Want to see how a school can go from 0-60 in a short period of time? Think you have obstacles that are difficult to overcome? Read on! As my readers know, Julie Wilson invited me on to a team working with Ortiz Middle School in Santa Fe, NM, a recognized underperforming school with an extremely [...]
I have just wrapped up a week at the East Asian Regional Council of Schools conference in Malaysia. Some observations on independent schools in Asia: The economies in many or most Asian countries, combined with an extraordinary (healthy or not?) cultural obsession with academic success, has created an enormous market demand for K-12 schools. Even [...]
Perhaps the most powerful driver of traditional, standards-focused education in America is the sense that we have fallen behind many countries in student performance. In our sound-bite world, the nexus of this concern are the results of international exams of math, reading, and writing. As I have written in the past, educators for whom I have [...]
Are your teacher teams working at peak performance to help bring about school innovation and change? It's sometimes easy in the late spring or dog days of August to gather ourselves and build a vision of deep, impactful learning for our students and ourselves. Then the hard work and long days of the school year take hold [...]
I love working with students! Yes, most of my work these days is with adult educators, but I am in my personal teaching wheelhouse with high school students. So I was truly honored to be included on the list of visiting scholars in the inaugural year of the Tad Bird Honors College at All Saints' [...]
Are "no excuses" the new "grit"? Last year in this space we shared a deep dive into the evolving meanings and educational efficacy of "grit" as popularized in the studies and writings of Angela Duckworth and others. Yesterday I bumped into similarly disorienting experiences with the term "no excuses". I visited ground zero of the growing [...]
A major pitfall I find amongst schools that want to shift their learning practices is a mis-alignment of resources to a new organizational vision. Where schools get this right, innovative change is systemic and sustainable; where they fail, change is isolated, episodic, and often ephemeral. Sonoma Country Day School is a 35-year old K-8 independent school [...]
What is the difference between a "great" school and a "leading" school? Which would you like to be? Where would you choose to send your own child? How might a school be both? I spent several hours with Kim Diorio, second year principal at Palo Alto High School yesterday. Paly High is as close to being a private school [...]
In my metaphor of educator-leader as "farmer", the principal/superintendent/head of school farmer's job is to nurture and grow a strong learning organization. The teacher farmer's job is to nurture and grow strong students. This interview with Roger Martin, Dean of the Business School at the University of Toronto is a great nine minutes. Translate his [...]
As followers of this blog know, I find THE key to transforming learning is painting the picture for adult educator-leaders, and then giving them the resources to re-tool and create dynamic, flexible, adaptive, engaged learning ecosystems. We are seeing a mini-explosion of professional development events aimed at meeting this critical need. Schools and districts realize [...]