In the next ten days I will work with five very different schools/districts, and all five are (amongst other things) thinking deeply about curriculum. I am not a curriculum expert at all, but here is what I do know: curriculum is a tool of learning. Tools are at the far end of a logic model or [...]
We model success for others. Great teachers model success for their students; principals for teachers; coaches for their athletes. Consultants are known for the models they bring, models that can be clear, helpful solutions, but also overly-simplified cookbook recipes that sound great but often just don't fit all of us. I was thinking about models yesterday [...]
Pizza always helps thinking! What is your school's aiming point? What do you want for your school in the future? Have you had this discussion? Does your community know what the words you use actually mean? If not, how can you aim at, and intersect, a distant target? Many schools use words like [...]
What does it mean to be a great school? If you work at a school that is not struggling to survive, there is a good chance that the message you and your colleagues, perhaps even your parent community, tries to communicate, is "we are a great school". There is nothing wrong with that; we should [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Most school communities and leaders say that significant, system-wide change from a traditional to a deeper learning model takes many years. I think we are about to prove that wrong. Thirteen months ago at The Tilton School the entire faculty and staff, most of the board, and a large number of students, came together to begin [...]
The ongoing discourse about "grit" received another jolt with an article by David Denby in the New Yorker (HT David Monaco). Denby adds his arguments in opposition to the oversimplified, or possibly misleading, research and logic of Angela Duckworth which has made the word "grit" a fixture in some schools' mission and vision statements. As we have [...]
Schools need students. That sounds trite, but until a very few years ago, this was not a concern for the vast majority of public schools. By far, the majority of students attended the public school closest to their home. That has now changed, and changed substantially for many American families who have a large and [...]