The Sad Irony of Chasing the Chinese System: Comments on Yong Zhao’s New Book
October 15, 2014Perhaps the most powerful driver of traditional, standards-focused education in America is the sense that we have fallen behind many countries in student performance. In our sound-bite world, the nexus of this concern are the results of international exams of math, reading, and writing. As I have written in the past, educators for whom I have…
Teacher Teams Transforming Schools: Learning From Julie Wilson
October 9, 2014Are your teacher teams working at peak performance to help bring about school innovation and change? It’s sometimes easy in the late spring or dog days of August to gather ourselves and build a vision of deep, impactful learning for our students and ourselves. Then the hard work and long days of the school year take hold…
Is Dissonance An Enemy or Driver of Creative Problem Solving?
October 6, 2014At the very core of learning, I believe, is the recognition that “I” have a problem I want to solve. Lacking that, we are engaging in exercises placed upon us by some external force, exercises in which we either have no stake or do not understand the stakes. For decades I have believed that at…
Follow Laura Fleming’s Imagination of Digital Learning
October 4, 2014Her principal told librarian/technologist Laura Fleming “I don’t care how you do it, but build a system for training Web 2.0 skills to the faculty”. The rest is history. Laura created a library of instruction and practice tools, and has now shared them with the world. She purposefully holds the actual instruction videos to under…
New Look at Design 39 Campus; Come See for Yourself
October 3, 2014Last year I told educators around the country that Design 39 Campus would be a destination not to be missed, and I was right. While small private schools can more easily claim the mantle of 21st century progressivism, a large public school, in the state with some of the lowest per-student funding in the country…
All Saints Honors College Sets a Bar
September 30, 2014I love working with students! Yes, most of my work these days is with adult educators, but I am in my personal teaching wheelhouse with high school students. So I was truly honored to be included on the list of visiting scholars in the inaugural year of the Tad Bird Honors College at All Saints’…
Good, Great, Perfect…and What We Really Want
September 29, 2014“Perfect is the enemy of good and good is the enemy of great.” I think this is what I would post in my classroom if I had one. Maybe I would add to it: “Great is the enemy of that one step beyond into a void for which we don’t yet have a name.” For how…
Video #EdJourney on #EdChatNZ: Collaborate With Global Colleagues Down Under
September 26, 2014We all know that the friendliest people on earth live in New Zealand…and so do many wonderful, passionate, forward-leaning K-12 educator-learners! We had a wonderful live video chat and Twitter back channel this week attended by MANY Kiwis as well as colleagues from Australia and Asia. I was happy and honored to stay up late to share…
What Does “No Excuses” Really Mean? Lessons From a Transformed School
September 24, 2014Are “no excuses” the new “grit”? Last year in this space we shared a deep dive into the evolving meanings and educational efficacy of “grit” as popularized in the studies and writings of Angela Duckworth and others. Yesterday I bumped into similarly disorienting experiences with the term “no excuses”. I visited ground zero of the growing…
Take A Few Minutes of Class to Engage Gender Equality With Hermione Granger?
September 22, 2014How might teachers and students learn and engage in the revolution supporting global gender equality? How about this first step: what if classes around the country watched this short video of Emma (Hermione Granger) Watson addressing the UN; followed with a discussion; and gave the boys in the class (with enthusiastic support from the girls) an…
#EdJourney is Featured Book of the Week
September 19, 2014Honored that Jossey-Bass Education featured #EdJourney as their K-12 book of the week! I have been moderating some Twitter ed-chats, and have a few more lined up for the fall. It is a great way to get our thinking focused on the keys to school innovation; if you know a Twitter chat moderator who might…
A School Pushing Itself Past Inertia and Fear of Change: Sonoma Country Day
September 18, 2014A major pitfall I find amongst schools that want to shift their learning practices is a mis-alignment of resources to a new organizational vision. Where schools get this right, innovative change is systemic and sustainable; where they fail, change is isolated, episodic, and often ephemeral. Sonoma Country Day School is a 35-year old K-8 independent school…
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