVoe, a 9-12 teacher from Westerley, R.I. Some wonderful colleagues have told me that my first book, The Falconer: What We Wish We Had [...]
What does student ownership of learning look like? How do even young students rapidly engage when given the freedom to ask expansive questions? Do students really need to start at the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy before building to abstraction and synthesis? Do we even begin to tap the insights of students that would contribute richly [...]
What does a transformed and deeper learning experience look like, and how can schools move intentionally in that direction? Last year I was honored to co-present a session at NAIS with Bo Adams in which I focused (in a general sense) on the strategic or organizational side of this coin, and Bo focused on the [...]
At the very core of learning, I believe, is the recognition that “I” have a problem I want to solve. Lacking that, we are engaging in exercises placed upon us by some external force, exercises in which we either have no stake or do not understand the stakes. For decades I have believed that at [...]
Last year I told educators around the country that Design 39 Campus would be a destination not to be missed, and I was right. While small private schools can more easily claim the mantle of 21st century progressivism, a large public school, in the state with some of the lowest per-student funding in the country [...]
Design thinking is grabbing hold as a mainstream process for problem solving and building value in K-12 schools. A few school groups are taking it to another level: using regional or district-wide design challenges to deeply embed the skills and outcomes of long-term, sustainable design thinking into their culture and norms. Design thinking is born [...]
The classrooms look huge...but only because there is no clutter of "stuff and the minimalist furniture. "All we have to do is focus on the kids and not ourselves." That was principal Sonya Wrisley's response as I gawked at the seemingly vast amount of space that her students have in the newly-opened Design [...]
In building a design challenge for a group of public schools within the Poway Unified School District, we have defined a short list of essential guiding questions: How might we re-structure foundational elements of the traditional school model (time, space, leadership, allocation of people and budget) to increase effective differentiation of learning that will meet [...]