As individuals and as schools, do we want to be successful or significant? Great or leading? What are common elements of the disruptions and mutations facing both K-12 and higher education? I was honored to share the stage with Dr. John Fry, president of Drexel University at the annual meeting of trustees and heads of [...]
Last year I wrote an article for ISTE's magazine "Learning and Leading With Technology"; it argued that technology was not a goal but a tool, like arrows for an archer, and gave a number of examples from my many school visits. ISTE reposted it yesterday, so if you missed it, here it is!
What are some signals that your school is becoming more powerful, comfortable, and capable of innovation? What are some signals that perhaps you are not? One of the benefits/privileges of NOT working at one school is that I get to observe and synthesize what I see at many schools. Here are a few measures of [...]
Want to see how a school can go from 0-60 in a short period of time? Think you have obstacles that are difficult to overcome? Read on! As my readers know, Julie Wilson invited me on to a team working with Ortiz Middle School in Santa Fe, NM, a recognized underperforming school with an extremely [...]
I have just wrapped up a week at the East Asian Regional Council of Schools conference in Malaysia. Some observations on independent schools in Asia: The economies in many or most Asian countries, combined with an extraordinary (healthy or not?) cultural obsession with academic success, has created an enormous market demand for K-12 schools. Even [...]
What does a transformed and deeper learning experience look like, and how can schools move intentionally in that direction? Last year I was honored to co-present a session at NAIS with Bo Adams in which I focused (in a general sense) on the strategic or organizational side of this coin, and Bo focused on the [...]
If you are an educator interested in re-shaping the world of K-12 learning to prepare our students for the future, there are a few folks you just HAVE to follow, and one is Pam Moran. She does not blog often, but when she does, the posts are rich in both examples and links. Pam and [...]
In a very busy couple of months, I am seeing sharp lines between the way I "teach" and the methods of, perhaps, more traditional instruction, be it with children or adults. The lines grow brighter as I get to observe in classrooms and workshops. One element keeps popping up: why do you, the teacher, have [...]
Perhaps the most powerful driver of traditional, standards-focused education in America is the sense that we have fallen behind many countries in student performance. In our sound-bite world, the nexus of this concern are the results of international exams of math, reading, and writing. As I have written in the past, educators for whom I have [...]
Are your teacher teams working at peak performance to help bring about school innovation and change? It's sometimes easy in the late spring or dog days of August to gather ourselves and build a vision of deep, impactful learning for our students and ourselves. Then the hard work and long days of the school year take hold [...]