Category: Learnings

Michael Fullan is a hero of mine. He was very helpful to the education non-profit I led in Houston when it launched in the early 1990’s. Fullan, a professor emeritus, is a former dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto and the global director of leadership for New Pedagogies for Deep…

Successful learning depends on strong partnerships, mainly between an adult learning leader and a group of young learners. Last fall, the Harvard Business Review posted an article titled “What Makes Creative Partnerships Work”. The article states, “In the most exceptional careers, it is often not all that lonely at the top: For the extraordinarily successful,…

Early in this new year, I read an article published in EducationWeek online titled “These Principals Insist on Connecting Every Student to an Adult They Trust.” The story starts with an important question for traditional school leaders, “How do principals ensure that students know they have at least one adult in the building they can…

Learning design includes deciding “where” learning will occur. Everyone knows by now that learning doesn’t have to happen inside a classroom, although the traditional system leadership has worked hard the past three years trying to convince us otherwise. In June of 2022, architect Randy Fielding, founding partner at Fielding International, a team of architects and…

Last week I shared an article written by Getting Smart’s Nate McClennen and Tom Vander Ark titled “The Great Education Unbundling and How Learning Will be Rebundled.” The concept of “Unbundled Learning” is part of a six pillar campaign Getting Smart launched last summer. I thought it would be nice to cover the other five…

Back in May of 2022, Getting Smart’s Rebecca Midles wrote an interesting article titled “Framing and Designing the HOW.” Midles uses Simon Sinek’s work on organizational why, how, and what as a guide to her writing. As we attempt to create a new system of learning, I thought it wise to return to Midles’s thinking…

I’m a big fan of Valerie Strauss, the Washington Post education writer, who also authors The Answer Sheet blog. Here is a reprint of an article Strauss shared with her audience on January 17, 2021. “Here, as I have published in recent years to mark the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,…

Earlier this week, The 74 released an article focused on how the traditional public school system is using apprenticeships to redesign teacher preparation. Reporter Asher Lehrer-Small begins by writing, “Wyoming is vast and sparsely populated. Its only public four-year university is located in Laramie, in the southeast corner of the sharply rectangular state. Those factors…

Over a year ago, Nate McClennen and Tom Vander Ark wrote an article for the online newsletter Getting Smart titled “The Great Education Unbundling and How Learning Will be Rebundled.” In the article, McClennen and Vander Ark write, “More schools, more courses, more online learning experiences – for 25 years there has been steady expansion…

One more thought related to yesterday’s post [Try As They May, Schools Just Can’t Innovate] – if you take a look at the text describing various state policy related to desired innovation zones, it’s clear that these descriptions weren’t written by innovators themselves. Innovators employ creative phrases and provide a vision of what is possible.…