The new normal you are experiencing is not new, but has been "becoming normal" for many years. I first used the term "cognitosphere" in about 2008 to describe the rapidly-growing global neuro-network that increasingly connects everyone in the world who has access to the internet. Others have called this system the "metaverse" or other made-up [...]
Wayne Gretzky famously said. "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been". How about a corollary for schools: "Design schools for the future, not for today". This sounds embarrassingly obvious, yet it is not. This morning I read an article about the 11,000 student Carlsbad School District on the [...]
Four years ago when I published #EdJourney, I posited that significant changes at individual schools might take place over a period of 3-15 years, depending on leadership, intentionality, and focus. I have really never seen an example of significant change (other than in schools where a wolf is at the door) in the first year [...]
It was about 40 years ago that I sat in Prof. Jim Ingle's oceanography class at Stanford as he described the ebb and flow of climate patterns throughout geologic time. With a waving of arms he talked about the rise and fall of sea levels and massive changes in rainfall patterns, each arm flap covering [...]
Students learn best when they are wrestling with problems in which they find relevance, in which the intrinsic motivation to learn outpaces the extrinsic motivation of a higher grade. What if we took them into a real-life disaster movie, one where the nerdy scientists predict the end of the world, politicians yell at each other, some [...]
As I started to think about how to launch my new book, Moving the Rock, I came cross Thunderclap, a fascinating crowdsourcing site. It is not about raising money; it is about raising our collective voice. The idea is simple: propose an idea; set a target of gathering other people who share your idea; and [...]
You can watch the video below from Iolani School in Hawaii, and in the first 30 seconds your response might be: We are not a wealthy private school. We don't get to hand pick our students. We don't have millions of dollars for this kind of facility. We don't have alumni like Apple guru Guy [...]
Most students in school today have never played, and certainly never bought, a music CD. Within a few years after Apple launched the iTunes store a decade ago, sales of CD’s in America had dropped by something like 80%. A similar radical mutation is taking place right now in retail shopping, with widespread shuttering across America [...]
Does your school value students who exhibit character, grit, and leadership? Is it in your mission to develop these traits in your students? Probably, and rightly so. But as I and others have urged educators to step back and think deeply about the meaning of the word “grit”, an important article by Susan Cain, writing in [...]
A primary role of education is to give students the skill and wisdom to know how to gain knowledge. A key element of that process for centuries has been the reliance on experts who have invested enormous time, money, and intellectual resources in gaining knowledge and understanding that is deeper, more detailed, and often more [...]
