i have been fortunate to both design new learning spaces in a major school renovation, and to see dozens of examples of new and re-tooled learning spaces. A virtual meeting with a pioneering school group yesterday to talk about a new school building, gave me the chance to think about the boundary conditions I would [...]
In the next ten days I will work with five very different schools/districts, and all five are (amongst other things) thinking deeply about curriculum. I am not a curriculum expert at all, but here is what I do know: curriculum is a tool of learning. Tools are at the far end of a logic model or [...]
We model success for others. Great teachers model success for their students; principals for teachers; coaches for their athletes. Consultants are known for the models they bring, models that can be clear, helpful solutions, but also overly-simplified cookbook recipes that sound great but often just don't fit all of us. I was thinking about models yesterday [...]
For most of you who follow my blog, the conversation I had with Don Wettrick and Hunter Stone yesterday will likely be old hat. That is because you are on the leading edge! Perhaps there are others at your school who are now ready to transform to a deeper learning system...so share! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLONWfgbDaE Don and Hunter [...]
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 [...]
The way Bo Adams tells it, a couple of weeks ago they had a large group of visitors touring the iDiploma Hive at Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School, meeting with one of the student cohorts who are working in teams on various self-selected, long-term design and development projects. A cell phone range and one of the [...]
Pizza always helps thinking! What is your school's aiming point? What do you want for your school in the future? Have you had this discussion? Does your community know what the words you use actually mean? If not, how can you aim at, and intersect, a distant target? Many schools use words like [...]
What does it mean to be a great school? If you work at a school that is not struggling to survive, there is a good chance that the message you and your colleagues, perhaps even your parent community, tries to communicate, is "we are a great school". There is nothing wrong with that; we should [...]
Some advice i just gave to some school colleagues as we launch a one-year design project: Friends, You are about to launch on what will be a 9-month to one-year design project. For some of you this approach is unusual; for others completely foreign. I want to give you some critical advice at the outset. [...]
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 [...]