Thinkabit Lab in San Diego: Lighting Fires of Innovation and Imagination
April 15, 2016A place where students can gain self awareness into their unique value; where they can see how they might make a positive impact on the world; and where they can tinker to learn about interests they may never have uncovered. Sounds to me like a darn good mission statement for any school! These are the guiding…
Some Great Research-based Resources via Edutopia
April 14, 2016How do we make decisions about what and how to teach? Effective organizations make decisions based on some measure of objectivity so we are not constantly pursuing personal agendas of the loudest person or strongest interest group. Several schools I work with have wrestled with the idea of creating “Simple Rules” to help guide these…
School Innovation Trajectories: Steep Curves or a Quantum Step?
April 12, 2016Hitting a moving target is all about aim, velocity, and trajectory. When NASA fires off a satellite to intersect with an asteroid, they need to accurately calculate where that little rock will be a few years from now. If they are wrong in those calculations, and if the satellite has booster rockets, they can make…
Why Tesla REALLY Matters For School Leaders
April 8, 2016Tesla took orders totaling more than $14 billion for their new car model…in one week. There are a number of other electric and hybrid cars on the market and coming soon, and some with arguably better range and price point. The analogy to Apple computers should be lost on no one. What Elon Musk did…
School in 20 Years…
April 5, 2016What will “school” be 20 years from now? I am not ready to roll out my entire argument, but one result that I think is inevitable is that all schools, public and private, will increasingly fall into one of three categories (and probably some mixtures of the three): Struggling to stay open. Insulated from market…
What is the Purpose of a Job?, via Jordan Greenhall
March 31, 2016I met Jordan Greenhall last night; he has a remarkable background in technology companies and I was immediately impressed with his thinking about connected learning and social systems. This short video outlines some of his thinking about “why we have jobs” and what social and economic benefits they provide in a post-industrial economy. This is…
My Vodcast Series with “Project 2051”
March 30, 2016I have been recording a series of short (10 minutes or so) conversations with Garth Nichols and Justin Medved, two educators in Toronto, as they and their interscholastic group of colleagues, and the Canadian Association of Independent Schools, use #EdJourney as one guide in their conversations around changing schools. If you are looking for a…
Moving From “Why” and “What” to “How”
March 22, 2016There is nothing like deep discussions with thoughtful colleagues to solidify a key idea. Yesterday I got to hang out via video chat for an hour and a half with Bo Adams and Tim Fish, two of that unique group of educators who can both “think big and do small”: develop theory and deep understanding…
The Battle Between Trust and Fear
March 19, 2016In a battle of fear and trust, trust needs a great hand to win. This morning’s always-provocative #satchatwc, hosted by Shelley Burgess, on the nature of trust, generated a rapid and steady stream of great, targeted, and pithy advice about how leaders can build trust in their organizations. There were powerful quotes from Stephen Covey and…
Do We See the Waterfall Ahead?
March 17, 2016When we benchmark against other schools, are we focusing on the river or on the banks? Assessing how well an organization is meeting its mission is a difficult job. Most organizations compare themselves against other similar organizations with similar missions following the logic that measuring against an “average” or a “best in class”, tells us how…
Links I Find and Share
March 16, 2016I am starting to research my next book and in the process will be interviewing education thought and action leaders from around the country. As I do so, I will run across great tidbits, and of course I love to share, and will drop them into Tweets and here on my blog from time to…
“Why Doesn’t School Look Like This?”
March 13, 2016What if teachers learned to teach and learners learned to learn like explorers, scientists, empaths, inventors, poets, artists, and entrepreneurs? What if we started over in our construct of education, dialed it back to pre-1850 and extracted the pedagogy of apprenticeship, experience, observation, synthesis, and practice that underlay the wondrous mind explosions of the Renaissance,…
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