Stop. Don’t waste another Back To School Night, a rare opportunity when you have many or most of your parents and all of your teachers on campus, a large, diverse swath of community stakeholders. Traditionally we shuffle people as fast as we can from room to room so teachers can hand out sheaves of paper that they [...]
The myth of Pandora's Box tells us that we can unwittingly unleash terrible and unexpected things into the world through rash action. Might we re-construct this metaphor just a bit for the future of K-12 schools? "Terrible" and "unexpected" are two very different categories. We should not be afraid of the unexpected. The world changes [...]
Yesterday I tweeted “Innovation is limited by minds, not $$”. I am in Houston to work for a day with a highly respected independent school. In response to that, a Twitter colleague suggested that innovation is easy for those with money and not for those less well funded. Both historical and current evidence supports my sense of what [...]
Here is something I bet we can all agree on: simple is almost always better than complicated. What if we could take those messy problems at our schools that always seem to circle back on us, that confound us with inertia, dead ends, and multiple stakeholder turf battles, and find some simple guidelines to sort [...]
One of the goals I see most frequently in school strategic plans in the last half decade is an increased focus on STEM courses. The rationale is powerful: there is little debate that job opportunities in STEM fields will continue to far outpace that for students who have majored in the humanities. Recognizing, however, that creativity, perhaps [...]
What a dream come true it would be to go hang out at Pixar Studios, a place where the only real goal is to "make the product great", where they not only say that, but demonstrate it in a deep culture constantly evolving to "be great" in new, undiscovered ways? I think that dream, though, [...]
For those who don't follow me on Twitter or follow so many that it has become a waterfall, here is a link to a blog I wrote published on Edutopia today. In it I offer some specific recommendations on how schools can "gain comfort with the discomfort" of school change. In fact, we find that [...]
What would it look like if you started with an elephant and tried to turn it into a whale, piece by piece, without starting over? Imagine an artist's image of this process: first changing the right front foot into a flipper, then the tusks into a wide sheet of baleen, then the wispy little tail [...]
Group creativity and performance, what will make a school organization successful in times of challenge and change, is not driven by a few superstars. It is driven by the sum of interactions of diverse groups with time to share and build in relatively equality. Thanks to Bo Adams, my primary filter for TED talks, for [...]
Do we make a difference? Someone once asked that question of Pete Seeger: "How do you know you have made a difference" by sticking to your principles and your message in the face of long odds. His answer: "I don't know, but I have met many people with live eyes and live minds." That perfectly [...]