Friday, November 18th, 2011 at 1:09 pm
Late last night, alone in my TV room and still struggling to get back onto east-coast time, I watched Tim Tebow’s improbable 95-yard game-winning drive, and marveled at the uniqueness of his unfolding storyline.
As the dumbstruck commentators on NFL Network made clear, we are witnessing something unprecedented in the otherwise rigid, groupthinkian world of the NFL – a team that has completely (and, thus far, successfully) adjusted its overall strategy to align with the strengths of its newest, most essential player.
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Monday, October 3rd, 2011 at 12:23 pm
You know there’s a dearth of creative thinking in education when an article trumpeting cutting-edge teaching quotes somebody, without irony, saying the following:
“Get a computer, please! Log on . . . and go to your textbook.”
Yet that’s what the Washington Post did this morning – and they’re not alone. Despite ubiquitous calls for innovation and paradigm shifts, most would-be reformers are little more than well-intentioned people perfecting our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.
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Categories:
Leadership,
Learning,
Organizational ChangeTags: Bill Maher, Democratic Era, disruptive innovation, education policy, fidelity, Industrial-Era, Learning, NCLB, non-negotiables, QED Foundation, school reform, standardization, stephen covey, test scores, transformational change
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011 at 1:07 pm
I just returned from my first visit to China in 15 years, and I still can’t get over how aligned the Middle Kingdom remains around its core “mission statement” – and how misaligned we remain in the United States.
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Categories:
Democracy,
Leadership,
Learning,
Organizational ChangeTags: achievement gap, China, Deng Xiaoping, federal education policy, finland, Learning, Mission-driven, NCLB, opt out/opt in, Rick Hess, social & emotional learning, vocational learning
Monday, September 19th, 2011 at 10:40 am
It wasn’t until the end of her tragically short life that Thea Leopolous first discovered the depth of her talent as an artist.
A buoyant, beautiful girl with dark eyebrows and sharp brown eyes, Thea spent her childhood believing the experts who first told her, back in third grade, she was unworthy of acceptance to the local program for “gifted and talented” children. Since then, Thea had struggled in her coursework and felt uninspired by a stream of classes that focused too much on academics, and not enough on other forms of learning, like the arts.
Then, in her junior year of high school, she produced a finger-painted portrait of B.B. King and removed any doubt of whether or not she was talented. Soon after, her capacity to excel in every area of her life changed dramatically. She had discovered a new source of confidence and calm. She had found her path.
A few months later, she was killed by a drunk driver.
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Tuesday, August 9th, 2011 at 5:40 pm
With all due respect to Flannery O’Connor, my vote for greatest American short-story writer goes to Ray Carver. And with all due respect to America’s current crop of leaders, my hope is that they convene a summer book club to read Carver’s stories – and heed his central message.
I’m thinking specifically of his collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. As with all of Carver’s work, it’s a collection filled with a cast of characters best suited for the island of misfit toys – or the town in which you live. These are people who are down on their luck, who have fallen out of love, and who are struggling to find the right words to communicate their feelings, their thoughts, and their sense of how (and where) it all went wrong. Reflected in Carver’s spartan prose are the surface realities of life – the quotidian desperation of the things we sometimes say, see and do. But his genius comes from his ability to surface the submerged emotions of living – the weight of grief, the insufficiency of the words we live by, the slow acknowledgement of seeing what we don’t want to see. Carver’s stories are always about what we know, what we are perpetually struggling to know, and what we talk about while we linger in the chasm in between.
Which leads us to the present moment.
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Categories:
Leadership,
Learning,
Organizational ChangeTags: appreciative inquiry, Arne Duncan, education reform, Frank Bruni, national prayer rally, New York Times, paradigm shift, Ray Carver, school reform, short stories, social & emotional learning, systems change, Thomas Kuhn
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011 at 4:13 pm
How do we transform the quality of teaching and learning in America?
Like a lot of people, I’ve been wrestling with that riddle for the bulk of my career. And this month, three separate events are making me wonder in a new way about how to bring about such a shift – and sustain such a movement.
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Categories:
Leadership,
Learning,
Organizational ChangeTags: Ashoka, character education, civic education, Deepak Chopra, education reform, Empathy, Imagination, Lincoln Center Institute, movement, movement-building, service-learning, sir ken robinson, social & emotional learning, SOS March
Monday, June 6th, 2011 at 10:48 am
This month, schools across the country are hard at work preparing auditoriums, printing programs, checking commencement speeches, and readying for the arrival of one of our society’s most cherished rites of passage – the high school graduation ceremony.
Perhaps by this time next year, we can do our students an even greater service and scrap the high school diploma altogether.
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Categories:
Assessment,
Democracy,
Leadership,
Learning,
Organizational ChangeTags: Democratic Era, democratic learning communities, Graduation, High School Diploma, Industrial-Era, kim carter, MC2
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011 at 10:48 am
What makes for a transformational meeting?
I’m asking myself this question because I just attended the best conference of my life. I’m asking it because most conferences, well, suck. And I’m asking it because the people I just spent three days with were continually asking it of each other in order to identify the “special sauce” for themselves – and give us all a better chance of recreating it for more and more people.
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Categories:
Democracy,
Leadership,
Learning,
Organizational ChangeTags: business, business thinking, conference, Democracy, democracy in the workplace, meeting, organizational democracy, Simon Sinek, special sauce, TED, worldblu
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 11:45 am
A little over a month ago, I spent a few days on the campus of High Tech High School (HTH), a remarkable network of schools in San Diego that are, simply, among the best examples of public education our country has to offer.
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