Category: Learnings

Kids aren’t reading as much as they did. Popular opinion blames social media. But maybe there are other reasons. Recently, The 74 published an article titled “Why Are So Few Kids Reading For Pleasure?”: … “Over the course of two generations, from 1984 to 2023, the proportion of 13-year-olds who said they ‘never or hardly…

Kids don’t have to attend school to learn. Today, the world is their classroom, and they should be given credit for their learning wherever and whenever that learning happens. When we ran a personalized learning lab school in Houston, one of the big takeaways was that the city offered a multitude of locations for learning…

Our traditional K-12 system has lost its creativity, if it ever had it. Few thinkers inside that system approach challenges and problems with the question “How can we make this better?” Instead, our K-12 leaders are more than willing to double-down on what they believe has worked for them, and kids, in the past –…

In the second installment of a two-part ABPTL series, we continue to look at the reasons why New Orlean schools improved and why those schools still have a long way to go to achieve equity between all K-12 learners: “From 60th to 6th.” “In 2005, New Orleans schools ranked 60th among Louisiana’s 68 districts in…

It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, Louisiana. My wife and I happened to be in the Crescent City that weekend. I was scheduled to attend a College Board leadership conference, so we decided to make a weekend of it. As I was riding in from the airport, I noticed…

The way we “grade” learning, still today, is archaic and misguided. It invites misalignment between graders, a false sense of security on behalf of the learner, and a general sense that we really don’t know how well our young learners are meeting their reading, writing, and problem-solving goals. And this just doesn’t happen in our…

A friend of mine is friends with Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. My friend leans to the right a bit more than I do, but it’s my friendship with her that has led me to be interested in what Pondiscio is thinking and writing. Recently, Pondiscio wrote an article for National…

It seems like everyone is against devices, cell phones, and artificial intelligence being allowed in America’s classrooms. Recently, I read articles written by a journalist, parent, and teacher criticizing all three, while pleading for a “return to normalcy” when teachers were able to teach what was important without interruption. Mary Harrington, a contributing editor at…

I’m back from an extended absence. What was supposed to be an August full of rest and relaxation beside a northern Minnesota lake turned out to be way different. I was scheduled for an angiogram in early August after results from an electrocardiogram came back irregular. During the angiogram the doctors found 99% blockage in…

Any adult learning leader interested in building smarter and stronger readers, writers, and problem-solvers must first start with relationship building with their young learners. Part of relationship building depends on every young learner feeling like they belong to the learning process. Without a sense of belonging, learning becomes a sterile operation without hope for successful…