Can a non-charter public school in California, with near-the-bottom public funding per student, truly transform learning? As you know I have been closely following Design 39 Campus in Poway Unified, where the guiding principles are: Nurture creative confidence Practice design thinking Encourage inquiry Connect globally Use technology Promote courage Instill a growth mindset Well, here [...]
Can your school community achieve a mission or vision when they don’t know what the words that form these mean? Building a strong brand and a sparkling value proposition is not about saying you can do everything. It is about laser-sharp clarity about what you are going to do…and then doing it. Over the last [...]
Yes, we CAN make substantial change in even underperforming schools in underserved communities, and the answer does NOT have to lie in longer hours and drilling for tests. The answer can lie in what John Dewey and the other giants of the Progressive Era of education defined more than 100 years ago: student experience, engagement, and ownership [...]
You can now read the full text of my article in Independent School Magazine on the collection and synthesis of the 2,000 "what if" questions I gathered from school communities all over the country in the last 24 months. Here is the key graphic that does not show up in the online article: Hopefully our collective [...]
What if schools were what we wanted them to be? Why are they not? As many of you know, I have collected more than 2,000 questions from teachers, administrators, parents, and students around the country over a period of more than 18 months. (HT Bo Adams was the first of many that I know of [...]
What if schools became the actual learning and innovation hub of the community, rather than an island where students and teachers go to download subject knowledge? I recently visited a school that is thinking of renovating some existing space, or creating a new building, modeled along the lines of the growing number of enterprise incubators [...]
What if every school set aside time for the students and teachers to deeply explore learning through the lenses of key all-school guiding principles? What if we aligned resources like time and teachers around those principles that we think lead to great learning, rather than silo-ed subjects? Design 39 Campus in Poway continues to blow [...]
Doing is SO much harder than saying, pointing, or quoting. Inspired by the prompts in another great #satchatwc, guest hosted by Jay Billy, I ask us to consider the gap between the posters on our wall, the quotes we love to share, the heroes we seek to emulate...and what we do each day. If you [...]
Have we been asking the right questions? What if we have been approaching the transformation of learning from "north" on the compass rose when we should have been approaching from "west" or "east"? I am going to mix the heck out of some metaphors here, but stick with me for a moment. Computing metaphor: the [...]
Do you want to understand disruptive innovation? Fill your car's gas tank. And if you think the price of gas has nothing to do with the future of schools, read on! In the 1970's (I know this stuff because I was a geologist at Stanford and with the US Geological Survey back then), the official reports [...]