“You made my head hurt”, the 10th grader told me during reflection of our three-hour learning block on how to observe, analyze, understand, and communicate about systems. He assured me he meant it in a good way, and that comment immediately went into my top-five all time moments as a teacher. It was my honor [...]
Is there a place for student-centered school innovation at the crossroads of poverty, test scores, and growth mindset? What does that look like? Many others are tackling this question, but I had the opportunity to see a piece of it today when Laura Dearman of the Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence and I visited Holy [...]
I am proud and honored to help announce the launch of a unique 9-month collaboration amongst leaders of independent schools to take a new approach to the issue of long-term financial and market sustainability in these times of dramatic change. I have been asked by the partnership of the National Business Officers Association (NBOA) and [...]
Jeff Shields, President of the National Business Officers Association, posted comments and a link to a white paper by Ian Symmonds, one of our most respected consultants to independent schools and colleges. In the article Ian cites seven factors common to successful tuition-paying institutions, and Jeff invited comment. I did, as follows (it will not [...]
Alyssa Gallagher of LASD K-8 District welcomes the three teams to their iLearn Lab. Why do we wait for a conference or a formal gathering set months in advance? Days of intense learning are too infrequent and widely-spread for most educators, which was one of the main topics of discussion during a tremendous, [...]
Every Wednesday evening (9 PM Eastern; 6 PM Pacific) a group of creative, energetic, risk-taking educators gathers for #DTK12chat, a virtual meeting on Twitter about the role and use of design thinking (DT) in K12 education. The pace and quality of the discussion is outstanding, including many links to resources to help others use the [...]
The team from Design 39 Campus in Poway Unified is in the SF Bay Area this week visiting schools, Google, and IDEO. I will be with them tomorrow when we gather with teams from Los Altos and Milpitas School Districts to share forward leaning innovations at all three districts. I will post several blogs this [...]
Last spring I wrote three posts in response to extensive research that proves that the bell-shaped curve of human performance is wrong. (I was reminded of it by watching Malcolm Gladwell's talk about the distribution of performance by students at a range of universities.) The Gaussian distribution lies at the absolute heart of school assessment, [...]
I love being proven right by the likes of Malcolm Gladwell! Pass this along to your college guidance office. When our son, Josh, was a rising junior in high school, we started looking at colleges. He was in the top 10% of his class at a very good independent school; knew he wanted to go [...]
Does your school mission statement sound pretty much like every other school mission statement? Try this, posted during #satchatwc today by Carrie Ann Gehringer, teacher and coach in Ft. Bragg, CA. She did not mean it to be a mission statement, but I think it would make a GREAT one! Carrie, am so going to [...]