Yesterday I published what I think is my most important contribution in the last year since #EdJourney hit the shelves. It is a short article that was chosen to launch a new collaboration, Transforming Teaching, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education by Prof. Jal Mehta and his team. In Rebuilding the K-12 Operating System I outline [...]
What if teachers had access to a "commodities market" of time? Last week at the Hun School in Princeton we were prototyping some bold new experiential learning units, challenging the traditional boundaries of time, space, and subject. As almost always happens given this opportunity to expand our thinking, we ran up against the barrier of time [...]
The start of a school year is always a time to re-energize, but at four schools I worked with in the last week or so I think it was more than that. It was a time to focus on how we as educators want to change our practice in order to help our students prepare [...]
One year ago this week teaching and learning at the underserved, underperforming Ortiz Middle School in Santa Fe, NM was pretty much what you would expect: students lining up quietly in the hallways; sitting quietly in rows and pods of desks; completing worksheets; raising hands one at a time to answer questions or read a [...]
Stop. Don’t waste another Back To School Night, a rare opportunity when you have many or most of your parents and all of your teachers on campus, a large, diverse swath of community stakeholders. Traditionally we shuffle people as fast as we can from room to room so teachers can hand out sheaves of paper that they [...]
The myth of Pandora's Box tells us that we can unwittingly unleash terrible and unexpected things into the world through rash action. Might we re-construct this metaphor just a bit for the future of K-12 schools? "Terrible" and "unexpected" are two very different categories. We should not be afraid of the unexpected. The world changes [...]
After a day of workshopping this week, a teacher gave me some honest feedback. “You need to be more clear on the questions you ask. It wasn’t really clear what you wanted us to do or what you were looking for.” After thanking the teacher for this honest and helpful feedback, another teacher at the [...]
I can only wish I had the chops to have written Building School 2.0: How to Create the Schools We Need. I read a lot of books, many on the current state and future of K-12 education, best practices of organizational change and innovation, and the nature of creative individuals and organizations. I don’t recommend [...]
In his latest article in Salon, big edu-thinker and always provocative Alfie Kohn takes on one of the icons of K-12 learning, Carol Dweck and her catechism of "growth mindset". As I tweeted, I would pay good money to attend a debate between these two! My thoughts are not at their level of theory, but more like [...]
Yesterday I tweeted “Innovation is limited by minds, not $$”. I am in Houston to work for a day with a highly respected independent school. In response to that, a Twitter colleague suggested that innovation is easy for those with money and not for those less well funded. Both historical and current evidence supports my sense of what [...]