Once again, I have found a way to visit a remarkable school, share the details with all of you, and NOT pack my Prius and drive around the country. EdJourney continues, this time with a charter school that is pioneering and sharing a remarkable arc of student-owned, differentiated, competency-based learning, and doing it with a [...]
Institute For The Future, based in Palo Alto, CA Following my great Skype yesterday with Sean Ness (@seanness)and Devin Fidler (@devinfidler) of the Institue For The Future, they were kind enough to highlight a number of their publicly available resources that relate to the future of education and learning. I will certainly be [...]
The annual NMC Horizon Report for K12 schools, a comprehensive forecast of what technologies will most impact K12 education in the next 1-5 years. What I enjoyed seeing this year is that we are recognizing that technology will become less a driver of education than a facilitator of learning. I also think that the Horizon [...]
Somewhere hovering in the open rafters of a large design space at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School, the ghosts of my fictional protagonists from The Falconer, Mr. Usher and Sunny/Sun Tzu sat and had a cup of tea today. They don’t have Twitter accounts so we can’t follow their thoughts, but we know they listened with [...]
A remarkable day at the Martin Institute Summer Conference in Memphis, and one has to ask...why is this unique? As John Hunter asked me this afternoon, is this revolutionary? A conference of learning amongst educators, not a convention with numerous commercial sponsors and treasure spent on high-priced authors. Few chairs in rows, very little sit-and-get. [...]
This video of Diana Rhoten via Edutopia really resonated with the chapters I am writing for my book from my school visits last year. In particular, the idea of "relevance" is one of the six key indicators I saw of schools that are really shifting away from the assembly line model, where relevance is almost [...]
I came up with a set of professional goals before I graduated college, and they have never left me: work with smart people to tackle difficult problems, create elegant solutions, for something of value. This week has been another link in that chain! All this week I have been able to sit in with a dynamic team [...]
As many of you know, I formally resigned my position at Francis Parker School this spring after almost a decade and a half in a variety of leadership positions. I hope to continue my association with Parker, which my great aunt and uncle founded 100 years ago, in informal ways. For now, and following on [...]
Today I had two comments from deep in my archive (all of a year ago) on my post about Flipping or Doubling Bloom's Taxonomy, including this from Bree Berman, an instructional coach at Flint Hill School: Your focus on the “why” as primary made me think about how teachers view their students’ motivations. Frequently I [...]
Almost exactly one year ago I told my friends Bo Adams (@boadams1) and Jill Gough (@jgough) that Twitter was for people with nothing better to do than broadcast their latest coffee venue. They told me to get over myself and get in the game. They were right. If you are an educational administrator and not [...]