This is HUGE for these kids. Ortiz Middle School (#ortizms) is a traditionally poorly performing school in Santa Fe, NM with almost 100% underserved students. Exactly one year ago, the overwhelmingly predominant learning style was "sit and get"; students lacked engagement and enthusiasm; they politely did their worksheets and listened to their teachers. The teachers decided to take [...]
Last week in New Zealand I visited a high school that may well be the exemplar for global high schools of the future. Hobsonville Point Secondary School (HPSS) on the outskirts of Auckland is just two years old, and only has about 20% of its build-out student population. It has been designed, physically and pedagogically to break [...]
I was honored last week to give the opening keynote address to more than 1,800 primary and secondary educators from across New Zealand and other regional nations. I hope you will get past the short self-introduction in Maori language. The audience was wonderful, enthusiastic, and obviously eager to share, and lead, a transformation to deeper [...]
The Convergence Center for Policy Resolution has published a major white paper that will help build gravity around the push to transform K-12 education. Convergence has asked me, and many others, to act as ambassadors of this effort, and since I am on vacation, I am going to borrow heavily from their media guide. I [...]
How might we integrate innovation practices across our school culture, breaking down myopic silos of "that's not my job"? This is one of the true challenges of innovation in any organization, and particularly in schools where teachers, administrators, students, and parents frequently and strongly identify with their respective "tribe" more than with an organizational imperative. At [...]
I received both strong support for, and passionate pushback to, my article last week, "Re-building the K-12 Operating System" that was selected to kick off the Transforming Teaching series organized by Jal Mehta, Tyler Thigpen, and others at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Specifically, I had immediate responses on Twitter from Ilana Horn, a [...]
Yesterday I published what I think is my most important contribution in the last year since #EdJourney hit the shelves. It is a short article that was chosen to launch a new collaboration, Transforming Teaching, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education by Prof. Jal Mehta and his team. In Rebuilding the K-12 Operating System I outline [...]
The start of a school year is always a time to re-energize, but at four schools I worked with in the last week or so I think it was more than that. It was a time to focus on how we as educators want to change our practice in order to help our students prepare [...]
One year ago this week teaching and learning at the underserved, underperforming Ortiz Middle School in Santa Fe, NM was pretty much what you would expect: students lining up quietly in the hallways; sitting quietly in rows and pods of desks; completing worksheets; raising hands one at a time to answer questions or read a [...]
Yep; this is going to get me in trouble with the marketing folks. IMHO school tag lines are mostly a waste of time. Tag lines are those pithy one or a few words that we struggle to find that tells the world exactly what we stand for. They come from the for-profit world where Avis [...]