Like dog years, time passes differently in schools than in the world around us. I have been thinking a LOT about what "school" will be in August of 2036 or so, which in school-time is really not that far away. Certainly five years can pass in the blink of an eye and while the world [...]
Schools do a particularly bad job of ending things before we start others. Yesterday at the last day of our Summer Institute at Tilton School, my co-facilitator Julie Wilson reminded us of the importance of endings. Some celebrate endings; one of our attendees used to work at a school that held a Viking funeral every spring [...]
Progressive education is alive and well in Chicago, the home of John Dewey and the first laboratory school more than 100 years ago. I found a budding example this week, spending two days with the leadership team at the young, rapidly-growing Bennett Day School, which, come August, will be expanding from a quaint four-classroom early [...]
Most school communities and leaders say that significant, system-wide change from a traditional to a deeper learning model takes many years. I think we are about to prove that wrong. Thirteen months ago at The Tilton School the entire faculty and staff, most of the board, and a large number of students, came together to begin [...]
Summertime, and the blogging is lazy. Sorry to be lax in my posting. Yesterday I had a great Google Hangout, part of a MOOC created and operated by New Zealand teacher Danielle Myburgh in which, amongst other points of discussion, I share some of the themes of the new book I am working on. Here [...]
Here is what keeps me up at night: this 3D holographic learning is ALREADY a reality. How is your school or district preparing to intersect with a near-future where this is common place? If not, how can "school" be the place where students prepare for their own futures? How can we even put this kind [...]
I can't make the argument for getting rid of AP courses any better than Suzanne Fogarty, HOS at Lincoln School in Providence, RI. Listen to her 6 minute interview on NPR for why, what, and how...and the positive responses from across her school community. Is this right for every school? No; nothing is right for [...]
Change is measured by the passing of time. Whether transformation is personal, organizational, social, regional, or global, change is always a measurement of "something different" on one axis, and "time" on the other. I write almost exclusively about education; I try to know my readers and most of them don't care much about my worldview [...]
As I work on my new book, I am looking at a resurrected model of the Dewey-era "Lab School" for the 21st Century that includes multi-win collaborations amongst schools, colleges, community organizations, and companies. So I was really happy to see that my former school, Francis Parker School in San Diego, has developed a partnership [...]
Keep your eyes on a new school in western Canada that, when it breaks ground in a couple of years, will bust many of our conceptions about the word "school". A 35 minute ferry ride from Vancouver, B.C, brings you to the small town of Sechelt, population about 10,000. A few miles to the west of [...]