Many of us have been struggling over how to teach our students, and ourselves, about a new world of widespread fake news. I have argued that the skills of filtering real and fake news must become a large element of what we call "literacy", every bit as important, and perhaps more so, than our traditional [...]
I apologize for largely ignoring by blogging duties for the last month or more. I have been nose-down in a semi-final draft of my new book, which is on schedule to be published by Jossey-Bass in September. Now that is turned in, I will try to be a more regular writer in this space! Next [...]
If you walk around schools, if you ask the right questions, if you stop and listen to teachers and students, if you look at how spaces are arranged and used, you can tell a lot about a school in a short period of time. I am in freezing Columbus, OH for the NCAA volleyball Final [...]
In October I was honored to participate in An Evening of Inquiry, Innovation, and Impact at Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta. Thanks to Mt. Vernon Institute of Innovation for hosting this intimate conversation-in-the-round, and to my co-presenters on the evening, Kawai Lai, Glen Whitman, Kaleb Rashad, Tod Martin, and Joyelle Harris. Feel free to [...]
And people wondered why the low income school with the mascot of a big wave with fists had a lot of trouble with fighting during recess... The new mascot is the green sea turtle that live in the shallow, southernmost reaches of San Diego Bay just a few steps from the newly renamed and rebranded Bayside [...]
If we can point to a moment when educators finally realized that the world was changing so dramatically that we had to take notice, it was within a year or so of the publication of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. Friedman has a remarkable ability to take something complex that many of us know to [...]
In the earliest phase of work with each school with which I engage, I ask the site leader (principal, head of school, superintendent) to come up with a set of "boundary conditions" that will guide and govern a process of expansive strategic design. Boundary conditions set out both the limits and expectations of a project. They [...]
Col. Francis Parker, a contemporary of John Dewey, said that the primary role of education was to instill in students the skills necessary for them to fulfill their roles as democratic citizens. If the events of the last year have taught us anything it is that these skills, and how they are exercised, are being [...]
One of the hallmarks of deeper learning, and certainly one of the drivers of education in the future, will be a breaching of the walls between "school" and "world". Another is demonstration of understanding based on something more authentic than an essay or a test. Yesterday I saw work done by two ex-colleagues at Francis [...]
Regardless of your politics, there is no question that the elections last week were revolutionary, and the potential impacts widespread. It is way too soon, with such volatility, to know for sure what those impacts will be for schools, communities, or individuals who comprise those communities. But if there ever was a time to make [...]