Category: Learnings

And then there’s Oklahoma. A few days ago I shared a story about the Los Angeles Unified School District and their attempts to assist undocumented immigrant families by educating them about their rights and establishing district policies intended to protect young learners during school time. But Oklahoma is a different place and a different story.…

Social-emotional learning (SEL), like other subjects in our ultra-partisan country, has unfairly been criticized by the conservative right as being something it’s not – some type of “woke” movement designed to brainwash our youth to think a certain way. What makes SEL especially interesting these days is that, even though it’s criticized by some as…

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…