“Never,” was the answer. The question? “Do you ever have conversations in school that touch on the changes that are happening in the world that will affect your life outside of school?” Honestly? Not shocked. That student is a part of a diverse team we’re working with in a school that’s trying to figure out […]

Goodbye Twitter. Goodbye Chrome. Neither was easy. I was there for early-Twitter, and it was love-hate from the beginning. I loved the ease, the networking, the linking, and, yes, the learning. I hated the fact that I knew blogging in the way that I’d been practicing it for about a decade at that point was […]

(1/4 Newsletter Repost) First, Happy New Year! May 2023 bring us all good health, deeper relationships, and as much joy as we can handle! With those aspirations in mind, we want to tee up some of the themes that will be most on our minds here at BQI over the coming year. We see the […]

(Note: I originally wrote this in July, 2016. I wish I could say that we’d evolved since then into a much more sane, loving, enlightened, literate, just society. But as you’ll see, almost all of it could have been written this week. What will we do to make sure this post won’t be relevant four […]

With respect to those who stand in awe of all that’s changed about schools in the past few months, I would ask “what’s actually changed?” I don’t mean to minimize the incredible work that educators around the world have done to respond to this crisis. It’s amazing the scale and speed with which we moved […]

As educators, parents, and students have scrambled over the past couple of months to figure out how to move school online quickly and at scale, I can’t help but be reminded of a pivotal scene in the movie Apollo 13. After having to abandon their trip to the moon due to an explosion, the three […]

Right now, we have millions of parents shouldered up to their children trying to help them do school. I’m reading a fair share of both funny and sad accounts of parents who are trying to navigate this new role of surrogate teacher or coach in terms of setting schedules or giving feedback or making the […]

I’ve been thinking more about story since writing this recent post, and I’ve come across some more reading and thinking that I’m trying to make sense of. (If you haven’t read that post, this one will make much more sense if you do.) So in the spirit of blogging my way to greater understanding… Next […]

At some point in the last couple of months, someone recommended that I read Seth Kreisberg’s 1992 book Transforming Power: Domination, Empowerment, and Education. To whomever that person is, sincere thanks. It’s an amazing read. And it’s connecting really deeply with my recent thinking about the tension between schools as a public and private good […]

I’ve been expending a lot of bandwidth lately reading and thinking about the meta story of school, not just the history of the system and of pedagogy, but, more specifically, the motivations behind the story we’re currently living and how they effect the potential for deep and powerful learning that we all say we want […]

When Bruce Dixon and I started Modern Learners six years ago, we had two aspirations. First, to help people, teachers, parents, and policy makers, better understand the ways in which the modern world provided different lenses through which to see education and learning, and to help them use those lenses to make better decisions for […]

So, it’s been a while. For someone who has had a blog for almost 20 years in one form or another, I’m wondering what happened last year. Started off with a bang. Posted fairly regularly elsewhere. But I think the white space here for the last year or so captures a larger struggle that I’ve […]

Just for the record, if you’re an advocate for “personalizing” learning, then you need to do more than just offer some options for how students might work their way through the curriculum. That’s just a starting point. If you really are serious about honoring a student’s interests and dispositions and individuality, then you’re going to […]

New rule: Whenever we talk about learning, we should distinguish between learning in the real world and learning IN SCHOOL. For example, the work of John Hattie is cited daily as research that can help us improve student learning. All good, as long as we remember that his research is about improving learning IN SCHOOL […]

Do we value what works more than we value what matters? Peter Block has me thinking about that. In The Answer to How is Yes he writes: “The phrase ‘what matters’ is shorthand for our capacity to dream, to reclaim our freedom, to be idealistic, and to give our lives to those things which are […]

Final exams, SAT and ACT, pop quizzes, state standardized tests… Why? Why do we need a test to show us what our students have “learned”? Seriously. I’m asking. It would seem to make more sense that what students learn should be transparent from day 1, not just captured in a number or score on day […]

I spend a lot of time talking to educational leaders about mission and vision. Without a clear sense of what larger purpose you want your school to serve in the world, and an equally clear picture of what it takes to achieve that purpose, schools are, in a word, incoherent. And let’s just say, incoherence […]

One of my least favorite phrases in education is “hand it in.” Why, instead wouldn’t we say “share it with the world”? I mean I know that much of what students create isn’t ready for prime time, that it’s a draft or “in progress.” But why at a moment when we can share so easily […]

Your Sunday Snip: “The common view, one that underpins almost all educational enterprises that have arisen over the past 150 years, is that motivation must be instilled from without, by a pedagogically sophisticated educator. This view is understandable when education is considered a way to enforce a particular social agenda on children. From the realization […]

Professional learning may be about expanding our own skillset, but professional growth is about testing our own fears. Change is scary, especially in schools. It’s the unknown. It takes courage to do something new, to try an approach that you’ve never tried before. Or, importantly, an approach that we’ve never tried before. But to never […]

One of my favorite stories about living the mission is the one about John F. Kennedy’s visit to NASA a year or so after he announced that we would be going to the moon by the end of the 1960s. The story goes that as he was touring the facility meeting the engineers and executives, […]

When we’re caught in a moment when we really don’t know what to do next, isn’t it safer just to do what we’ve always done? Like, let’s just keep creating the five-year plan even though we have little idea what five years from now will look like. Or let’s keep teaching the same curriculum even […]

So today, my team and I at Modern Learners are excited to release our “10 Principles for Schools of Modern Learning Audit.” It’s a 5-7 minute survey tool that we’ve developed as a companion to our whitepaper of the same name. If you want to get a quick snapshot of how you compare to schools […]

From the “Stories I Never Thought I’d Read Department” comes this little discovery from Yahoo News: A high school that requires some students to wear ID badges announcing their failing grades. Yes, you read that right. At Mingus Union HS in Cottonwood, AZ “upperclassmen who struggle in classes must also wear red badges (aka “scarlet […]

Here’s your “Sunday Snip:” “It is impressive, on one level, that we spend billions of dollars and innumerable hours creating this perfect, practice-based environment in which children’s abilities to sit still in classrooms are honed. Furthermore, we have built a reward structure to praise those students who can sit in classrooms better than anyone else. […]

I realized the other day that I live in an almost constant state of discomfort. Not a physical or mental discomfort; my life humbles me. It’s an intellectual discomfort that just won’t go away. It’s a discomfort driven by questions that I struggle to answer. It’s a state of constant not knowing that I can’t […]

If you want to make real, serious change in schools stick, don’t underestimate the time it takes to till the soil. This week, another district in Maine decided to scale back its proficiency-based assessment regime and reinstate letter grades because the new system was “too hard to explain.” And so, understandably, parents were in an […]