Okay, I went down a rabbit hole over the past few days. As is always with me, these ideas are not well-formed, and I want to share them with you as they percolate in my brain. I do believe this discussion is relevant to the future of public education, so please keep on reading! All of these thoughts come from Redeeming…
Like many people, I struggle with balancing short-term, micro thinking and long-term, macro thinking. Micro-thinking focuses on the “here and now” tasks and getting things done, while macro-thinking takes a broader view and considers larger trends and patterns. Often, I find myself stuck in micro-thinking, stressing about efficiency and tactics to manage change and complete my to-do list. I believe…
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…
The promise of Web 3.0, which I introduced earlier, depends to a large extent on the blockchain. So let’s break down the blockchain. The easiest to understand definition of a blockchain that I found is from Coinbase: At its most basic, a blockchain is a list of transactions that anyone can view and verify. Think of the blockchain in terms of…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…