Tag: schools

25 years ago, 12 students and one teacher were murdered in cold blood inside Columbine High School. I was finishing up five years as a middle school principal, getting ready to open a brand-new high school. Myself, my school, my community, my city, my state, and my nation were shocked at what happened at Columbine…

Last week, I wrote an article that shared some of Julia Freedland Fisher’s thinking from her article titled “Beyond Bans: Schools’ Role in a Hard Reset on the ‘Phone-Based Childhood’.” In the article, Fisher writes: “There’s another article that should lend urgency to getting this [Artificial intelligence and other technology innovations] right. It’s a memo…

My wife is critical of my vision for a new type of public schooling in this country. She is afraid that like-minded people will congregate together to begin their own version of “schooling,” while accessing public dollars to do it. She pleads with me “Scott, do you want learning pods of Nazis? Because that’s what…

Over the years, I’ve collected tidbits of information related to learning. There really isn’t a connection between any of what I share today – only short vignettes about learning and related subjects that seemed interesting to me at the time. Here’s another edition of “A Little About a Lot.” For reference, I’ve included the year…

If you’ve read most of what I’ve written in this column about AI, social media, smartphones, and traditional schools trying to ban all of these recently, you know that I’m not convinced schools know what they are doing, whether it be banning these potential learning tools or using them more effectively in the learning process.…

Earlier this month, I read with interest a story about “Flexible Futures,” a public school program in Germany focused on connecting work with learning. The story, originally published by The Hechinger Report, was re-published by Reasons to be Cheerful. The story begins, “Neriman Raim, a 16-year-old student in Cologne, Germany, thought that after finishing school…

Traditional school districts have always taken a narrow view of what student success really means. During most of my K-12 career, if a young learner passed a high-stakes test, then that student was judged a success. I can’t tell you how many young learners, in my career at least, were poor readers, writers, and problem-solvers,…

I tend to stray away from pedagogical themes in this column, but we need to confront an inconvenient truth when it comes to making our young learners smarter and stronger – most of what we work on inside classrooms is a royal waste of time. For example, take the long-honored practice of finding the “main…