Yesterday I tweeted “Innovation is limited by minds, not $$”. I am in Houston to work for a day with a highly respected independent school. In response to that, a Twitter colleague suggested that innovation is easy for those with money and not for those less well funded. Both historical and current evidence supports my sense of what [...]
What can making a fire teach us about the nature of learning? I have had an ongoing dialogue with Dr. Adrian Bejan of Duke University, one of the preeminent scholars on the science of connectivity and flow through human, organic, and inorganic systems. He recently sent me his latest article, Why Humans Build Fires Shaped the Same [...]
I am truly honored to receive a generous and superlative book review of #EdJourney from the prestigious USC Rossier School of Education. They call the book "...a must-read for educators that is both clear-eyed in its appraisal of the obstacles faced by the education community and refreshingly upbeat in its reporting about innovations that are [...]
What a dream come true it would be to go hang out at Pixar Studios, a place where the only real goal is to "make the product great", where they not only say that, but demonstrate it in a deep culture constantly evolving to "be great" in new, undiscovered ways? I think that dream, though, [...]
Do we make a difference? Someone once asked that question of Pete Seeger: "How do you know you have made a difference" by sticking to your principles and your message in the face of long odds. His answer: "I don't know, but I have met many people with live eyes and live minds." That perfectly [...]
I have written previously about the confluence of two innovation pathways, the "pedagogical master plan" of Bo Adams and my "stairway of school innovation". There is now a journal article online that you can read, reference, and share, complete with graphics and a list of key elements on the innovation stairway that you can use [...]
I always worry that students in school look forward to Memorial Day as a day off of school, unless they are already enjoying a summer break, in which case it may be just another day. The foundations of wisdom, that which we hope to instill in our next generations beyond what they can learn in [...]
How do you as an individual, your school as an organization, and the group of all schools and educators as a system increase the odds of successful innovation? Consider 100 pollywogs, each in 100 different small ponds; that is 10,000 pollywogs. Will they evolve? Probably, given enough time and a sustained ecosystem of resource supply, [...]
What is the future of the school "library"? Last month I took my stab with "Replace 'Library' With 'Portal of Idea Flow'?" on Edutopia. It built on ideas shared by Beth Holland and others, on discussions we see all over the country/world about how these library spaces might evolve and be re-imagined in the future [...]
Once in a while I get the pleasure of working deeply with students, asking the adults to sit back and watch how their students expand and rise to unbounded, untested, unknown mini-challenges. That was the kind of day we had at the Shipley School last fall; here are just a few minutes out of our [...]