According to one large vendor in the room, "Poway is in the leading 1% of districts nationwide who are looking at this." According to several others, "90% of the bits and pieces are there; no one has put it all together." According to almost all the vendors, "We can't make this kind of investment with [...]
What if we named a public school "We Imagine" or "We Change the World"? I am working informally with a crack team at the large Poway Unified School District on two tracks: program design for a new K-8 to open in 2014, and an adaptive learning model to be piloted at the new school and [...]
A month or so ago I had my feet up thinking of draft language for a new vision statement for The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence. The broad mission of the Martin is professional development for educators, which is really just about learning. The challenges to how we will learn in a rapidly changing [...]
I think I just made up a new term: "missioning". It is the activity of bringing your organization's mission to life. This spring I have been focusing with school leaders on the relationship between three critical aspects of institutional sustainability: vision, systems, and value. Creating a vision is actually pretty easy. Developing systems-wide alignment between [...]
This is the future. No platform exists. Blank slate. Smart people. Tough task. Big, worthwhile goals. “Let’s build it”. I love it! Yesterday I got to spend three hours with a tremendous team at Poway (Ca) Unified School District imagining the future of differentiated and adaptive learning systems. Poway is a 35,000-student district, and visionary [...]
One of the reasons I agreed to work closely with The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence in the future is that they really know how to swing a bat. And here is a great example. The Martin and Presbyterian Day School have agreed to bring the widely-acclaimed Project Zero of Harvard, in conjunction with the Center [...]
As many of you know, I formally resigned my position at Francis Parker School this spring after almost a decade and a half in a variety of leadership positions. I hope to continue my association with Parker, which my great aunt and uncle founded 100 years ago, in informal ways. For now, and following on [...]
A couple of days ago friends at Parish Episcopal School in Dallas reached out with an interesting request. For a publication this summer they were looking for short expressions of what their school, and somewhat by definition, schools in general, will look like in 40 years. This is what I jotted down for them. In [...]
Unlike NFL championships, defense does not win in innovative environments. It just does not. Over time, offense wins. Education is undergoing dramatic evolution via innovation, possibly even mutation, in the words of Shoshona Zuboff and Jim Maxmin, where mutation is an evolution well outside the conventional frame. Defense is not a strategy against mutation.Defensive strategies [...]
Two days ago I wrote a post about how zero-based strategic thinking will replace our outdated model of long-range strategic planning. As promised I will offer my view of what forms that zero base for any school. A zero-based approach tests every assumption against the absolute core of the mission. This approach is critical at [...]