What can making a fire teach us about the nature of learning? I have had an ongoing dialogue with Dr. Adrian Bejan of Duke University, one of the preeminent scholars on the science of connectivity and flow through human, organic, and inorganic systems. He recently sent me his latest article, Why Humans Build Fires Shaped the Same [...]
Here is something I bet we can all agree on: simple is almost always better than complicated. What if we could take those messy problems at our schools that always seem to circle back on us, that confound us with inertia, dead ends, and multiple stakeholder turf battles, and find some simple guidelines to sort [...]
Innovation in K12 education is about shifting our practice from a rigid, proscribed one-size-fits-all-every-year model to one that is more adaptable, flexible, and relevant to student interests and passions. As you think about the coming school year, here are two simple guides via @Edutopia to help shift your classroom practice towards a deeper learning student experience: The [...]
One of the goals I see most frequently in school strategic plans in the last half decade is an increased focus on STEM courses. The rationale is powerful: there is little debate that job opportunities in STEM fields will continue to far outpace that for students who have majored in the humanities. Recognizing, however, that creativity, perhaps [...]
What a dream come true it would be to go hang out at Pixar Studios, a place where the only real goal is to "make the product great", where they not only say that, but demonstrate it in a deep culture constantly evolving to "be great" in new, undiscovered ways? I think that dream, though, [...]
For those who don't follow me on Twitter or follow so many that it has become a waterfall, here is a link to a blog I wrote published on Edutopia today. In it I offer some specific recommendations on how schools can "gain comfort with the discomfort" of school change. In fact, we find that [...]
What would it look like if you started with an elephant and tried to turn it into a whale, piece by piece, without starting over? Imagine an artist's image of this process: first changing the right front foot into a flipper, then the tusks into a wide sheet of baleen, then the wispy little tail [...]
Group creativity and performance, what will make a school organization successful in times of challenge and change, is not driven by a few superstars. It is driven by the sum of interactions of diverse groups with time to share and build in relatively equality. Thanks to Bo Adams, my primary filter for TED talks, for [...]
Regardless of whether you work within a public or private educational system, the unsustainable rise in private K-12 and both public/private university tuition costs, is cause for serious attention. This graphic, just released by the National Association of Independent Schools highlights that: Tuition has become less affordable even for the nation's wealthiest families in the [...]
Is there, in fact, something different about the 21st Century that requires learning to evolve beyond what we have always known as timeless keys? Charles Fadel, writing under the umbrella of the Center for Curriculum Redesign (HT Bo Adams for highlighting this piece), argues that there are several such unique driving factors: increased human longevity, global [...]