I have visited a LOT of schools in the last decade. It takes something special to shorten my breath, to stop me dead in my tracks, so full of wonder and questions that I just want to sit down, boil a pot of tea, and shut up and listen for a few hours or a [...]
Deep, profound cultural, political, and moral divisions. Family members split by anger and outrage. Failure of institutions. Precipitous lack of trust in government and leaders. Violence on our streets. Since the founding of the American Experiment, three times stand out as testing the social fabric that has allowed the country to grow, flourish, and test [...]
From Dumaguete City, Negros Island, Philippines Changing what we do in schools is uncomfortable, even hard sometimes, certainly complex. But as you ponder the “why, what, and how” of change at your school, in your district, or by your community, as you struggle with the inevitable discomfort and disruptions, take a look at what REALLY complex [...]
I rarely use this space to discuss themes that might be interpreted as political. If the reader interprets this post as political, they are missing the point. This post is about history, knowledge, what we do with knowledge, and the utterly unique role that education plays in that sequence. In the last week I read [...]
If you think you have it tough as a teacher, administrator, or parent... I just committed to partner with an education NGO in Bulgaria, and to keynote and workshop a conference for about 1,000 teachers, parents, and students in Sofia in November. It is a long way to go, and I am pretty sure I [...]
One of the hallmarks of deeper learning, and certainly one of the drivers of education in the future, will be a breaching of the walls between "school" and "world". Another is demonstration of understanding based on something more authentic than an essay or a test. Yesterday I saw work done by two ex-colleagues at Francis [...]
Here is what keeps me up at night: this 3D holographic learning is ALREADY a reality. How is your school or district preparing to intersect with a near-future where this is common place? If not, how can "school" be the place where students prepare for their own futures? How can we even put this kind [...]
Change is measured by the passing of time. Whether transformation is personal, organizational, social, regional, or global, change is always a measurement of "something different" on one axis, and "time" on the other. I write almost exclusively about education; I try to know my readers and most of them don't care much about my worldview [...]
How might educators save what is left of the American dream? A key lesson I tried to convey when I took students on two-week immersion experiences to the Philippines: in the developing world, most families live on the edge of functional bankruptcy every day. While starvation is rare in the Philippines due to plentiful water and [...]
What if teachers learned to teach and learners learned to learn like explorers, scientists, empaths, inventors, poets, artists, and entrepreneurs? What if we started over in our construct of education, dialed it back to pre-1850 and extracted the pedagogy of apprenticeship, experience, observation, synthesis, and practice that underlay the wondrous mind explosions of the Renaissance, [...]
