Category: Learnings

I’m back after a few days of vacation. Imagine being a 5-year-old kindergartner, excited to learn and grow. But while you are sitting on the rug waiting for your teacher to read you an after-lunch story, five badged men walk into your classroom and tell you to get up and come with them. Turns out,…

Every year, Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of an EducationWeek opinion blog, publishes his Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. It’s been awhile since I paid attention to Hess’s list, so I thought 2025 would be a good year to catch up on who is making the list…

When I’m asked what qualities a learning coach would possess, a learning coach being an adult learning leader responsible for building learning plans with young learners and then supporting those young learners as they work to become smarter and stronger, I think of attributes we have already identified for traditional education leaders like school principals.…

Most parents have no idea how good the school they send their kids to every day really is. That’s why, as a school leader, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what parents thought about the school day we ran through the year. Instead, we paid way more attention to what our youngsters were…

As I’ve stated before, I’m a big fan of David Brooks’ writing. When I was first read Brooks, he was a bit too conservative politically for my tastes, but, like George Will, Brooks has mellowed a bit over the years. And I suppose I have too. In November, Brooks wrote an article for The Atlantic…

Happy New Year! Will Richardson just released something he is calling “A Manifesto” titled “Confronting Education In a Time of Complexity, Chaos, and Collapse.” Richardson was a public school educator for over two decades before he began questioning current practices within our K-12 public school system. An author calling for a different and more creative…

We are still struggling with learning loss caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but this time the loss is infecting those kids who weren’t even in school when COVID appeared back in March of 2020. This past summer, The New York Times reported that, “The pandemic’s babies, toddlers and preschoolers are now school-age, and the impact…

When I worked in the traditional K-12 public school system, I constantly thought we didn’t ask enough of our young learners. We were content to have them sit passively at their desks, listening to us lecture on and one about things we knew about, and they didn’t. But what if they knew more about subject…

Education savings accounts are currently being used by mostly middle-class families who are interested in leaving our public school system and enrolling in available private schools. What education savings accounts should be used for is to help primarily lower class families to find learning options for their kids so that those youngsters no longer have…

Exploration is one of the best learning models available – for both young and old. Exploring usually begins with a question, and then pursuit toward answer for that question. Exploration almost always involves challenge and struggle, but with the right type of support and encouragement, most questions lead to answers which lead to learning. Last…