Jeff Shields, President of the National Business Officers Association, posted comments and a link to a white paper by Ian Symmonds, one of our most respected consultants to independent schools and colleges. In the article Ian cites seven factors common to successful tuition-paying institutions, and Jeff invited comment. I did, as follows (it will not [...]
Alyssa Gallagher of LASD K-8 District welcomes the three teams to their iLearn Lab. Why do we wait for a conference or a formal gathering set months in advance? Days of intense learning are too infrequent and widely-spread for most educators, which was one of the main topics of discussion during a tremendous, [...]
Every Wednesday evening (9 PM Eastern; 6 PM Pacific) a group of creative, energetic, risk-taking educators gathers for #DTK12chat, a virtual meeting on Twitter about the role and use of design thinking (DT) in K12 education. The pace and quality of the discussion is outstanding, including many links to resources to help others use the [...]
I love being proven right by the likes of Malcolm Gladwell! Pass this along to your college guidance office. When our son, Josh, was a rising junior in high school, we started looking at colleges. He was in the top 10% of his class at a very good independent school; knew he wanted to go [...]
I am so pleased and honored to forward the announcement that The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence has welcomed seven outstanding K-12 educators as the newest group of Martin Fellows. They are: Philip Cummings, Teacher, Presbyterian Day School, Memphis, TN Robert Dillon, Director of Technology and Innovation, Afton School District, St. Louis, MO Jill Gough, [...]
Did I contemplate the values of grit many years ago and not know it? Angela Duckworth has drawn such a clean picture of this trait we now call grit, and how it impacts success. She says that grit has a lot to do with the tendency to sustain interest in long term goals in the [...]
Public schools face an array of daunting challenges, each a reason that change is hard: won't work, won't improve outcomes, can't afford it, teachers will rebel, flavor-of-the-month. Taken together these=inertia that prevent us from scrapping the Industrial Age assembly line and back-flipping to the passion and engagement of Dewey+connectivity that will prepare our students for [...]
I need an assist from the power of social media! I have essentially finished the full draft of my book based on #EdJourney last fall. Sending blind proposals to publishers will be time-consuming and, well, blind. So I need your help: do you know a publishing editor, or a publishing agent who might know an [...]
Just watched the Charlie Rose interview with Thomas Friedman, Joel Klein of Amplify, Amy Gutman, President of UPenn, and Art Agerwal of EdEx. The subject was MOOCS, and I am not sure they told us anything new, but I had two thought take-aways: We have asked if change in K-12 is, or needs to be, [...]
Last September I reported on my visit to the second-year Design Lab school in inner city Cleveland. (I urge you to review that post.) Principal Eric Juli and Design Lab are front and center in the introduction to the book I am writing about my trip last fall because of the long odds and [...]