If your school is not accessing the FREE products and services of CK-12 Foundation, you are throwing away precious dollars and leaving leading-edge learning tools on the shelf. I gave a brief overview of CK-12 in #EdJourney after an interview with founder Neeru Khosla. Here is a quick video overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbN-fPQnBeQ In addition to fully [...]
What is the difference between a "great" school and a "leading" school? Which would you like to be? Where would you choose to send your own child? How might a school be both? I spent several hours with Kim Diorio, second year principal at Palo Alto High School yesterday. Paly High is as close to being a private school [...]
Design thinking is grabbing hold as a mainstream process for problem solving and building value in K-12 schools. A few school groups are taking it to another level: using regional or district-wide design challenges to deeply embed the skills and outcomes of long-term, sustainable design thinking into their culture and norms. Design thinking is born [...]
The classrooms look huge...but only because there is no clutter of "stuff and the minimalist furniture. "All we have to do is focus on the kids and not ourselves." That was principal Sonya Wrisley's response as I gawked at the seemingly vast amount of space that her students have in the newly-opened Design [...]
I am almost done reading the powerful biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaccson. It is certainly a must read for all of us who have grown up with, or are the recipients of, the generation of technology/design geniuses who changed the world forever. While Jobs was anything but a role model of empathy or perhaps [...]
On this Labor Day, remember that schools are founded in the people who work there. A 2013 Gallup Survey found that: Seven in 10 American workers are “not engaged” or are “actively disengaged” in their jobs, are “emotionally disconnected” from their workplaces, and are “less likely to be productive,” according to Gallup’s recently released study, [...]
I am so honored and lucky to have been involved in the creation of Design 39 Campus, the new K-8 school in Poway Unified School District. Leading education reporter Katrina Schwartz does a better job than I have in the past of painting a picture of D39C, so check out her article in MindShift and [...]
Success, even in little steps, sure is great! The 6th grade teaching team at Ortiz MS in Santa Fe, N.M. should be absolutely BEAMING about how they transformed the first week of middle school, one of the toughest times in a student's life, into one of the best. And I really want you to follow [...]
Is your school community aligned behind a well-defined group of forward-leaning, system-wide learning initiatives? Are you busting or re-enforcing silos with your strategic thinking? Are you using the most recent research in neuroscience to help craft learning routines and differentiate learning opportunities for each child? I had a full day to work with the faculty, staff [...]
Why don't we use faculty meetings for deep and collaborative thinking? Why do trustees and faculty work on parallel tracks that almost never cross? Does our school have a portfolio of value-generating innovative projects in the pipeline that will mature over the next 1-3 years? These are some of the expansive questions we asked and [...]