It's one thing to hear a school boast that it is "innovative" or to see that word splashed across their website. It is quite another, and still rarer than we would like, to find a trove or artifacts at at school that, together, paint a real picture of sustained, intentional, innovation. The later is what [...]
I kept a blog from Tom Olverson pinned to my browser for most of a week, letting it stew to see if I could add anything to what is already a tremendously elegant argument on school leadership. I think I can, but only because I am building on such well-crafted thinking by Tom, and by [...]
Does your school value students who exhibit character, grit, and leadership? Is it in your mission to develop these traits in your students? Probably, and rightly so. But as I and others have urged educators to step back and think deeply about the meaning of the word “grit”, an important article by Susan Cain, writing in [...]
The thesis of my new book is simple: Schools have been stuck for decades, but WE can overcome that inertia without permission from the forces that have created the inertia in the first place. I throw down a pretty strong challenge in this book: WE can change the system of education at scale using these powerful levers [...]
A primary role of education is to give students the skill and wisdom to know how to gain knowledge. A key element of that process for centuries has been the reliance on experts who have invested enormous time, money, and intellectual resources in gaining knowledge and understanding that is deeper, more detailed, and often more [...]
From Dumaguete City, Negros Island, Philippines Changing what we do in schools is uncomfortable, even hard sometimes, certainly complex. But as you ponder the “why, what, and how” of change at your school, in your district, or by your community, as you struggle with the inevitable discomfort and disruptions, take a look at what REALLY complex [...]
Rhetorical question for all educators: do you have or wish you had a really well-scaffolded curriculum? To be honest, I would have thought by now most schools could answer that integrated curriculum maps and tight alignment amongst subjects and grade levels were well in our rearview mirrors; that faculty who work in the same school [...]
A you know I rarely advocate for one school, but you also know the high esteem I hold for the remarkable leadership of Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta. So when they asked that I share a job opening opportunity, I am happy to do so. If you think of yourself as an innovator, creator, [...]
The tempest that is Washington D.C. these days provides a puzzle for educators: is it an opportunity for learning, or just too fractious to even touch? What is our role in helping our students to make sense of something, when much of it does not make sense from many traditional perspectives? Are we, as educators and [...]
I have two big takeaways from a fast-paced, roiling week of interaction with hundreds of education colleagues in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore this week. The first is a powerful reinforcement of a paragraph early in the introduction for my upcoming book, Moving the Rock: Seven Levers That Will Revolutionize Education (Josey-Bass Education; coming out this [...]