For those of you who don't follow me on Twitter or who missed the tweet, I want to proudly direct you to a blog written by my daughter on the subject of bullying. Cassidy is a member of the US National Women's volleyball team, and when she is not competing for USA Volleyball or professional [...]
In a series of short posts and videos from Fast Company, we see how Google is using space to create collaborative working and learning environments. I watched several of these, and see enormous parallels to how we can transform the K-12 learning process by re-imagining the use of physical space. Here are some of my [...]
One of the pleasures of research is to observe longitudinal change; revisiting a school from time to time provides that window. It was my pleasure to visit the campus of Colorado Academy for the third time in just over a year, and to see evidence of some of the courageous decisions they have made about [...]
Here is the question that education leaders should be screaming to each other and to the world: what is the business of school? For millennia, the business (some of my colleagues think we should not use the word business with respect to education; replace it with purpose if you like) of schools has been to [...]
I am so happy, honored, and to announce that I have signed a contract to publish my manuscript covering my travels and work of the last year with Jossey-Bass Publishers! To be honest, I had never given a lot of thought to who publishes the books I read. But when I started to reach out [...]
Words matter. The first time I saw the word “ecosystem” used to describe a process of learning more attuned to the future needs of our students was by Thomas and Seeley-Brown in “A New Culture of Learning”. It resonated with me; they described the teacher as a farmer who sets out the boundary fences of inquiry [...]
Exactly one year ago I was in my Prius driving through the Carolinas visiting schools and blogging from the road. This morning I am in Greensboro, N.C. and this time the Prius is back home in California. But I get to report on another school, Miami Valley School in Dayton, Ohio, that is taking some [...]
I did not think my afternoon session with the freshmen at All Saints Episcopal School could top the “you made my head hurt” whirl of systems thinking with the sophomores. I may have been wrong. I had a 70-minute learning block with the 9th grade cohort of the Tad Bird Honors College, and with virtually [...]
I just finished reading Creative Confidence by David and Tom Kelley. This is not a review, a summary of design thinking, or an argument on why design thinking is a critical life skill. It is a short list of both intellectual and emotional responses to the book, primarily as it relates to my field of [...]
Save the Date: The Martin Institute is offering a one-day Deep Dive conference on June 12, 2014, the day following the annual two-day Summer Conference. The Deep Dive will be a powerful day of active learning and inter-school collaboration on four themes that are key to transforming the learning environment in our schools: Leading Change [...]