Today may have been my most productive learning experience ever between 6-8 AM, with the probable exception of that morning on the north side of the Annapurna range in eastern Nepal… Mount Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta is holding their second annual Fuse conference (Twitter #fuse13) today and tomorrow. It is a design thinking experience [...]
'Tis the season of graduations and graduation speakers. We attended the Stanford University graduation yesterday...always a heartwarming event to go back to The Farm and see a bunch of REALLY smart kids ready to go out and tackle some tough problems. How many times this year alone do you think we heard graduation speakers advise [...]
I have attended many educational conferences over the last 15 years. I usually walk away with one or two good ideas. Yesterday, at the end of the the Martin Institute Summer Conference, I talked to many attendees who said something like, "Enough, I am full, my head is about to explode!" This was a remarkable [...]
A remarkable day at the Martin Institute Summer Conference in Memphis, and one has to ask...why is this unique? As John Hunter asked me this afternoon, is this revolutionary? A conference of learning amongst educators, not a convention with numerous commercial sponsors and treasure spent on high-priced authors. Few chairs in rows, very little sit-and-get. [...]
The last two days I have been re-writing chapters for my book on organizational innovation in schools. We KNOW that connectivity is an absolute key to innovation; it has been since the Renaissance, in coffee shops, billard halls, or online. We also know that generally younger information age knowledge workers are more comfortable, in fact seek [...]
This video of Diana Rhoten via Edutopia really resonated with the chapters I am writing for my book from my school visits last year. In particular, the idea of "relevance" is one of the six key indicators I saw of schools that are really shifting away from the assembly line model, where relevance is almost [...]
I am writing and re-writing the section of my book that will argue, in detail, that schools are becoming learning ecosystems, not assembly lines. This is not a metaphor; ecosystems are governed by a set of laws that are very different from those that govern an efficient assembly line. Education should not act like an [...]
A key takeaway from my EdJourney last fall and subsequent work with hundreds of educators this spring is that changing how and what we teach is not "hard"; it is "uncomfortable". I won't reprise the argument here; it is in my TEDx talk if you have not seen it yet. I also heard so many [...]
I have been remiss in my blog posts for several days; I am deep into writing, re-writing, and re-re-writing chapters of my book. I wrote a summary of my chapter on leadership, and though I am not a "cookbook" kind of person, I do believe the following to be true: When it comes to paradigm-level [...]
According to one large vendor in the room, "Poway is in the leading 1% of districts nationwide who are looking at this." According to several others, "90% of the bits and pieces are there; no one has put it all together." According to almost all the vendors, "We can't make this kind of investment with [...]