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 [...]
Dear Secretary Duncan, You can't have it both ways: if the emphasis on testing is "sucking the oxygen" out of schools, delaying teacher assessments based on student testing for a year is not a solution. That is the same kind of push-it-down-the-road Band-Aid for which Washington DC has such a deserved, and unfortunate reputation. Over-emphasis [...]
Where is the student voice in our educator Twitter chats? Why are PLC's teacher-centric? How might we break the silo boundary between teacher professional growth and student learning? I get at least one good idea nearly every time I visit a Twitter chat. This morning I grabbed a seat at the #satchatwc (hosted today by education [...]
Are your students looking for global connections with other students who are designing their futures? How might we radically enhance student-student global connections to build capacity in our learning ecosystems? Read on! I had a wonderful skype session yesterday with students and their teacher, Katriona Main, at Albany Senior High School in Auckland, N.Z. As [...]
Just so there is NO argument about who submitted this brilliant idea to the Mythbusters, I just sent this in! Title: No-Cost Power From Electrical Transmission Lines Myth: Can a homeowner living adjacent to high-voltage electrical transmission lines harvest enough ambient EM energy from the transmission lines to power their home? Background: Harvesting small amounts [...]
What is the difference between joy and the pursuit of happiness? In my last post I commented on my day at Holy Child School in Potomac, MD, and how we discovered that one word amongst hundreds in their visioning and guiding documents stood out to so many in the room: Joy. Science teacher Reesh Powers [...]
At most schools I work with, we spend at least some time "parsing the vision", highlighting key words and phrases in a schools guiding documents: mission, vision and philosophy statements, key learning goals, portraits of the graduate, etc. Why? We find that many of these documents contain words and phrases around which there is a [...]
Publisher Jossey-Bass has just announced that my new book, #EdJourney, is available now for download on iBooks! Go here and read all of the narratives and details of my travels across America, 89 days on the road in my Prius, meeting with hundreds of educators at 64 schools to find out how schools are successfully [...]