In a major new three-hour workshop that I will co-present with John Gulla of the EE Ford Foundation at the annual NAIS Conference (Wed., March 1, 1-4 PM; sign up for the workshop before it is full!), we will look at what is inevitable in the transformation of "schools" over the next 20+ years. One [...]
Many of us have been struggling over how to teach our students, and ourselves, about a new world of widespread fake news. I have argued that the skills of filtering real and fake news must become a large element of what we call "literacy", every bit as important, and perhaps more so, than our traditional [...]
In October I was honored to participate in An Evening of Inquiry, Innovation, and Impact at Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta. Thanks to Mt. Vernon Institute of Innovation for hosting this intimate conversation-in-the-round, and to my co-presenters on the evening, Kawai Lai, Glen Whitman, Kaleb Rashad, Tod Martin, and Joyelle Harris. Feel free to [...]
And people wondered why the low income school with the mascot of a big wave with fists had a lot of trouble with fighting during recess... The new mascot is the green sea turtle that live in the shallow, southernmost reaches of San Diego Bay just a few steps from the newly renamed and rebranded Bayside [...]
Like many others, I am deeply concerned with the rapid spread of quasi-factual and nonsensical information spread across social and "journalistic" media as truth. As educators, we simply must take on the challenge of learning and teaching how to separate truth from fiction and opinion. In a recent post, journalist and commentator Dan Rather noted [...]
If we can point to a moment when educators finally realized that the world was changing so dramatically that we had to take notice, it was within a year or so of the publication of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. Friedman has a remarkable ability to take something complex that many of us know to [...]
In the earliest phase of work with each school with which I engage, I ask the site leader (principal, head of school, superintendent) to come up with a set of "boundary conditions" that will guide and govern a process of expansive strategic design. Boundary conditions set out both the limits and expectations of a project. They [...]
Twenty years ago, "disruptive innovation" was introduced to educational lexicon by Clayton Christensen largely within the context of technology. Personal computers and rapid new technological inventions were going to fundamentally change the system of schools. A decade ago, flattened global economic relationships were going to fundamentally change schools as we shifted learning to prepare students [...]
Col. Francis Parker, a contemporary of John Dewey, said that the primary role of education was to instill in students the skills necessary for them to fulfill their roles as democratic citizens. If the events of the last year have taught us anything it is that these skills, and how they are exercised, are being [...]
A thoughtful colleague at one of my client schools (anonymous now but not for long) wants to create a "portrait of a teacher" for and with her faculty. It is a great challenge: we need to know what we are aiming for if we want to hit it. She sent me some proposed questions for [...]