Julie Bragdon, Assistant Head at Montessori School of Denver sums up how she views their school: “We are a wave, not a museum”. MSD prides itself on a rich heritage of the Montessori method and culture, but also in continuing to innovate in ways that would make Maria Montessori proud. My main takeaway from my [...]
Wow, what a way to start my three-month journey. If you want to know how a school has made real progress at the process of re-inventing themselves to meet the challenges of the future, visit with the folks at Colorado Academy (CA). In this post I will try to summarize two main areas I learned [...]
Day 2: Crossing Utah and Colorado There will be a learning lesson here, but first please permit me a Sabbath reflection. Sunrise, five miles west of Salina, open road but for a few early morning long-haul truckers, bottom land rich in ripe alfalfa bounded by rising buttes of banded red and white, Neil Young “Helpless” [...]
Day 1; Richfield, UT From a very experienced science teacher, old school, but passionate about his students, as he wished me a safe journey yesterday: “Get out there. We won’t know what we need to do unless we know what is possible”. Thanks, Dave! If you feel cramped in classrooms, cubicles, or just [...]
LOOK AHEAD: Visits during week of September 10 Denver: Colorado Academy, Denver Montessori, St. Anne’s Episcopal, Denver Green School Kansas City: Barstow, Pembroke Hill The nature of comfort and risk are skewed to our life experience. I try, utterly unsuccessfully of course, to empathize with those who have experienced war, devastating personal loss, or just [...]
T-minus three days! As you know, over the next three months I will be meeting with hundreds of educators at more than 50 leading independent, charter, and public schools around the country, each with a unique story to tell about how they are evolving their organizations to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world. [...]
What is the nature of learning, as opposed to the nature of education? Holly Chesser, with SAIS, posted a story yesterday about a high school math student who, two weeks into the semester had already pretty much given up any future in math. She just was not grasping some foundational construct, and in math, you [...]
One school started the new academic year with back-to-school faculty professional growth day yesterday, and there is a good chance this school will never be the same. When Josie Holford, (@JosieHolford) head of K-12 Poughkeepsie Day School shot me an email two days ago about this, I could see a dense web of critical leadership [...]
My Prius has not even left the driveway on this fall’s Journey of Learning, yet the lessons and links are already stacking up. After posting in the last week about a new, creative approach to systems thinking at Townview Magnet in Dallas, and some extraordinary institutional steps to promote innovation at a major east coast [...]
Do you want to know the sounds and sights of real 21C innovation? How does a school with a long tradition of success begin to shift focus in recognition that the world we have prepared our students for in the past is rapidly fading away? Here are some snippets, thanks to a conversation I had [...]