Sustaining Innovation: Focus at 3,000 Feet
December 9, 2015How can your school best create the conditions that support innovation? There are essentially three broad levels of concern that take up the attention of innovation-oriented educators: The 10,000 Foot Level: creating a powerful, value-laden, forward-leaning vision, and building towards it through long-term strategies. The 3,000 Foot Level: creating and sustaining the processes and practices…
Create a “Compass Collaborative” at Your School?
December 7, 2015How might we best capture and build upon the swirl of talent, ideas, and knowledge within our schools? How might we build and sustain systematic distributed idea creation and collegial feedback as a core function of an evolving school? I have previously written about, and use in my workshops, elements of the brilliant book Creativity,…
Culture of Innovation is Built With Little Chunks of Time
December 4, 2015Think of all the discussions, decisions, work, and meetings and that take up “free” time at school, those precious prep periods and colleague collaboration windows that you have managed to carve out of the busy school day. Imagine those times as forming a cube. That cube is packed full, right? You are not wasting any of that time…
Assessing Our Capacity for “Deeper Learning”
December 3, 2015I have added an important new arrow to my quiver. What if you (if you are a school leader) or you and your teaching colleagues (if you are in the classroom most of the day) had a “map” of your school’s overall affinity for “deeper learning”? “Deeper learning” is the term that many of us are…
Power of Logic Models in Leading School Change
December 2, 2015Do changes at your school follow any logical model? Or do things happen because some one or group have the pull or push to make them happen? Is change intentional, or do you get the sense that “we are going to throw a lot of stuff against a wall and see what sticks”? Logic models are…
Following a Shared Vision Does NOT Mean We Share Compass Headings
November 30, 2015If the end point is the same, but we all start from a different place, what does that say about our paths to success? I have increasingly used the metaphor of a “North Star” around which schools can build a shared vision of where they want to get to in terms of “great learning”. We…
Can Simple Rules Overcome Fear of the Unknown?
November 25, 2015Can a few simple rules guide our personal and professional decision pathways? Can they help alleviate the fear that I am going to leap into a bottomless chasm of future uncertainty? Can they get us past the chokepoints of inertia that stand in the way of following a true passion? I think so. A few…
First Accredited AP Language Course Developed by Students
November 18, 2015Can students create their own Advanced Placement course? I guess so! I just talked to Katherine Jones and Anya Smith, two juniors at Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta. They wrote, developed, submitted, are “taking”, and have now been accredited for an AP Language Arts course. According to them it appears to be the first student-written…
Do We Win With Peace or War?
November 15, 2015In the aftermath of Paris, people of good will are wrestling with perhaps the existential question of our time: can we fight our way to peace, or does the solution lie in following those greatest teachers of our time—Gandhi and King—who argued that we can never “drive out darkness with darkness in kind, but only with…
We All Have 3 Mins a Day to Help a Colleague Grow!
November 13, 2015A couple of years ago, Bo Adams told me that at Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School they decided to turbocharge instructional rounds by asking each teacher to visit another classroom for a quick three-minute pass-by observation, followed by a feedback Tweet to a common hashtag. I loved this idea and have shared it a number of…
Is Leadership Transition the Weak Link of School Innovation?
November 10, 2015Two remarkable, leading schools I know of are undergoing leadership changes. Many people have spent time, treasure, and, most importantly, professional risk capital to lever these schools off of the a worn out path and on to visionary trajectories of the future of learning. Now comes the test: will these schools survive a leadership transition…
Hewlett Foundation Announces Big Push in Open Educational Resources
November 9, 2015Why does your school community still charge itself for expensive textbooks when fully accredited resources are available for free? For some schools the answer is simple: they are controlled by local and state requirements to use certain books. For other schools where these overly prescriptive regulations do not apply, news out of the Hewlett Foundation…
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