Last week I talked about two terrible, horrible, no good, very bad questions. This week I am talking about the one great question. As a backdrop. I am a volunteer coach for a local high school boys basketball team. (An aside, being a volunteer coach is great. I don’t have to make any decisions and I tell everyone they are great..what can…
Raise your hand if you feel as if you are the hamster running on that wheel…working hard and staying in place! In our VUCA (Volitile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world, the number of micro and macro decisions that we are making is increasing. I think there is a direct correlation between the “more VUCA” the world is to the number of…
3 Drivers For Transforming Education Systems One of my “go-to” newsletters is The Learn Letter by Eva Keiffenheim. As the name of the newsletter states, she is concerned with studying how people learn. In her latest issue, she shares insights that a group of learning researchers she worked with to help make sense of education. The research team came up with three…
The Iceberg Model Of Systems Change We have all heard of the saying “that’s the tip of the iceberg” at some point in our careers. We usually use the saying to mean that there is a lot more going on with a situation than we can “see” at that moment. This week Jen Anderson shared this image with me. The image distills the importance…
I know I promised a simple explanation of two things in last week’s blog: a crypto digital wallet and a SMART contract. Well, things get messy sometimes. The more I research a SMART contract, the harder it is for me to come up with an easy explanation. So, I need another week to continue down the rabbit hole of SMART…
When I was a teacher, a group of my teacher friends and I organized 2 field trips a year for our 7th and 8th graders. Every Fall we would take a day trip to New York City. In the Spring we would rotate destinations between Washington DC, Baltimore, and Boston. We raised money for the trips and it was a…
There are amazing things you can learn about a person when they are interviewing for a job. The job applicant usually starts the interview nervous and it is difficult (at times) to get beyond the nervousness so you can really learn about the person. I vividly remember one job interview in which all of us conducting the interview were having…
“Vigor and creative flow have their source in internal strains and tensions, it is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music” -Eric Hoffer Eric Hoffer was considered the “workingman’s philosopher” and is best known for his 1952 book The True Believer. The above quote is a result of a line of thinking that Hoffer undertook…
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…
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…