'Tis the season of graduations and graduation speakers. We attended the Stanford University graduation yesterday...always a heartwarming event to go back to The Farm and see a bunch of REALLY smart kids ready to go out and tackle some tough problems. How many times this year alone do you think we heard graduation speakers advise [...]
I have attended many educational conferences over the last 15 years. I usually walk away with one or two good ideas. Yesterday, at the end of the the Martin Institute Summer Conference, I talked to many attendees who said something like, "Enough, I am full, my head is about to explode!" This was a remarkable [...]
A remarkable day at the Martin Institute Summer Conference in Memphis, and one has to ask...why is this unique? As John Hunter asked me this afternoon, is this revolutionary? A conference of learning amongst educators, not a convention with numerous commercial sponsors and treasure spent on high-priced authors. Few chairs in rows, very little sit-and-get. [...]
The last two days I have been re-writing chapters for my book on organizational innovation in schools. We KNOW that connectivity is an absolute key to innovation; it has been since the Renaissance, in coffee shops, billard halls, or online. We also know that generally younger information age knowledge workers are more comfortable, in fact seek [...]
This video of Diana Rhoten via Edutopia really resonated with the chapters I am writing for my book from my school visits last year. In particular, the idea of "relevance" is one of the six key indicators I saw of schools that are really shifting away from the assembly line model, where relevance is almost [...]
I am writing and re-writing the section of my book that will argue, in detail, that schools are becoming learning ecosystems, not assembly lines. This is not a metaphor; ecosystems are governed by a set of laws that are very different from those that govern an efficient assembly line. Education should not act like an [...]
I have been remiss in my blog posts for several days; I am deep into writing, re-writing, and re-re-writing chapters of my book. I wrote a summary of my chapter on leadership, and though I am not a "cookbook" kind of person, I do believe the following to be true: When it comes to paradigm-level [...]
According to one large vendor in the room, "Poway is in the leading 1% of districts nationwide who are looking at this." According to several others, "90% of the bits and pieces are there; no one has put it all together." According to almost all the vendors, "We can't make this kind of investment with [...]
I came up with a set of professional goals before I graduated college, and they have never left me: work with smart people to tackle difficult problems, create elegant solutions, for something of value. This week has been another link in that chain! All this week I have been able to sit in with a dynamic team [...]
What if we named a public school "We Imagine" or "We Change the World"? I am working informally with a crack team at the large Poway Unified School District on two tracks: program design for a new K-8 to open in 2014, and an adaptive learning model to be piloted at the new school and [...]