Education and rural American have always been symbiotic. In the 19th century, small towns built one-room school houses, and land grant colleges created the foundations for what are now many of the most thriving cities in the country. Today that symbiosis is under severe threat. Most education systems in rural America are underserved and under-supported; [...]
If you follow my social media at all, you know I am getting ready to launch a big, daunting, exciting, new project, #EdJourney on steroids: #WisdomRoad. I won't repeat the details here; the short one-pager in on my new website landing page, and a short launch article was published last week by my "communications partner", [...]
Is your school, like so many others, thinking of leveraging community partnerships for real world, student-choice learning? If so, read on! About four years ago, Legacy Christian Academy in Frisco, TX launched their Professional Schools Program (PSP) in grades 9-12. I visited them just before the launch, and revisited yesterday to get an update. You [...]
If you want your school to be considered a "leader", but you're not sure exactly what that might look like, here it is: Whatever strides towards empowering women and girls that K-12 has made over the past few decades, and there have been many, it is not enough. Many post-secondary futures are highly gender-imbalanced. The [...]
Napoleon. Stalin. Hitler. Putin. Will the good Russian people ever learn that the wars that dictators foment never end well for them? The European wars of the 20th century are not ancient history; I was born 11 years after the end of WW II, which killed tens of millions in Europe alone. Now, Putin, an [...]
All educators, not just those who teach in a traditional classroom, have a critical role to play in the social and emotional wellness of the next generation. And beyond the traditional classroom, more American youth choose to spend their time involved in athletics than any other activity. Isn't it time that we stopped viewing athletics [...]
In April I was asked to join a team to design and build "the best school in America", a provocative and audacious challenge from the edu-leaders at Alamogordo (NM) Public Schools. Alamogordo is a small, diverse, rural lower and middle class town tucked away alongside the extraordinary beauty and climate of the Tularosa Basin, the [...]
When it comes to human decisions, reducing friction is radically more effective than increasing force. This simple lesson is evident in everything from rockets to swimming. And it is is key to understanding how to get people to "move" from where they are to where we want them to be. Loran Nordgren at the Kellog [...]
If you are trying to change your school, this is where your efforts will be most rewarded. In Part II, we again visit the work of systems guru Donella Meadows who identifies " 'leverage points' within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one [...]
Schools are complex systems. In a meaty article by systems guru Donella Meadows (HT to Tim Fish at NAIS for sharing with me) we find that, "Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in 'leverage points'. These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an [...]
