This is one to share with those at your school who are responsible for long-range planning. Traditional strategic planning at schools is dead. This passing is not really news, but what will rise to replace it has been a mystery. I think we have solved that mystery. The good news is we will have a more [...]
Walmart is always looking at ways to reduce expenses, to find that fraction of a penny of cost reduction that will translate into millions of dollars of worldwide savings. They looked at how macaroni and cheese is packaged and challenged their principal suppliers to reduce the size of the cardboard box. The principal cost savings [...]
Tell me again why strategic planning takes a year, costs tens of thousands of dollars in consultant fees, and produces inside the box ideas? Another way? Read on! Yesterday I was happy to work with a group of faculty, staff, and trustees at Poughkeepsie Day School who are generating the schools updated strategic plan. On [...]
Moon-set at dawn from "my" porch. Every time I am in a new place of quiet beauty I thank God for waking early in the morning when the world is new, when the mist is still rising off the lake, two paddling loons trail V-ripple wakes across the shimmering reflection of the setting [...]
This very short post is why we can stop worrying about exactly what "it" is, that place where every great educator knows that real learning is taking place or about to take place or has the future potential to take place. This is what we work for. This from a friend who has taken her [...]
Sun Tzu says: Act after having made assessments. The one who first knows the measures of far and near wins—this is the rule of armed struggle. Yesterday I shared some of Bo Adam’s wisdom about the importance of systems in school transformation. It is so easy to check the box, to say “let’s go through [...]
Yesterday I virtually attended a talk by Bo Adams of Atlanta-based transformational design thinking firm Unboundary, hosted by the Southern Association of Independent Schools. Bo was talking about his visionary Pedagogical Master Planning template that they are starting to beta test at schools. Here are some kernels I Tweeted out during the session; most of [...]
“Flipping” a classroom is wonderful slang; as soon as we learn what it means, the image sticks. Flipping 1.0 is about having students do work outside the classroom that they can do without a teacher present to free class time for personal interaction, questions, discussion, and the kind of face-to-face help that teachers can provide. [...]
Yesterday I wrote a post prompted by comments from Bob Gallagher on the long-term goals of the Common Core Standards. I argued that CCS may be a step in the right direction, but that it is constrained to the same plane of thinking and learning that has defined the industrial age model. It is the [...]
Yesterday I found this blog post by Bob Gallagher, a retired Assistant Superintendent for Instruction, arguing that we have to give the Common Core Standards time to work, that the impatience of Americans often sacrifices long-term vision on the alter of short term results. I have never met Bob, but my bet is that he [...]