Must Must Read: Building School 2.0 via Lehmann and Chase
August 19, 2015I can only wish I had the chops to have written Building School 2.0: How to Create the Schools We Need. I read a lot of books, many on the current state and future of K-12 education, best practices of organizational change and innovation, and the nature of creative individuals and organizations. I don’t recommend…
Kohn, Dweck, and Growth Mindset: Are There Different Emerging Usages of the Term?
August 18, 2015In his latest article in Salon, big edu-thinker and always provocative Alfie Kohn takes on one of the icons of K-12 learning, Carol Dweck and her catechism of “growth mindset”. As I tweeted, I would pay good money to attend a debate between these two! My thoughts are not at their level of theory, but more like…
Innovation Limited By Minds, Not $$
August 17, 2015Yesterday I tweeted “Innovation is limited by minds, not $$”. I am in Houston to work for a day with a highly respected independent school. In response to that, a Twitter colleague suggested that innovation is easy for those with money and not for those less well funded. Both historical and current evidence supports my sense of what…
Fire, Learning, and the Spread of Knowledge
August 12, 2015What can making a fire teach us about the nature of learning? I have had an ongoing dialogue with Dr. Adrian Bejan of Duke University, one of the preeminent scholars on the science of connectivity and flow through human, organic, and inorganic systems. He recently sent me his latest article, Why Humans Build Fires Shaped the Same…
Simple Rules: An Important Step in School Transformation?
August 11, 2015Here is something I bet we can all agree on: simple is almost always better than complicated. What if we could take those messy problems at our schools that always seem to circle back on us, that confound us with inertia, dead ends, and multiple stakeholder turf battles, and find some simple guidelines to sort…
Two Ways to Engage Students in Deeper Learning This Year
July 29, 2015Innovation in K12 education is about shifting our practice from a rigid, proscribed one-size-fits-all-every-year model to one that is more adaptable, flexible, and relevant to student interests and passions. As you think about the coming school year, here are two simple guides via @Edutopia to help shift your classroom practice towards a deeper learning student experience: The…
STEM, STEAM, T-Rex, and Crows
July 25, 2015One of the goals I see most frequently in school strategic plans in the last half decade is an increased focus on STEM courses. The rationale is powerful: there is little debate that job opportunities in STEM fields will continue to far outpace that for students who have majored in the humanities. Recognizing, however, that creativity, perhaps…
USC School of Education Calls #EdJourney a “Must Read”
July 22, 2015I am truly honored to receive a generous and superlative book review of #EdJourney from the prestigious USC Rossier School of Education. They call the book “…a must-read for educators that is both clear-eyed in its appraisal of the obstacles faced by the education community and refreshingly upbeat in its reporting about innovations that are…
What Do Pixar and Schools Have In Common? Not Enough!
July 9, 2015What a dream come true it would be to go hang out at Pixar Studios, a place where the only real goal is to “make the product great”, where they not only say that, but demonstrate it in a deep culture constantly evolving to “be great” in new, undiscovered ways? I think that dream, though,…
My Blog on Edutopia Today!
July 8, 2015For those who don’t follow me on Twitter or follow so many that it has become a waterfall, here is a link to a blog I wrote published on Edutopia today. In it I offer some specific recommendations on how schools can “gain comfort with the discomfort” of school change. In fact, we find that…
Is Your School Building a “Whalephant”
July 1, 2015What would it look like if you started with an elephant and tried to turn it into a whale, piece by piece, without starting over? Imagine an artist’s image of this process: first changing the right front foot into a flipper, then the tusks into a wide sheet of baleen, then the wispy little tail…
Must See TED Talk on Keys to High Performing Groups
June 17, 2015Group creativity and performance, what will make a school organization successful in times of challenge and change, is not driven by a few superstars. It is driven by the sum of interactions of diverse groups with time to share and build in relatively equality. Thanks to Bo Adams, my primary filter for TED talks, for…
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