How do you know if your school is increasingly innovative? How do you know if innovation is changing the school culture? How can we improve our chances that innovation actually results in positive outcomes for our students and our school's future? Paul Hobcraft, a thought leader on innovation practice, has published a summary of authoritative reports [...]
How can your school best create the conditions that support innovation? There are essentially three broad levels of concern that take up the attention of innovation-oriented educators: The 10,000 Foot Level: creating a powerful, value-laden, forward-leaning vision, and building towards it through long-term strategies. The 3,000 Foot Level: creating and sustaining the processes and practices [...]
How might we best capture and build upon the swirl of talent, ideas, and knowledge within our schools? How might we build and sustain systematic distributed idea creation and collegial feedback as a core function of an evolving school? I have previously written about, and use in my workshops, elements of the brilliant book Creativity, [...]
Think of all the discussions, decisions, work, and meetings and that take up "free" time at school, those precious prep periods and colleague collaboration windows that you have managed to carve out of the busy school day. Imagine those times as forming a cube. That cube is packed full, right? You are not wasting any of that time [...]
Do changes at your school follow any logical model? Or do things happen because some one or group have the pull or push to make them happen? Is change intentional, or do you get the sense that "we are going to throw a lot of stuff against a wall and see what sticks"? Logic models are [...]
If the end point is the same, but we all start from a different place, what does that say about our paths to success? I have increasingly used the metaphor of a "North Star" around which schools can build a shared vision of where they want to get to in terms of "great learning". We [...]
Can a few simple rules guide our personal and professional decision pathways? Can they help alleviate the fear that I am going to leap into a bottomless chasm of future uncertainty? Can they get us past the chokepoints of inertia that stand in the way of following a true passion? I think so. A few [...]
Two remarkable, leading schools I know of are undergoing leadership changes. Many people have spent time, treasure, and, most importantly, professional risk capital to lever these schools off of the a worn out path and on to visionary trajectories of the future of learning. Now comes the test: will these schools survive a leadership transition [...]
Let’s call her Jane. I met her last night. Jane is a white 9th grader from a well-to-do New York City family who attends what we all would call an “elite” independent high school. Her parents passionately believe in the power of a good education, as well as a well-rounded and balanced life. Jane has [...]
Last week in New Zealand I visited a high school that may well be the exemplar for global high schools of the future. Hobsonville Point Secondary School (HPSS) on the outskirts of Auckland is just two years old, and only has about 20% of its build-out student population. It has been designed, physically and pedagogically to break [...]