Julie Bragdon, Assistant Head at Montessori School of Denver sums up how she views their school: “We are a wave, not a museum”. MSD prides itself on a rich heritage of the Montessori method and culture, but also in continuing to innovate in ways that would make Maria Montessori proud. My main takeaway from my [...]
Wow, what a way to start my three-month journey. If you want to know how a school has made real progress at the process of re-inventing themselves to meet the challenges of the future, visit with the folks at Colorado Academy (CA). In this post I will try to summarize two main areas I learned [...]
Schools are in the knowledge business. We need to be in the wisdom business. Let’s find the fusion of those two. Great educators know this is true. We look back on our own lives and know that our moments of success come more from clarity and experience that lead us to make wise decisions than [...]
Thanks Bo Adams for Tweeting me a link to the Harvard Business Review Idea Cast interview with management professor and jazz musician Frank Barrett, talking about his book “Yes to the Mess”. It is a great 20-minute piece and I encourage you to listen to it. I won’t repeat all of his wonderful images and [...]
What is the nature of learning, as opposed to the nature of education? Holly Chesser, with SAIS, posted a story yesterday about a high school math student who, two weeks into the semester had already pretty much given up any future in math. She just was not grasping some foundational construct, and in math, you [...]
My Prius has not even left the driveway on this fall’s Journey of Learning, yet the lessons and links are already stacking up. After posting in the last week about a new, creative approach to systems thinking at Townview Magnet in Dallas, and some extraordinary institutional steps to promote innovation at a major east coast [...]
Do you want to know the sounds and sights of real 21C innovation? How does a school with a long tradition of success begin to shift focus in recognition that the world we have prepared our students for in the past is rapidly fading away? Here are some snippets, thanks to a conversation I had [...]
Many of us are talking about the need to shift learning in the direction of creation, rather than consumption, of knowledge. Students and teachers have the capability to create and share in ways that they never have before in human history. I have proposed that the cognitasphere includes both the body of knowledge as it [...]
The core goal of education is to prepare students for their future. This means that a radical transformation of education is inevitable and irreversible; it is only a matter of how efficiently we get there. Education can no longer give students the knowledge they need for the “present known”, or even for the “near-future known”. [...]
A year ago I trialed a method of project-based learning that incorporates a number of skills that we associate with critical collaboration, networking, and group communication skills. It strengthens student ownership of the process and the product and ensures that the students are working on problems that are meaningful to them, not just to the [...]