I just Tweeted "If more kids watched and identified with Miley Cyrus than MLK this week, then our schools are doing a bad job. How is that for an easy metric?" Girls at a local public high school were suspended last spring for twerking in a video. None had ever been punished for vastly more [...]
Independent schools often state that they have a public purpose and try to share resources with their local public schools and districts. I want to give a special shout-out to one school that really lived that part of their mission yesterday. Yesterday I organized a Skype communication between David Monaco and some of his leadership [...]
I hope every teacher in every school in America found and used one of the great teaching moments of our generation today. I watched the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s dream, a day in 1963 that may have marked the high water mark of the soul of America. And with the searching words of each [...]
I just had an article published in the ISTE journal Learning and Leading With Technology. It is only available to ISTE members, but the editors were kind enough to allow me to link to it. So I have posted it on the Resources page of this blog. The title is "Taking Aim at Innovation". It [...]
Great start to the morning: a veteran teacher who had been at my workshop with the Polytechnic faculty in June came up to me when I arrived and said, "I did not get this 'innovation' thing until you talked about 'teacher as lead learner and co-learner'. Now I see it and I feel like the [...]
Please join me, the faculty of five independent schools, and three authoritative voices from outside the traditional mainstream of K-12 education, via Twitter feed for a unique conversation about the direction of learning in the years ahead. Next Monday, August 26, from 10:15-11:45 Pacific Time, more than 300 educators from Alverno High, Mayfield Senior, St. [...]
For those readers who do not follow on Twitter, please know that there is a remarkable sharing of ideas started by my post yesterday on Magnitude and Frequency. Check out the Comments stream and add your own. I think "we" will develop some tools for schools to assess and open their concepts of what innovation [...]
When we talk about innovation and change in schools, are we overly focused on the rate of change? We talk about the need to fail fast and fail forward. Does that breed myopia on speed, pace, and the frequency of innovative ideation? What about magnitude? I shared a fascinating dialogue on Twitter yesterday with JoAnn [...]
If we truly believe that all educators can and should be leaders, we need to develop those skills that bake “leadership ownership” into the dough of the whole organization. In my ongoing work with the leadership team at Pacific Ridge School, we got to do just that today, while testing some new tools I have [...]
If you think social media is a gimmick for kids to waste time, here is my (heavily biased) argument otherwise. My daughter wrote the following blog for USA Volleyball yesterday. This is Twitter at its best. And the match starts in 15 minutes...GO USA/Team Toy! Aug. 10: Cassidy Lichtman (@CassidyLichtman), U.S. Women's National Volleyball Team [...]