NOTHING moves the needle of school innovation faster than high quality, interest-based, peer-to-peer collaboration. If teachers who are eager to create a deeper learning environment for their students can "see" what that looks like, and learn from peers who are actually doing it....boom. We are seeing the emergence of this kind of collaboration in explosive [...]
Transformational technologies — from the wheel to the printing press, steam energy, the telephone, radio, air travel, television, personal computing, and the internet — have never been just about changing how we “do” the mechanics of our lives. Truly transformational technologies allow us to fundamentally re-imagine our relationship to the world around us. In a [...]
The great transformation in which education is engaged in the first quarter of this 21st century is simply this: we are changing our focus from what we teach to how we learn. Forward leaning schools are shifting, in the words of Bo Adams, from teaching organizations to learning organizations. Perhaps most of all, we are [...]
Most school communities and leaders say that significant, system-wide change from a traditional to a deeper learning model takes many years. I think we are about to prove that wrong. Thirteen months ago at The Tilton School the entire faculty and staff, most of the board, and a large number of students, came together to begin [...]
A place where students can gain self awareness into their unique value; where they can see how they might make a positive impact on the world; and where they can tinker to learn about interests they may never have uncovered. Sounds to me like a darn good mission statement for any school! These are the guiding [...]
I have added an important new arrow to my quiver. What if you (if you are a school leader) or you and your teaching colleagues (if you are in the classroom most of the day) had a "map" of your school's overall affinity for "deeper learning"? "Deeper learning" is the term that many of us are [...]
THE most critical element on the path to school innovation is to align precious resources with a forward leaning vision. If your school recognizes the need for innovation, for changing the assembly line model of learning, it is NOT enough to just talk about it. Sooner or later your customers will realize the disconnect between [...]
I just added two very important slides to my deck, or arrows in my quiver. Last weekend at a Unity Church service we attended with friends in Santa Fe, the minister selected two quotes which hold both personal power and a real message for educators. The Tao te Ching tells us: "To attain knowledge, add [...]
As promised, I made a short, very informal video of my visit with Hobsonville Point Secondary School in New Zealand. I wrote about HPSS last week with the comment that they are really an exemplar of what high schools can and might look like in the future. If you are interested in space, architecture, and [...]
Last week in New Zealand I visited a high school that may well be the exemplar for global high schools of the future. Hobsonville Point Secondary School (HPSS) on the outskirts of Auckland is just two years old, and only has about 20% of its build-out student population. It has been designed, physically and pedagogically to break [...]