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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]