Old school: "Don't ever ask a question of the audience unless you are sure of the answer." New school: "Learn to be flexible; deal with ambiguity and the unknown." I took these yesterday at a meeting for prospective parents of the new Design 39 Campus K-8 in Poway Unified, opening in 2014. (I [...]
If you are a learner/leader at a private school and think about how to generate or ensure continued admissions demand in shifting markets, read on. If you are a leader/learner at a public school and think about aligning student outcomes to community expectations as well as a forward-leaning vision, read on! As I will detail [...]
Exactly on year ago, I jumped off a cliff. I packed my Prius and drove east to visit more than 60 schools over three months and 10,000 miles. I had a couple of parachutes: some financial sponsors and the moral support of family and friends. It was a long trip, lonely drives punctuated by jolts [...]
You may already know this story; I did not and am always on the lookout for creative solutions to problems in education. Thanks to John Thorsen, Asst. Head at Asheville School for posting a query to some of his PLN about major issues facing education, I cyber-met Bill Bugg, head of Thetford Academy in Vermont. [...]
I just Tweeted "If more kids watched and identified with Miley Cyrus than MLK this week, then our schools are doing a bad job. How is that for an easy metric?" Girls at a local public high school were suspended last spring for twerking in a video. None had ever been punished for vastly more [...]
I hope every teacher in every school in America found and used one of the great teaching moments of our generation today. I watched the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s dream, a day in 1963 that may have marked the high water mark of the soul of America. And with the searching words of each [...]
I just had an article published in the ISTE journal Learning and Leading With Technology. It is only available to ISTE members, but the editors were kind enough to allow me to link to it. So I have posted it on the Resources page of this blog. The title is "Taking Aim at Innovation". It [...]
Great start to the morning: a veteran teacher who had been at my workshop with the Polytechnic faculty in June came up to me when I arrived and said, "I did not get this 'innovation' thing until you talked about 'teacher as lead learner and co-learner'. Now I see it and I feel like the [...]
Please join me, the faculty of five independent schools, and three authoritative voices from outside the traditional mainstream of K-12 education, via Twitter feed for a unique conversation about the direction of learning in the years ahead. Next Monday, August 26, from 10:15-11:45 Pacific Time, more than 300 educators from Alverno High, Mayfield Senior, St. [...]
If we truly believe that all educators can and should be leaders, we need to develop those skills that bake “leadership ownership” into the dough of the whole organization. In my ongoing work with the leadership team at Pacific Ridge School, we got to do just that today, while testing some new tools I have [...]