Are there still stakeholders in your community, perhaps fearful parents or reluctant faculty members, who don't understand why schools need to change? Here are some tools for you. In my upcoming new book (which is out for peer review and feedback right now), I explore both what is inevitable in the transformation of education in the [...]
In an industrial-age system of education known for rigidity, there is nothing that screams “one-size-fits-all” more than the box of clean, new, un-scuffed, tightly-bound, inky-smelling textbooks that arrives in a teacher’s room once every five or six years, accompanied by an instruction manual about how to efficiently transfer the information in those boxes to groups [...]
Transformational technologies — from the wheel to the printing press, steam energy, the telephone, radio, air travel, television, personal computing, and the internet — have never been just about changing how we “do” the mechanics of our lives. Truly transformational technologies allow us to fundamentally re-imagine our relationship to the world around us. In a [...]
The great transformation in which education is engaged in the first quarter of this 21st century is simply this: we are changing our focus from what we teach to how we learn. Forward leaning schools are shifting, in the words of Bo Adams, from teaching organizations to learning organizations. Perhaps most of all, we are [...]
As you start the new school year, here is another thought that should creep into the school's organizational consciousness and bug the heck out of you: Are we measuring what we really value in our students? Most teachers spend an enormous amount of time calculating a grade that they believe represents something, or at least [...]
Progressive education is alive and well in Chicago, the home of John Dewey and the first laboratory school more than 100 years ago. I found a budding example this week, spending two days with the leadership team at the young, rapidly-growing Bennett Day School, which, come August, will be expanding from a quaint four-classroom early [...]
Most school communities and leaders say that significant, system-wide change from a traditional to a deeper learning model takes many years. I think we are about to prove that wrong. Thirteen months ago at The Tilton School the entire faculty and staff, most of the board, and a large number of students, came together to begin [...]
Schools need students. That sounds trite, but until a very few years ago, this was not a concern for the vast majority of public schools. By far, the majority of students attended the public school closest to their home. That has now changed, and changed substantially for many American families who have a large and [...]
I have been less regular with my blog posts and Twitter stream over the last couple of months. I have been working hard on my new book, including about 60 in-depth phone, video, and in-person interviews and regular writing hours every day. I am happy to report that I am about 80% through the rough [...]
I have been tracking the progress of the first-ever student-designed and accredited Advanced Placement course. The two author-students, Anya Smith and Emy Schaeffer at Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta, have finished the course for the year, and here is Anya's video reflection. I have asked these two student-scholar-pioneers to video in to several summer [...]