Currently, the news cycle is being dominated by a “college admissions” scandal. A good synopsis of the scandal can be found here. The gist of the scandal is that wealthy people were doing things to guarantee admission to elite schools for their children. The details are sordid, but basically significant sums of money were changing hands to cheat on the…
Category: Education Leadership
The Cult of Innovation…and How to Overcome it in Education
Recently I spent time with a school district leadership team. As I listened to the significant work they were doing within their schools to make learning better for students, I kept hearing things like, “Well, this is not that innovative” or “It (what they are doing) is not that big of a deal”. I wanted to shout (and did tell…
Finding Innovations in Rural School Districts; 3 “E’s” An ESA Can Do
I was asked to write a blog series for the Association of Education Service Agencies (AESA) as a follow up to an article a colleague and I wrote for them. AESA represents education service agencies like IU8 all across the country. Our goal for the article (and for the blog posts) was to highlight how rural schools and communities can…
Four O’Clock in the Morning Courage
Civil War historian Shelby Foote said that Ulysses S. Grant had something few generals had…he had “Four o’clock in the morning courage”. This is the courage it takes to stay calm when you are woken up at 4:00AM and told your left flank has just been turned. This is the same kind of courage you as a superintendent need to…
How to Conceptualize Professional Learning…A Quick Guide
On my first day of teaching 27 years ago, I entered the high school auditorium with 150 other teachers. I was expecting magic! I was pumped up to start my career and learn something new in the first three days before learners walked through the door. As I walked in the auditorium, I noticed something peculiar. The front half of…
Snipping Arrogance out of the Old Operating System of Education
Everyone you ever meet knows something you don’t. –Bill Nye My uncle spent his career as a gym teacher. He was one of those teachers that could get kids to do more than they thought they could do themselves…he always had kids in the gym doing something. The kids that went to the gym to hang out before or after…
3 Questions Every Educational Leader Needs to Ask to Create Dignity in Their Schools
This is the third in the series of transforming to a new operating system in education. As discussed in previous posts, the old operating system creates despair for those working and living in it, and has as its foundation principle competition as a motivating factor. A result of despair and competition is apathy…the third foundational principle of the old operating…
3 Questions to Start your Mass Customized Learning Journey
“This is not a program…you have to change your philosophy” perfectly encapsulates the difficulty some educators may experience with Mass Customized Learning. There are two facts we must remember about Mass Customized learning: First, MCL is not a program but a journey. A journey toward restructuring the educational system. Second, MCL is uncompromisingly learner centered. The ramifications of of these…
Let’s Unbundle Education
Industries are being disrupted by people and organizations that are utilizing technology to reframe the traditional business role. Disrupters study an industry in an effort to determine its most essential components. By doing this, disrupters do not approach the problem with a technology in mind. Rather, they concentrate their time on doing the heavy mental lifting required to analyze the…
Hope and the New Operating System of Education…4 Questions to Start Your Journey
“No ‘advanced educator’ can allow themselves to be so absorbed in the question of what a child ought to be as to exclude the discovery of what he is.” –Jane Addams A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog about how the dominant operating system of education is broken. Over the next few Tuesday’s I will delve further into that…