NOTHING moves the needle of school innovation faster than high quality, interest-based, peer-to-peer collaboration. If teachers who are eager to create a deeper learning environment for their students can "see" what that looks like, and learn from peers who are actually doing it....boom. We are seeing the emergence of this kind of collaboration in explosive [...]
Are there still stakeholders in your community, perhaps fearful parents or reluctant faculty members, who don't understand why schools need to change? Here are some tools for you. In my upcoming new book (which is out for peer review and feedback right now), I explore both what is inevitable in the transformation of education in the [...]
My readers and schools I work with are always on the lookout for high quality professional development focused on deeper learning and design-type thinking skills. So check out the video from Noble Impact, a newer group out of Arkansas. I have been in touch with Chad Williamson about their ideas and evolution for several years, [...]
In an industrial-age system of education known for rigidity, there is nothing that screams “one-size-fits-all” more than the box of clean, new, un-scuffed, tightly-bound, inky-smelling textbooks that arrives in a teacher’s room once every five or six years, accompanied by an instruction manual about how to efficiently transfer the information in those boxes to groups [...]
Transformational technologies — from the wheel to the printing press, steam energy, the telephone, radio, air travel, television, personal computing, and the internet — have never been just about changing how we “do” the mechanics of our lives. Truly transformational technologies allow us to fundamentally re-imagine our relationship to the world around us. In a [...]
The great transformation in which education is engaged in the first quarter of this 21st century is simply this: we are changing our focus from what we teach to how we learn. Forward leaning schools are shifting, in the words of Bo Adams, from teaching organizations to learning organizations. Perhaps most of all, we are [...]
As you start the new school year, here is another thought that should creep into the school's organizational consciousness and bug the heck out of you: Are we measuring what we really value in our students? Most teachers spend an enormous amount of time calculating a grade that they believe represents something, or at least [...]
Like dog years, time passes differently in schools than in the world around us. I have been thinking a LOT about what "school" will be in August of 2036 or so, which in school-time is really not that far away. Certainly five years can pass in the blink of an eye and while the world [...]
Schools do a particularly bad job of ending things before we start others. Yesterday at the last day of our Summer Institute at Tilton School, my co-facilitator Julie Wilson reminded us of the importance of endings. Some celebrate endings; one of our attendees used to work at a school that held a Viking funeral every spring [...]
I write almost exclusively in this space about education, and that will continue to be the case. This post has an element of education, but is is really about history, America, and the soul of a people who have fought against the tyranny of ideologues from both the political left and right…in the voting booth, [...]