I work with schools and districts that are in the early stages of transforming to a range of deeper learning models. My thinking on something has been a little bit stuck. How might a school or district, early in the transformation from a traditional to a deeper learning model, self-assess their progress? In those early [...]
If you work at a K-8 school and want to transform to a deeper learning experience for your students, I simply do not know of a better example to visit than Design 39 Campus in Poway Unified District, CA. If you have read my posts in the past, you know I follow D39C closely; I [...]
I may have the chance to keynote a major international conference later this year, and, sitting in my chair at home this morning, my opening to what will be a highly diverse group of attendees began to form itself. I thought I would share: I'm not a techie, but I am going to talk about [...]
Stanford Cardinal super-fan Cliff (am sure someone knows his last name, but I don't) is a gnomish old guy who reportedly made a fortune in Silicon Valley, retired, and for years has shown up at Stanford sporting events all over the country. Last week before the national NCAA semi-final women's volleyball match between the Cardinal [...]
If you walk around schools, if you ask the right questions, if you stop and listen to teachers and students, if you look at how spaces are arranged and used, you can tell a lot about a school in a short period of time. I am in freezing Columbus, OH for the NCAA volleyball Final [...]
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 [...]
A theme that comes up in every school I work with, and again today: Change at schools does not start with a shift in the daily schedule, the individuals in the room, the classrooms in which we teach, or a curriculum scaffold. Those will come in time. But first, change is about culture. It is [...]