Does your school value students who exhibit character, grit, and leadership? Is it in your mission to develop these traits in your students? Probably, and rightly so. But as I and others have urged educators to step back and think deeply about the meaning of the word “grit”, an important article by Susan Cain, writing in [...]
The tempest that is Washington D.C. these days provides a puzzle for educators: is it an opportunity for learning, or just too fractious to even touch? What is our role in helping our students to make sense of something, when much of it does not make sense from many traditional perspectives? Are we, as educators and [...]
If you don't follow me on Twitter (what??), or missed it this morning, I posted another article on the Transcend Education site. This was a re-boot from my archives that surprised me when I read it. In 2012, Keith Evans and I came up with a list of what were then somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and definitely outside [...]
There is surely one thing that unites all educators: we are responsible for both the well-being and learning progress of our students when they are in our charge. The role that testing plays in schools has correctly become an enormous point of controversy as we question just what are we testing and what the results [...]
NOTHING is as effective in transforming schools as seeing "it" in action. I spent Monday with a visiting team of elementary school teachers from Albermarle County in Virginia as theytoured four elementary schools in Cajon Valley USD, just east of San Diego. Albermarle Supt. and national edu-leader Pam Moran sent the team out to look at [...]
Two years ago, Scott Looney, head of the Hawken School in Cleveland, told me about an idea they had to dramatically enhance high school student assessment and how that might revolutionize the outdated drivers of college admissions. He asked if I thought it would attract support from like-minded school leaders. I told him, simply, "get the first ten schools [...]
What is the point at which people are not willing to look beyond the horizon? Next week at the annual NAIS conference (#NAISAC), John Gulla and are are giving a three-hour workshop with the primary goal of pushing education leaders' thinking beyond their current horizons. We will have between 85-100 leaders from something like 60 [...]
The pictures of water exploding through the eroding spillway of Oroville Dam is an opportunity for us to think about the nature of time, and the inevitable forces that control our collective destinies. It is a chance to back away for a moment of learning from the human-centric view of our world that governs most [...]
Keep an eye on Vista Unified School District in California. You may want to add it to your list of visits for your teachers and administrators to see how learning is dramatically changing, even in schools with very significant challenges. I have written extensively about Vista Innovation and Design Academy, and the dramatic positive changes [...]
I work with schools and districts that are in the early stages of transforming to a range of deeper learning models. My thinking on something has been a little bit stuck. How might a school or district, early in the transformation from a traditional to a deeper learning model, self-assess their progress? In those early [...]