Great Video Series This Fall on Election 2016 via Stanford University
October 15, 2016In this turbulent and historic election season, how might we engage students in the process as a great learning experience? Stanford University is offering a course this fall that brings together a pantheon of experts on the political process to digest and discuss, in panel format and through seven sessions, the election. It is all…
Educators Speak Out: What Does it Mean to be a “Leading” or “Significant” School?
October 7, 2016What is your school’s aiming point? What do you want for your school in the future? Have you had this discussion? Does your community know what the words you use actually mean? If not, how can you aim at, and intersect, a distant target? Many schools use words like “great” and “outstanding” to describe who…
Recommending Zoom over Skype
October 6, 2016I rarely if ever endorse a product, but I am finding a number of us switching to Zoom from Skype for video chats. I don’t know why, but the quality of the experience, in terms of both clarity of the video feed and vastly fewer glitches and freeze-ups, is much better with Zoom. You can have…
What Do “Great” and “Leading” Mean to Your School?
October 4, 2016What does it mean to be a great school? If you work at a school that is not struggling to survive, there is a good chance that the message you and your colleagues, perhaps even your parent community, tries to communicate, is “we are a great school”. There is nothing wrong with that; we should…
Educators Love to Share and Steal
September 28, 2016A tidbit from the last chapter of my upcoming book: The great news is that education does not need to remain stuck in the past. There are many, many examples of individuals, schools, and districts that have found ways to push past the crippling inertia that has imprisoned so many others in a system that…
Advice to Colleagues as We Start a New Design Challenge
September 27, 2016Some advice i just gave to some school colleagues as we launch a one-year design project: Friends, You are about to launch on what will be a 9-month to one-year design project. For some of you this approach is unusual; for others completely foreign. I want to give you some critical advice at the outset.…
“Conferences” are Dying; A New Species of “Design Camps” Arises!
September 22, 2016NOTHING moves the needle of school innovation faster than high quality, interest-based, peer-to-peer collaboration. If teachers who are eager to create a deeper learning environment for their students can “see” what that looks like, and learn from peers who are actually doing it….boom. We are seeing the emergence of this kind of collaboration in explosive…
Four Drivers of Inevitable School Change: All Include “We”
September 13, 2016Are there still stakeholders in your community, perhaps fearful parents or reluctant faculty members, who don’t understand why schools need to change? Here are some tools for you. In my upcoming new book (which is out for peer review and feedback right now), I explore both what is inevitable in the transformation of education in the…
An “A” List Conference for Deeper Learning: Noble Impact
September 10, 2016My readers and schools I work with are always on the lookout for high quality professional development focused on deeper learning and design-type thinking skills. So check out the video from Noble Impact, a newer group out of Arkansas. I have been in touch with Chad Williamson about their ideas and evolution for several years,…
Textbooks Will Soon Be On the History Shelf
September 2, 2016In an industrial-age system of education known for rigidity, there is nothing that screams “one-size-fits-all” more than the box of clean, new, un-scuffed, tightly-bound, inky-smelling textbooks that arrives in a teacher’s room once every five or six years, accompanied by an instruction manual about how to efficiently transfer the information in those boxes to groups…
Virtual Reality Will Change “School” Forever: Major New Article
August 31, 2016Transformational technologies — from the wheel to the printing press, steam energy, the telephone, radio, air travel, television, personal computing, and the internet — have never been just about changing how we “do” the mechanics of our lives. Truly transformational technologies allow us to fundamentally re-imagine our relationship to the world around us. In a…
Reunion With a Teacher-Hero Who Taught Us to Learn
August 29, 2016The great transformation in which education is engaged in the first quarter of this 21st century is simply this: we are changing our focus from what we teach to how we learn. Forward leaning schools are shifting, in the words of Bo Adams, from teaching organizations to learning organizations. Perhaps most of all, we are…
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