What Happens At College Does Not Stay At College
May 24, 2012In yesterday’s Boston Globe online Mary Carmichael summarizes a new report being released by think tank Ithaka S+R that shows little, if any, difference in learning outcomes between online and face-to-face instruction in higher education. She provides quotes by James McCarthy of Suffolk University, Brit Kirwan, Chancellor of the University of Maryland system, Michael Horn…
Beyond Strategy: It’s About Value
May 23, 2012We might refer to the last 20 or 30 years in independent school management as the Era of Strategic Planning. Schools recognized during this time that they were businesses, not mom-and-pop start-ups or old boy clubs. Businesses need to plan for the future, not just believe in it. We learned to do five-year look-aheads according…
Balancing Content and Context: A Sweet Spot
May 22, 2012THE argument of our time in education may be that of content vs context. Every time I talk to a group of faculty, there are those who want to switch off and dive back into their love of the content-rich familiar. Then there are those who pull the other way, like in this thoughtful blog…
Do You Have Real Game Changers on Your Team?
May 21, 2012Education is in need of evolutionary game-changes. There are two important aspects to that simple statement. First, we need evolution, not revolution. Our foundations and traditions are strong, so we don’t need to blow up the walls. What we think of as revolution due to fear of the unknown will present as evolution once we…
Damn the Trolls; Cross the Bridge
May 18, 2012We have all used the expression “thinking outside of the box”. What do we really mean, how far are we willing to go, how hard are we willing to work, how disruptive are we willing to be, and how much are we willing to change to actually think outside the box? Picture a bridge; on…
Cost and Structural Implications of Innovation in Schools
May 17, 2012One of my key areas of focus in the next year is the financial implication of innovation in our schools. Relative to even two years ago, there is an enormous agreement to the proposition that rapid global changes really do require schools to adopt a vastly more innovative approach, or risk irrelevancy. Actual implementation of…
Two Big Ideas: Flipping and Doubling Bloom?
May 16, 2012Shelley Wright’s essay, Flipping Bloom’s Taxonomy is a must read, and a possible game changer. She argues that if we want to embed Nth C (21C) skills in our curriculum we can and must start with the most important elements of creativity and work up to the derivations of knowledge. In between she posits a…
Aligning Focus with Goals: A Good Read From Zoe Weil
May 15, 2012In her essay for NAIS Independent School Magazine, “Solutionaries Education for a Better World”, Zoe Weil provokes us to honestly and thoughtfully answer the question “What is schooling for?” It is a question that many of us are asking, and I want to launch off of several of her key points as real action items that…
Fab Lab, Flipping, Failure, and Forecasting the Future: Four Great Reads!
May 14, 2012How fast is the world of education changing? How hard will it be to keep up with this pace? How will we adjust, adopt, adapt and evolve in real time when our traditions are based on months and years of discussion, evaluation, assessment, training, and strategic implementation? Here is a shotgun of radical changes that…
My Best Failed Idea: Campus Sanctuaries
May 11, 2012We have all had good ideas that have failed to take root. A Tweet from Jamie Baker today reminded me of a GREAT idea that I had that was too radical at the time, but maybe others can take advantage of it. If you are planning a campus building project, big or small, what about…
Natural Leadership: A Critical Lever for Effective Innovation
May 10, 2012Sam Folk-Williams, Knowledge Program Manager at Red Hat, a major enterprise computing company, wrote a standout piece on leadership for the Management Innovation Exchange. Co-authored by Jim Stikeleather and Michele Zanini, the paper proposes a “dynamic system for measuring an individual’s ‘natural leadership’. They outline three broad areas of leadership that occur largely outside of,…
Questioning and Experiencing: Two Simple, POWERFUL Keys
May 9, 2012I have been tracking prolific and thoughtful blogs by Annie Murphy Paul on her site, The Brilliant Blog. She provides excellent summaries from a wide range of research and media sources, and two really resonated today: First, she reports on research described by Sarah Hampson in Canada’s Globe and Mail. Two years ago, according to…
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