A month or so ago I had my feet up thinking of draft language for a new vision statement for The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence. The broad mission of the Martin is professional development for educators, which is really just about learning. The challenges to how we will learn in a rapidly changing [...]
I had to post this; one of the nicer things anyone has ever written about my work to date. It is from a long and very thoughtful blog post by Jack Hassard, a writer, former high school science teacher and Professor Emeritus of Science Education, Georgia State University. The post also includes extensive connections with Narcis [...]
This is the future. No platform exists. Blank slate. Smart people. Tough task. Big, worthwhile goals. “Let’s build it”. I love it! Yesterday I got to spend three hours with a tremendous team at Poway (Ca) Unified School District imagining the future of differentiated and adaptive learning systems. Poway is a 35,000-student district, and visionary [...]
One of the reasons I agreed to work closely with The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence in the future is that they really know how to swing a bat. And here is a great example. The Martin and Presbyterian Day School have agreed to bring the widely-acclaimed Project Zero of Harvard, in conjunction with the Center [...]
Am I a little excited/stoked by this photo? Yes! Faculty at Trinity School in Atlanta were given five book titles to choose from for their summer reading. Theme: the Art of Questioning. Not gonna disclose the other titles, but you can see a couple of them. My book, The Falconer, was selected by more than [...]
As many of you know, I formally resigned my position at Francis Parker School this spring after almost a decade and a half in a variety of leadership positions. I hope to continue my association with Parker, which my great aunt and uncle founded 100 years ago, in informal ways. For now, and following on [...]
A couple of days ago friends at Parish Episcopal School in Dallas reached out with an interesting request. For a publication this summer they were looking for short expressions of what their school, and somewhat by definition, schools in general, will look like in 40 years. This is what I jotted down for them. In [...]
Unlike NFL championships, defense does not win in innovative environments. It just does not. Over time, offense wins. Education is undergoing dramatic evolution via innovation, possibly even mutation, in the words of Shoshona Zuboff and Jim Maxmin, where mutation is an evolution well outside the conventional frame. Defense is not a strategy against mutation.Defensive strategies [...]
Today I had two comments from deep in my archive (all of a year ago) on my post about Flipping or Doubling Bloom's Taxonomy, including this from Bree Berman, an instructional coach at Flint Hill School: Your focus on the “why” as primary made me think about how teachers view their students’ motivations. Frequently I [...]
Two days ago I wrote a post about how zero-based strategic thinking will replace our outdated model of long-range strategic planning. As promised I will offer my view of what forms that zero base for any school. A zero-based approach tests every assumption against the absolute core of the mission. This approach is critical at [...]