Here is my talk from last week at the TEDx Denver Teachers event sponsored by Colorado Academy, Denver Public Schools, and the Association of Colorado Independent Schools. I hope you enjoy it and will share. As you know, TED is not about telling everything you know, but about teeing up the big ideas. I hope [...]
Effecting change is a skill just like teaching history, playing a piano, or throwing a football. Being good at it is a combination of inherent ability and learning. Why should it be otherwise? Some people are naturally more comfortable with change, with things like risk and creativity and flexibility. Others are less comfortable. And just [...]
Dr. Adrian Bejanof Duke, author of Design in Nature, has been kind enough to help clarify our understanding of how the constructal law will drive the design of future K-12 learning systems. The constructal law requires that systems that carry some flow tend towards a tree-shape design (see earlier posts for clarification). I queried him [...]
I know that many others provide links to good reads, and I try to Tweet out these as well. But I thought from time to time I would post links to some particularly good reads as I plow through my Google Reader list trying to keep up. I know I have more time than some [...]
Those who followed my EdJourney will recall my report on Doug Berman and his ground-breaking four year computer science program at Porter Gaud School in Charleston. Doug Bergman is a nationally recognized teacher and his courses are a blend of open-ended projects on student-created ideas that he describes as “structured but chaotic”. During my visit, [...]
I am catching up on my blog reading, and Peter Gow's observations about a middle school class discussion really resonated with me from my own many school observations on the road trip. Peter says that the discussion was ridiculously high level, and yet many of the trappings of "21C" were not present; it was just [...]
A journey is about what we learn, both intentionally and by being open. Thanks in large part to the incredible support I received from all of you who have followed and shared this journey, I had the enthusiasm to write up most of those intentional lessons. But I have kept track of some of those [...]
As I mentioned last week. Presbyterian Day School in Memphis is doing some really interesting work with embedded technology, starting at early grade levels. They started to share it all with me in person and I got out of my depth in a hurry. Then I tried to capture and embed all of the rich [...]
Some schools with long histories find it hard to change due to a legacy of success and the inevitably of inertia. Some schools with short histories find it easy to change but hard to build a legacy of success. Then there are the “tweeners”, small schools with a long history that make a sudden growth [...]
As a testament to the passion with which so many educators embrace the need to fundamentally change how we teach, the 60th (or thereabouts) visit of my trip was just as rich and engaging as the first, with new approaches and models that we all can share. I had not planned to visit The Hockaday [...]