Yesterday I posed a question: who is the customer of our schools? Many of us believe the future of schools, both public and private, will depend on increasing the value proposition of a school; lacking this, “school” as we know it may be an endangered species. Here is the logic; if the logic is not [...]
Based on a Twitter discussion yesterday, here is a question that needs some pondering...I don't believe the answer is either easy or evident. Who is the school's customer? I ask this within the critical context of value, which by definition is viewed through the eyes of the customer. Several people responded that the customer is [...]
Last September I reported on my visit to the second-year Design Lab school in inner city Cleveland. (I urge you to review that post.) Principal Eric Juli and Design Lab are front and center in the introduction to the book I am writing about my trip last fall because of the long odds and [...]
Old school: "Don't ever ask a question of the audience unless you are sure of the answer." New school: "Learn to be flexible; deal with ambiguity and the unknown." I took these yesterday at a meeting for prospective parents of the new Design 39 Campus K-8 in Poway Unified, opening in 2014. (I [...]
You may already know this story; I did not and am always on the lookout for creative solutions to problems in education. Thanks to John Thorsen, Asst. Head at Asheville School for posting a query to some of his PLN about major issues facing education, I cyber-met Bill Bugg, head of Thetford Academy in Vermont. [...]
Is your organizational chart bound by the geometry of the piece of paper it is drawn on? Does your school have an org chart? Does it promote connectivity or preserve isolation? Do your employees have allegiance first to their own tribe or to the value-driven goals of the whole school? Are resources distributed within hard [...]
I just Tweeted "If more kids watched and identified with Miley Cyrus than MLK this week, then our schools are doing a bad job. How is that for an easy metric?" Girls at a local public high school were suspended last spring for twerking in a video. None had ever been punished for vastly more [...]
Independent schools often state that they have a public purpose and try to share resources with their local public schools and districts. I want to give a special shout-out to one school that really lived that part of their mission yesterday. Yesterday I organized a Skype communication between David Monaco and some of his leadership [...]
Please join me, the faculty of five independent schools, and three authoritative voices from outside the traditional mainstream of K-12 education, via Twitter feed for a unique conversation about the direction of learning in the years ahead. Next Monday, August 26, from 10:15-11:45 Pacific Time, more than 300 educators from Alverno High, Mayfield Senior, St. [...]
If we truly believe that all educators can and should be leaders, we need to develop those skills that bake “leadership ownership” into the dough of the whole organization. In my ongoing work with the leadership team at Pacific Ridge School, we got to do just that today, while testing some new tools I have [...]