I just added two very important slides to my deck, or arrows in my quiver. Last weekend at a Unity Church service we attended with friends in Santa Fe, the minister selected two quotes which hold both personal power and a real message for educators. The Tao te Ching tells us: "To attain knowledge, add [...]
As promised, I made a short, very informal video of my visit with Hobsonville Point Secondary School in New Zealand. I wrote about HPSS last week with the comment that they are really an exemplar of what high schools can and might look like in the future. If you are interested in space, architecture, and [...]
This is HUGE for these kids. Ortiz Middle School (#ortizms) is a traditionally poorly performing school in Santa Fe, NM with almost 100% underserved students. Exactly one year ago, the overwhelmingly predominant learning style was "sit and get"; students lacked engagement and enthusiasm; they politely did their worksheets and listened to their teachers. The teachers decided to take [...]
Last week in New Zealand I visited a high school that may well be the exemplar for global high schools of the future. Hobsonville Point Secondary School (HPSS) on the outskirts of Auckland is just two years old, and only has about 20% of its build-out student population. It has been designed, physically and pedagogically to break [...]
I was honored last week to give the opening keynote address to more than 1,800 primary and secondary educators from across New Zealand and other regional nations. I hope you will get past the short self-introduction in Maori language. The audience was wonderful, enthusiastic, and obviously eager to share, and lead, a transformation to deeper [...]
This is what PD should look all the time! We had some very active, noisy, collaborative workshops at ULearnNZ this week...and then there was the best conference workshop I have ever contributed to, and possibly attended. Students from Hobsonville Point Secondary School gave up a day of vacation per the request of my co-presenters, Steve [...]
The Convergence Center for Policy Resolution has published a major white paper that will help build gravity around the push to transform K-12 education. Convergence has asked me, and many others, to act as ambassadors of this effort, and since I am on vacation, I am going to borrow heavily from their media guide. I [...]
How might we integrate innovation practices across our school culture, breaking down myopic silos of "that's not my job"? This is one of the true challenges of innovation in any organization, and particularly in schools where teachers, administrators, students, and parents frequently and strongly identify with their respective "tribe" more than with an organizational imperative. At [...]
I received both strong support for, and passionate pushback to, my article last week, "Re-building the K-12 Operating System" that was selected to kick off the Transforming Teaching series organized by Jal Mehta, Tyler Thigpen, and others at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Specifically, I had immediate responses on Twitter from Ilana Horn, a [...]
For two years I have been collecting notes from blogs, books, school observations, and more discussions with more educator colleagues that I can remember or cite. I keep hearing many of the same ideas about how to transform the factory model classroom into a deeper learning experience more relevant and attuned to the future needs [...]