A theme that comes up in every school I work with, and again today: Change at schools does not start with a shift in the daily schedule, the individuals in the room, the classrooms in which we teach, or a curriculum scaffold. Those will come in time. But first, change is about culture. It is [...]
Twenty years ago, "disruptive innovation" was introduced to educational lexicon by Clayton Christensen largely within the context of technology. Personal computers and rapid new technological inventions were going to fundamentally change the system of schools. A decade ago, flattened global economic relationships were going to fundamentally change schools as we shifted learning to prepare students [...]
Col. Francis Parker, a contemporary of John Dewey, said that the primary role of education was to instill in students the skills necessary for them to fulfill their roles as democratic citizens. If the events of the last year have taught us anything it is that these skills, and how they are exercised, are being [...]
A thoughtful colleague at one of my client schools (anonymous now but not for long) wants to create a "portrait of a teacher" for and with her faculty. It is a great challenge: we need to know what we are aiming for if we want to hit it. She sent me some proposed questions for [...]
The way Bo Adams tells it, a couple of weeks ago they had a large group of visitors touring the iDiploma Hive at Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School, meeting with one of the student cohorts who are working in teams on various self-selected, long-term design and development projects. A cell phone range and one of the [...]
In this turbulent and historic election season, how might we engage students in the process as a great learning experience? Stanford University is offering a course this fall that brings together a pantheon of experts on the political process to digest and discuss, in panel format and through seven sessions, the election. It is all [...]
Pizza always helps thinking! What is your school's aiming point? What do you want for your school in the future? Have you had this discussion? Does your community know what the words you use actually mean? If not, how can you aim at, and intersect, a distant target? Many schools use words like [...]
I rarely if ever endorse a product, but I am finding a number of us switching to Zoom from Skype for video chats. I don't know why, but the quality of the experience, in terms of both clarity of the video feed and vastly fewer glitches and freeze-ups, is much better with Zoom. You can have [...]
A tidbit from the last chapter of my upcoming book: The great news is that education does not need to remain stuck in the past. There are many, many examples of individuals, schools, and districts that have found ways to push past the crippling inertia that has imprisoned so many others in a system that [...]
NOTHING moves the needle of school innovation faster than high quality, interest-based, peer-to-peer collaboration. If teachers who are eager to create a deeper learning environment for their students can "see" what that looks like, and learn from peers who are actually doing it....boom. We are seeing the emergence of this kind of collaboration in explosive [...]