Every Wednesday evening (9 PM Eastern; 6 PM Pacific) a group of creative, energetic, risk-taking educators gathers for #DTK12chat, a virtual meeting on Twitter about the role and use of design thinking (DT) in K12 education. The pace and quality of the discussion is outstanding, including many links to resources to help others use the [...]
I love being proven right by the likes of Malcolm Gladwell! Pass this along to your college guidance office. When our son, Josh, was a rising junior in high school, we started looking at colleges. He was in the top 10% of his class at a very good independent school; knew he wanted to go [...]
I am so pleased and honored to forward the announcement that The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence has welcomed seven outstanding K-12 educators as the newest group of Martin Fellows. They are: Philip Cummings, Teacher, Presbyterian Day School, Memphis, TN Robert Dillon, Director of Technology and Innovation, Afton School District, St. Louis, MO Jill Gough, [...]
Did I contemplate the values of grit many years ago and not know it? Angela Duckworth has drawn such a clean picture of this trait we now call grit, and how it impacts success. She says that grit has a lot to do with the tendency to sustain interest in long term goals in the [...]
Public schools face an array of daunting challenges, each a reason that change is hard: won't work, won't improve outcomes, can't afford it, teachers will rebel, flavor-of-the-month. Taken together these=inertia that prevent us from scrapping the Industrial Age assembly line and back-flipping to the passion and engagement of Dewey+connectivity that will prepare our students for [...]
I need an assist from the power of social media! I have essentially finished the full draft of my book based on #EdJourney last fall. Sending blind proposals to publishers will be time-consuming and, well, blind. So I need your help: do you know a publishing editor, or a publishing agent who might know an [...]
Just watched the Charlie Rose interview with Thomas Friedman, Joel Klein of Amplify, Amy Gutman, President of UPenn, and Art Agerwal of EdEx. The subject was MOOCS, and I am not sure they told us anything new, but I had two thought take-aways: We have asked if change in K-12 is, or needs to be, [...]
Last September I reported on my visit to the second-year Design Lab school in inner city Cleveland. (I urge you to review that post.) Principal Eric Juli and Design Lab are front and center in the introduction to the book I am writing about my trip last fall because of the long odds and [...]
Old school: "Don't ever ask a question of the audience unless you are sure of the answer." New school: "Learn to be flexible; deal with ambiguity and the unknown." I took these yesterday at a meeting for prospective parents of the new Design 39 Campus K-8 in Poway Unified, opening in 2014. (I [...]
If you are a learner/leader at a private school and think about how to generate or ensure continued admissions demand in shifting markets, read on. If you are a leader/learner at a public school and think about aligning student outcomes to community expectations as well as a forward-leaning vision, read on! As I will detail [...]