This time next week I will be on the downhill ride to Denver to start my 3-month Journey of Learning with visits to a quartet of outstanding schools: Colorado Academy, St. Anne’s Episcopal, Denver Montessori, and the Denver Green School. Each are embracing innovative programs to help their students succeed in the challenges of their [...]
Roger Fisher, co-author of one of the great books of our generation, “Getting to Yes”, and co-founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, died last week at age 90. Roger was my uncle (well, first cousin, once removed actually) and one of my heroes. If you don’t read farther than this first paragraph, remember this: “Getting [...]
Once again I am inexorably drawn to the root cause of our dissatisfaction with the current process of education. It remains deeply ensnared in a manufactured, assembly line design when our instincts as educators, our vision, our understanding of the information age, all tell us that we should attend to the lessons of the natural [...]
One school started the new academic year with back-to-school faculty professional growth day yesterday, and there is a good chance this school will never be the same. When Josie Holford, (@JosieHolford) head of K-12 Poughkeepsie Day School shot me an email two days ago about this, I could see a dense web of critical leadership [...]
My Prius has not even left the driveway on this fall’s Journey of Learning, yet the lessons and links are already stacking up. After posting in the last week about a new, creative approach to systems thinking at Townview Magnet in Dallas, and some extraordinary institutional steps to promote innovation at a major east coast [...]
Yesterday Craig Dwyer @dwyerteacher reflected on Inquire Within about setting up a marvelous unit for his class, including a myriad of opportunities for collaboration, use of technology, reflection time, reaching out to students around the world and more. Yet at the end, here is his takeaway: “But, it was my inquiry. I planned it all out. I chose [...]
The core goal of education is to prepare students for their future. This means that a radical transformation of education is inevitable and irreversible; it is only a matter of how efficiently we get there. Education can no longer give students the knowledge they need for the “present known”, or even for the “near-future known”. [...]
Classic Skunk Works are hidden from curious eyes and ears; not so in our new world of connected educators! I had a great discussion with a young teacher, Aaron Baldridge at the Townview Magnet Center High School in Dallas, a unique setting where six public magnet schools are housed at one location. Aaron is a [...]
In his post “The Immeasurable, Pt. 2” Will Richardson posted this great graphic to articulate the problem with assessment: He states, correctly, of course, that we spend most of our time in the bottom left quadrant, and little in the upper right quadrant. I think this is an issue that goes well beyond assessment, or [...]
This is the third of three posts about the Three Horizon framework of innovation. If this third horizon sounds tough, or something we should not worry about, or a problem for those in a distant future, think about the folks that just landed a rover on Mars. We revel in their success! We get goose [...]