Why Advisory Matters

There is nothing more important to an adolescent than being known and understood. As they begin to get a sense of themselves as people, they recognize factors that make them who they are, and continually respond to the way the environment in which they’re placed treats them as individuals. This is important to their academic … Continue reading →

The Qualities of Great Teachers

Great teachers make great schools, but what makes a good teacher has changed over the last 5 years. In previous eras when information wasn’t ubiquitous, teachers with advanced degrees and massive content knowledge possessed traits on which schools needed to place a premium. A teacher’s interpersonal skills were secondary to their mastery and delivery of content. However, … Continue reading →

The Modern Teacher: A Job Description

In The End of Average, Todd Rose writes about how the process by which we sort and rate everything, from pilot size to student achievement, is built upon faulty premises of what it means to be successful. Specifically, that the manner in which we define “smart” is brutally flawed, allowing for only one specific type … Continue reading →

Focusing on What Matters

I recently read a solid piece entitled “Is Google Teaching Us Anything?” (h/t to @gregkulowiec on twitter) that opens by citing both Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and Sugata Mitra’s SOLE project as competing philosophies of the role of technology in education. More important, though, is the question of self-directed learning and to what extent truly independent … Continue reading →

What If…

What if we designed a school whose foundation was built on an obsession with learning, in all shapes and forms? What if our school focused on every possible way to reward and promote all learning students chose to pursue? What if we populated that school full of teachers who weren’t great traditional students? How would … Continue reading →

Turn Aspirations into Goals

The amount of change in the world over the last ten years has made many schools rethink and reconsider their course. In doing so, a number of schools are redefining their vision and plans for the future. This is one of the most difficult things to do especially for schools; I’ve seen many schools get … Continue reading →

Batman Begins and Teaching Practice

There’s a scene in Batman Begins that ends with a line that always makes me think about teaching and learning. When it comes to the lives of educators, I think a lot of us believe we are defined by who we are underneath. We root our discussions in educational philosophies that sound great–a focus on … Continue reading →

The “Top 500 Schools in America,” or “The 500 Whitest and Wealthiest Neighborhoods in America”

So your high school made Newsweek’s list of “Top Five Hundred Schools in America.” You saw it on facebook and shared it with your networks. Sharing that Newsweek link felt good, right? Hooray for my alma mater! We got ranked in the top 500 by Newsweek! You probably didn’t think twice about sharing that link. … Continue reading →

Transversing Digital and Analog Learning Spaces

I’ve been reading a lot about learning spaces, but a piece recently tweeted out by (and authored by) Gary Stager (@garystager) has caught my eye and got me thinking about constructivism in secondary education. As someone who believes in (but hasn’t by any means mastered) progressive education, I’ve always got Alfie Kohn’s Questions for Progressive Schools … Continue reading →

Assessing Student Performance in a Design-Infused History Course

On twitter and elsewhere, I’ve made my feelings about grades pretty well known: I can find little, if any, pedagogical justification for student grades. I find them to be wildly inadequate in terms of providing students with meaningful, actionable feedback about the work they do. Furthermore, they are reductionist in that they try to provide … Continue reading →