How do we know students are engaged in their learning? Do we need sophisticated tools to tell us that students are engaged? Or can we look at the dynamics of the classroom and get a pretty good idea? When I visit schools I poke my head into classrooms. Sometimes I am asked to sit down [...]
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 [...]
The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence will host their annual conference on Tuesday, June 9, and Wednesday, June 10, at Presbyterian Day School in Memphis, Tennessee. The theme of this year’s conference is: the Heart and Soul of Teaching. There is an outstanding line-up of keynote presentations and active learning sessions on tap. The Martin Institute [...]
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 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 [...]
Does design thinking run the risk of being the next buzzword in K-12 education? The theme of the recent National Association of Independent Schools conference highlighted design and innovation. One could not throw a rock without finding a session purported to link design thinking to learning. Many educators have realized that actually finding problems, asking [...]
What will learning look like in the future? Let's start with a short visual history lesson (thanks John Gulla for pulling some of these images together to prompt our thinking): This was learning 100,000 years ago: This was learning 1,000 years ago: This was learning 100 years ago: This is a lot of learning today: [...]
Nothing will overcome the inertia opposing organizational change faster than shifting the gene pool of the organization. How might we do this with virtually no discomfort? How can we raise the level of "innovator DNA" amongst our teachers and administrators? Tired of reading stacks of resumes and interviewing dozens of job applicants who cannot raise the [...]
What one word describes your vision of the highest goals of learning? What do you hope to exude as an educator? Of what do you want your school to "reek"? In a January #satchatwc a prompt along those lines started a list, and I have continued to informally gather those words at #onewordK12. So far [...]
I have started to write for Edutopia; see my current article "Teacher as Farmer" on their site.