When Questions Are Much More Than Academic
June 8, 2012For most of us, the downside of not asking the right questions or not organizing information in the right way is that we do poorly on a test, lose money in a business deal, have to re-work a design drawing, or take another shot at drafting that proposal. For young men and women in uniform…
School Value: The Simple Lesson of Graduation Speeches
June 6, 2012How many speeches by graduating high school seniors have you heard in your career? Tens? Dozens? There are three varieties. One offers insight into the heart of the speaker. The second suggests that the class should go out and do wonderful things with their lives and talents. The third looks back and summarizes the yearbook…
Summer Flix: A Favorite, Fun Learning Tool
June 5, 2012I was sitting on the sofa with my 23-year old daughter over the weekend, scrolling the TV menu, and up came “Out of Africa”. I asked my daughter if she had ever seen it and she replied “Oh, yeah that’s the one about the Swedish lady who grows coffee; we watched it with you when…
Managing Knowledge-base: A Bit Obscure, But Important to Schools
June 4, 2012Schools are knowledge-based organizations. We may want to change the balance of skills and content instruction, but our core business is and will always remain rooted in knowledge. We don’t make things; we make “things” (people) smarter through the management of knowledge. Two blog posts grabbed my attention over the weekend as I am working…
Job #1: Dive In!
June 3, 2012High school graduations speeches tend to all sound the same. Bless the students and guest speakers, but after sitting through 15 graduations in the last 15 years, most of the wisdom and reflections are worn out. Yesterday, Carson Scott, the valedictorian of our Francis Parker School graduating class provided two words that will stick with…
Innovation is Hard? Schools Have it Easy.
June 2, 2012Yesterday I was writing a chapter of the new book dealing with innovation in schools. This singular point stuck out: Innovation is hard because it is about the future, and most predictions about the future turn out to be wrong. This creates the highest level of risk for organizations that have to commit large amounts…
Humbly Disagree with Tony Wagner on Work and Play
June 1, 2012Annie Murphy Paul posted a short commentary to a quote from Tony Wagner’s new book “Creating Innovators”. Wagner states that the millennial generation is particularly attuned to treating work as play because they have grown up in a digital world, and that they are more passionate about making a difference in the world than in…
Four Quick Links to Innovation Knowledge-base
May 31, 2012Innovation Excellence let us know that Florida opens a business incubator in Gainesville, a place for people to set up shop and share ideas on getting their dreams off the ground. Why don’t we have these for education, or why don’t we, as educators send our people to hang out in these places and share…
How to REALLY Measure Your School
May 30, 2012More than a year ago, Keith Evans, Head of Collegiate School in Richmond, and one of the brightest, most forward-thinking educators I know, sent me a list of about five metrics that he had created (yes, a bit tongue-in-cheek) to measure true effectiveness of his school. I added to the list. I swear I cannot…
Options=Good
May 29, 2012About 25 years ago a very wise mentor gave me a piece of timeless advice: always pick the path that provides the greatest number of options. To this day I cannot recall a single instance where it has failed the test of hindsight. I remember telling my own children that the reason prison or jail…
Memorial Day: A Teaching Moment We Should Never Miss
May 26, 2012Most of my readers live in the U.S., but some do not. Regardless of nationality, remembering those who have sacrificed their lives in service of their country, as Americans do on Memorial Day, is something we share across borders and time. This weekend we remember. On these days we don’t argue about the value of…
Innovation=Value: My Best Example
May 25, 2012What does real innovation look like in schools and how do we know we are not just stirring up a bunch of cool, but unrealistic, new ideas? Rita Gunther McGrath, responding to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, admonishes us that lots of companies talk about their focus on innovation but empirical data suggest…
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