NOTHING is as effective in transforming schools as seeing "it" in action. I spent Monday with a visiting team of elementary school teachers from Albermarle County in Virginia as theytoured four elementary schools in Cajon Valley USD, just east of San Diego. Albermarle Supt. and national edu-leader Pam Moran sent the team out to look at [...]
I am at The Hill School outside Philadelphia today and tomorrow; I have been working with the humanities departments this year on reimagining their program, offerings, and departmental structure. But this post is not about the humanities; we are prototyping solutions later today and will have have a lot to report by the end of [...]
If you think you have it tough as a teacher, administrator, or parent... I just committed to partner with an education NGO in Bulgaria, and to keynote and workshop a conference for about 1,000 teachers, parents, and students in Sofia in November. It is a long way to go, and I am pretty sure I [...]
Keep an eye on Vista Unified School District in California. You may want to add it to your list of visits for your teachers and administrators to see how learning is dramatically changing, even in schools with very significant challenges. I have written extensively about Vista Innovation and Design Academy, and the dramatic positive changes [...]
If you walk around schools, if you ask the right questions, if you stop and listen to teachers and students, if you look at how spaces are arranged and used, you can tell a lot about a school in a short period of time. I am in freezing Columbus, OH for the NCAA volleyball Final [...]
And people wondered why the low income school with the mascot of a big wave with fists had a lot of trouble with fighting during recess... The new mascot is the green sea turtle that live in the shallow, southernmost reaches of San Diego Bay just a few steps from the newly renamed and rebranded Bayside [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
What if the future is already behind us, and we just don't know it? While this sounds like Twilight Zone fiction, I think the future may be a relative term for school leaders. What is an improbable, fuzzy vision fraught with big obstacles, uncomfortable transitions, and unknowable outcomes for some schools is already in the rear [...]