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 [...]
Yesterday at the opening of Design 39 Campus, CEO of San Diego-based WD40 (that's right, the spray stuff in your garage that has about a million uses) Garry Ridge spoke for a few minutes about what makes his company, and many organizations, successful. He cited statistics that amongst all US companies, something like 60% of [...]
Do you want to see a transformed learning ecosystem? Can we scale differentiated learning up from small, elite private schools to large public schools with low funding levels? Can we break the anchors of time, space, subject, age, and an obsession with content-driven test scores to re-create experiential, passion-based learning amongst a community of young [...]
My publisher, Jossey-Bass Education, has kindly agreed to allow a free download of the first chapter of my book, #EdJourney. Chapter One is about the main obstacle that schools cited in my interviews when they realize that they need to embrace a path of change: the allocation of time during the day. What if we [...]