The building which houses the Upper School at Poughkeepsie Day School is steeped in creativity; Thomas Watson and early IBM inventors once worked in the basement, tinkering with ideas that grew into one of the largest and most successful companies in the world. It is only fitting that PDS took over the building in the [...]
This will be a somewhat abbreviated post, not because The School at Columbia University has little to report, but because it has become a well-known stop on school tours of the northeast and many of you know their story. I spent an hour and a half with Don Buckley, Director of Technology and Innovation and [...]
Big discussions can lead to big changes, not necessarily in rapid-fire fashion, but at a more comfortable pace. This post is about a school that saw the need for big discussions, had the leadership and courage to enter the arena, and has created some profound ripple-on effects. A dam broke, not only freeing up time [...]
Teaching context, the weaving together of content, is more powerful than teaching content alone. But teaching context to our students allows them to understand that one set of contextual relationships. Teaching them the skills of how to acquire context allows them to develop context on their own for the rest of their lives. This is [...]
This won’t be my longest post, but it will be rich in very specific details about how an old, highly respected prep school on the Upper East Side, arguably the Gold Coast of independent education, is changing what K-12 education looks like. It is not radical, but 10 years from now, learning at The Dalton [...]
The good news is that thousands of American Educators know the story of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, and are working to incorporate much of what Principal Chris Lehman and his talented team are building there. The bad news is that leaves about a million great educators who don’t know this story and either don’t [...]
As schools think, discuss, and plan what they want to look like in an uncertain future, my sense is that how we get there is at least as important as what a school decides. Hathaway Brown in Cleveland has developed a well-deserved national reputation as a model of intentional innovation, due in large part to [...]
On this journey I wanted to visit a wide range of schools to find out what innovation means across the board. This post will be different from all the rest in many ways. At the start you will be depressed that education can still look like this in America. Don’t dare stop reading. The definition [...]
School innovation is exciting. Passionate teachers work together on creative new ideas, imagine, test pilots, fail, tweak, and connect with each other and their students in new ways. It creates a buzz and energy at the school, infectious to colleagues, students, and outward to parents and the community. Many of the schools I have visited [...]
Rather than reprising it all here, Bo Adams of Unboundary has posted the second of our short video interviews from my current trip. He has also been thoughtful enough to wrap our mutual interest in this research into the context of a segment of my book, The Falconer. For those new readers who have not [...]