Yearly Archives: 2013

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What Creativity Actually Looks Like, Revisited

I don't do this often, but the Twitter feed is alive today with ideas about creativity, trans-disciplinary study, and idea generation, so I am going to re-post a blog from last year: Many of us are talking about the need to shift learning in the direction of creation, rather than consumption, of knowledge.  Students and [...]

By | 2013-07-08T18:21:22+00:00 July 8th, 2013|Uncategorized|1 Comment

Big Tank Battles and Schools of the Future

The synergistic connections just keep flying in!  My friend Glyn Cowlishaw (@PDSHead), head of Providence Day School in Charlotte just Tweeted a link to a BBC article on the great Kursk tank battle 70 years ago involving 9,000 German and Soviet tanks.  Glyn asked "Will there ever be another large scale tank battle?"  My response: [...]

What Do Schools Do Well? First Peek

This is a teaser of things to come, but I could not keep it to myself.  Over the last few months I have conducted workshops attended by hundreds of educators: teachers, business officers, and school CEO's.  One of our collaborative exercises is to look critically at this institution we call "school" and ask what aspects  are utterly [...]

By | 2013-07-05T15:11:59+00:00 July 5th, 2013|Innovation in Education|3 Comments

Stand By Me

Looking for something to start off the school year, put up on a big screen, turn the volume way up, get a smile on everyone's face and feel that, yep, there is a reason to come to work each day and feel a ray of optimism in this crazy, fast, thorny world? Here's my nomination! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM

By | 2013-07-04T22:08:17+00:00 July 4th, 2013|Uncategorized|1 Comment

July 4 Reflection

In the long march of human civilization there has, in just the last few hundred years, developed a line of demarcation that will prove the success or failure of human societies in the future.  It is not a line between rich and poor, liberal or conservative, north and south, Occident and Orient, or believer (of [...]

By | 2013-07-03T18:54:58+00:00 July 3rd, 2013|Uncategorized|3 Comments

Horizon Report: Tomorrow is Already Here

The annual NMC Horizon Report for K12 schools, a comprehensive forecast of what technologies will most impact K12 education in the next 1-5 years. What I enjoyed seeing this year is that we are recognizing that technology will become less a driver of education than a facilitator of learning. I also think that the Horizon [...]

Creating 21C Student Assessments: ATC21S via Jonathan Martin

I just read an important recent post by my friend Jonathan Martin and will not reprise it all here.  But I want to re-post the video he included from the ATC21S working group.  It was not long after I first heard the term "21st Century skills" and realized it referred to the kind of transformative learning [...]

What Is In a Name: Welcome to “Design 39 Campus”, Poway USD!

Democracy, discomfort, courage, and educational innovation collided last night.  What is in a name? I have been working with a team from the Poway Unified School District. Their charge: open a new K-8 school in 2014 with a mission that has four key words: Design, Learning, Creative, Future.  It will be the first "choice" school [...]

Gorbis and Saveri: More Evidence That Foundational Change is Inevitable and Already Here

As I am writing chapters to my book and an article for Independent School Magazine, I find threads from both inside and outside of education weaving together into a tapestry of future vision that is both exciting and inevitable.  I came across two more such threads today, or more accurately confirmation of threads from two [...]

Questions and Problems Before Solutions; Day 2 at #Fuse13

Somewhere hovering in the open rafters of a large design space at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School, the ghosts of my fictional protagonists from The Falconer, Mr. Usher and Sunny/Sun Tzu sat and had a cup of tea today.  They don’t have Twitter accounts so we can’t follow their thoughts, but we know they listened with [...]

By | 2013-06-19T16:14:18+00:00 June 19th, 2013|21C Skills, Innovation in Education|0 Comments