Education is a mirror of societal interactions. For millennia, knowledge and information have been vastly more "push" than "pull". The big ideas of a few rulers, politicians, philosophers, celebrities, scientists, artists, authors, and the like have molded the evolution of human thought and action. In logarithmic terms, the 10 have led the 100,000, or perhaps [...]
Penguins, icebergs, and organizational change, all in a one-hour read. What's not to love? John Kotter knows as much about change management as anyone in the world. I am embarrassed to say that I had not read Kotter until about two years ago, but perhaps that was actually good. I had to develop my own [...]
Here's the problem: We can lose the future if we forget the past, but we can't win the future with the past as our guide. What does that mean? None of us really know, because for the first time in human history, the past is a decreasingly useful guide to what will work and not [...]
My article on "community" was posted today in Ed Week as a Guest Blog with Next Generation Learning Challenges: I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that there may be no single piece of the education puzzle that is already starting to undergo a more fundamental, radical, and unpredictable evolution than the relationship amongst schools, [...]
What is the value of a school? What will it be in the future, for your school? Are we anywhere in the ballpark on this discussion? We should always pay attention to ideas at the margins of our own experience; this helps keep confirmation bias in check and brings fresh DNA into the pool of [...]
I'm pretty good at distilling, summarizing, synthesizing, and then sharing; it is what I do best for my fellow educators. I certainly don't arrive at big ideas by myself. Most are the products of interactions with "others", which stew for some time in my mental crock pot before they are ready for consumption. I am stumped [...]
This week in New Orleans, I once again have the honor of co-presenting with John Gulla, Executive Director of the EE Ford Foundation. Between us we have visited and worked with something like 400+ schools over the last five years. This will be the fourth time that John and I have shared our thoughts about [...]
The fundamental transformation of human interaction that is taking place right now is the shift from highly regulated, controlled institutions and formal connections, to the open and informal flow of knowledge, information, commerce, and ideas. In his book, Open, David Price, OBE provides an important and clear roadmap of the challenges and opportunities that this transformation [...]
If you follow my blog, hopefully by now you have pre-ordered my new book. If not, please do! And please share with your own professional and social media circles. The core takeaway of the book is that we don't actually need permission to dramatically transform education if we just collectively press on a few really [...]
