Category: Learnings

Is a learning organization successful if it increases its academic performance while losing enrollment? Maybe that learning organization is improving performance because of lost enrollment? This is the case with the Houston Independent School District. HISD reports a decline in enrollment of 168,400 students in the 2025-26 school year, a loss of 4.7%. Back in…

Great teachers are trapped inside a bad model. Most are unable to create an exemplary learning environment for their young learners because the districts they work for dominate learning time with mediocre curriculum, predictable pacing guides, and simplified lesson plans. If that’s not bad enough, great teachers are underpaid, unappreciated, and, for the most part,…

Warren Buffett resigned as Berkshire Hathaway’s Chief Executive Officer December 31, 2025, after 60 years of leading the massive multinational conglomerate holding company. In an article posted on December 18th in The Atlantic online, the answer to how Buffett was able to amass over $160 billion in his career was five-fold: “An alert, quick, accurate,…

The American K-12 system has always been suspicious of play-based learning. Too many adults, in K-12 leadership positions, dismiss play-based learning as wasteful time, time that can be used more productively by exposing young learners to state- and district-approved curriculum. Play-based learning is an educational approach where children learn essential cognitive, social, emotional, and physical…

When we opened our personalized learning lab school almost ten years ago now, we talked a lot about GREAT Learning. GREAT was an acronym that stood for: Growth, Relationships, Empowerment, Anytime/Anywhere, and Technology. Today the focus is on technology. It seems ed tech is being criticized from every angle these days. Cell phones, social media,…

EducationWeek (12/12/25) announced their 2025 “Word of the Year” was “dismantle.” According to the education news outlet, “Education is largely governed by states, and federal funding makes up about 10 cents for every dollar K-12 schools spend. So shifts in federal bureaucracy seem to pale compared to actions on the state and local level.” “But…

We are winding down ABPTL for 2025, so let’s look at some of the top news from the year. Every year The 74 releases a story (December 9, 2025) focused on the top educational news from the past year. Here are highlights from that story: Immigration enforcement worsened absenteeism in our public schools. In California’s…

“Australia is actually doing this. As of December 10th, no one under 16 will be allowed to have an account on TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, or basically any other platform an average teen might care about.” That was the lead in an article appearing in December 4th online issue of The Atlantic. Called the Online…

A beginning teacher was sitting at her desk one day when her principal came into the room. The principal handed her a class roster. Beside the student names were numbers – beginning with the number 120. The teacher was ecstatic since she had inherited such a smart class, as the numbers beside the student names…