What Does Student-Owned Learning Exploration Look Like?
February 4, 2015What does deeper, richer learning look like? How might we shift to a more student-centered, student-owned school day? Is this possible only in private schools, or also in public schools that are adjusting to new standards and struggling with larger class sizes? Here are some pics from a quick stop at Design 39 Campus yesterday.…
A Simple Proposal; A Radical Change to American Education?
February 2, 2015Spoiler alert and “huge surprise”: the NY Times did NOT choose to print the following as a guest editorial. Well, let’s show ’em how K-12 educators can weigh in on big ideas without the popular press! Amidst the seemingly endless list of polarizing arguments tearing at the American landscape, American K-12 education has high billing.…
“Teacher as Farmer” on Edutopia.Org
January 28, 2015I have started to write for Edutopia; see my current article “Teacher as Farmer” on their site.
Congratulations, Dr. Lichtman!
January 27, 2015There are times when personal and professional interests directly cross, and this is one of them. Those who follow this blog know that I almost exclusively write about education, but have upon occasion shared something from or about our rock-star daughter, Cassidy in her role as incredible scholar athlete and big thinker. Today it is…
Rapid Prototypes of Near-Classroom Experiential Learning Units
January 24, 2015Could your faculty (with maybe a bit of input from students) prototype an experiential learning unit in 14 minutes that meets the following specs?: Student ownership of the project Multidisciplinary content Observation Reflection Synthesis Action that impacts others Outside the classroom but within walking distance That is one of the fast activities we ran through…
Just How Disruptive Can Innovation Be?
January 9, 2015Do you want to understand disruptive innovation? Fill your car’s gas tank. And if you think the price of gas has nothing to do with the future of schools, read on! In the 1970’s (I know this stuff because I was a geologist at Stanford and with the US Geological Survey back then), the official reports…
The Infection of Radicalism
January 8, 2015Events like the massacre in Paris yesterday make discussions of moral relativism easy. There are two cultures of people in the world: those that leap to stop Ebola from killing millions, even when most of those people are different, poor and far away; and those that want to kill other people out of a twisted sense…
The Junction of “Surprise” and “Ah-Ha”
January 7, 2015What if school was primarily a place where students and teachers co-searched for surprises? We often find the best ideas, the most creative solutions, the profitable surprises, not in the expected, the well-trodden, the known, but in the outliers, the untested, and the unusual. Maybe they have been passed over by others because they are partially…
The Two Critical Planes of School Innovation
January 5, 2015I have had the unique privilege of visiting more than 100 K-12 schools in the last two years, and in virtually every one I found a spark of what the school leaders called “innovation”. A principal or head of school says “you just have to see what Ms. Jones is doing in her classroom; it…
A Bunch of Words Better Than “Grit”
January 3, 2015From a roiling, fast #satchatwc Twitter chat this morning: Many of the responses to “what one word describes your goals for 2015?” are better than the word “grit”. Surely words like joy, sparkle, passion, intent, courage, risk, unbounded, ask, voice, compassion, stretch, iterate, fearless, empathy, uncertainty, reflective, moment, authentic, yet, create, enthusiastic, awesome, overcome, finish, empower,…
What Students Really Want to Learn at School via (Student) Anya Smith
January 1, 2015What are we going to do with Anya? And why are we not teaching her what she needs and wants to learn? Anya Smith is a high school student in the inaugural year of the iDiploma program at Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School designed and operated by Meghan Cureton and Bo Adams. Anya latched on to…
A Short Note of Thanks
December 16, 2014Social media is the clothing of a new Goddess of Connectivity…until one realizes just how many people they are connected with and how important each of them are, as an individual within and beyond the collective. Last night flying home from Texas from my last school-team visit of what has been both an extremely busy…
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