Yesterday, I ran across this quote from Degreed, an online credentialing site: “The future doesn’t care how you become an expert.” Now, is that a marketing pitch or a reality? Obviously, for some professions, the future is still going to care a lot about how people gain their expertise. As I’ve said many times, I don’t want […]

I find words fascinating, especially new ones. When I was teaching high school English, one of my favorite classes was an elective titled “Language Development” where we looked at etymologies, made connections between words and cultural shifts, and created all sorts of new words on our own among other things. We even ended up creating […]

So, the “2017 Predictions” posts are starting to flow, and while I’m certainly interested in the education prognostications, I’m more interested in what people are saying outside of our field. (I’m somewhat pessimistic that anything will significantly shift in edu next year, especially in terms of our penchant for trying to do “the wrong thing […]

We talk a lot about “student agency” in these parts. But to be honest, most of what we label with those words are tepid substitutes for the real thing. As I Tweeted the other day, if these are the stories we’re writing in major education publications, the bar is set really low. So, Thursday I sat […]

Reading me some Neil Postman this morning as I continue to be drawn to thoughts about education that are at least a quarter century old. In reflecting on my own thinking about all of this, I find it fascinating the extent to which going back in time seems to inform the path moving forward more […]

As I was finishing off the last crumbs of pumpkin pie after the big, annual Richardson Thanksgiving Day feast, I caught this snip of a conversation between two extended family members, one a 24-year old girl who was struggling to finish college, the other a girl in middle school who clearly was not enjoying it. […]

The one good result for this morning is this: It. Is. Over. We know better (though not completely) what we face. The shock will wear off. The disequilibrium will subside. For me, it’s not anger. I understand why this happened. For me, it’s fear. Usually, that’s a reaction to uncertainty. This morning, it’s the opposite. I […]

“This hasn’t been easy, you know.” That’s the principal of a middle school where the way kids learn in classrooms is fundamentally changing. More questions. More projects that actually tackle stuff that’s happening in the real world and that are driven by kids’ interests. More making stuff. More presentations. More kids who are taking on their own “home […]

Now that I’m home from my most excellent, whirlwind trip to Russia, Finland, and Sweden, I want to share a few reflections on what I heard and what I learned. I’ll talk about Russia here, and I’ll be posting my Finland reflections on our ChangeLeadership Facebook group. (Join us!) Given the political conversation here in […]

Over the years, we’ve heard a lot of predictions about what the future of work holds for all of us, not just our kids. It’s interesting now to see some of those predictions actually playing out. Case in point is this post in the Harvard Business Review that summarizes the Herculean change initiative now underway at […]

Here’s an idea for a killer modern learning app: Call it Tinder-Ed if you like. Sign up, and fill in a) what you want to learn, and b) what you’re able to teach. Maybe add what time zone you’re in. Simple. Once you’re signed on, fire up the app, and start swiping through the people Tinder-Ed […]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t like just about every five year old have a “growth mindset?” I mean, depending on parents and other circumstances, I’m sure even kids that age can see themselves as limited. But most of the tail-waggers I’ve seen in kindergarten feel like they can conquer just about anything. They’ve […]

If you’re a frequent visitor here, you know that I’m always going on about the importance of grounding our work in education in what we believe about how kids learn. (If you haven’t checked out my latest TEDx Talk, you’ll get the gist.) You’ll also know how surprised I am that so few of us […]

The world as it is today, the one in which we have access to all sorts of knowledge, people, and technologies, that world is not the one that most current educators thought they were stepping into when they went into teaching. The image of schooling that most had was built on scarcity of those things, […]

From the “Doing the Wrong Thing Right Department,” George Siemens on the LMS: “You’ve made a process efficient that would make an awesome, productive employee in the 1960s, but you haven’t developed the mindsets, the networking capabilities and so on that you need for an individual—not just an employee, but a member of society—in 2020. […]

(Building on this post.) From a New York Times article on Anne Holton, Vice Presidential nominee Tim Kaine’s wife: Ms. Holton later enrolled in Open High School, which allowed students to create their own curriculum and did not give grades. When asked to pick an activity for physical education, she took up clogging. When assigned […]

Given the common sense arguments for learning that run counter to the current day structures and practices of schools, it would seem that a real rethinking of our education system would have happened long before now. It’s hard to argue that forcing kids to learn the same thing on the same day in the same […]

One of the most frustrating moments when I give a talk to educators is the moment when I put Seymour Papert’s picture and quote up on screen and ask how many of them have ever heard of him. Nine times out of ten, maybe a hand or two goes up. Many times, no one knows […]

Here’s your Friday moment of EduZen to think about over the weekend. As always, would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for reading this week. Brown, Davison, and Hagel: In previous generations of institutional change, an elite at the top of the organization created the world into which everybody else needed to fit. The institutional […]

From the “Ways of Thinking About Learning That Drive Me Crazy Dept.” comes this article in the Miami Herald titled “Ways We Can Make Students Interested in School.” Now, anyone who reads this space regularly knows that I don’t think this is a very difficult question. We can start by looking at schools where kids […]

Reading this most excellent post by Ira Socol this morning got me thinking about the word “risk” and its use in a learning context. So often I hear that we in education need to “take more risks,” or that our kids need to do that, that “risk-taking” is an important part of learning. And I totally […]

As some of you may have seen on my Twitter feed Saturday, my son Tucker and his teammates at SportsU won the Under Armour Association 16-U championship in Atlanta this weekend. It’s an elite team in an elite program playing an elite schedule, and I’ve never seen better basketball at the high school level than […]

Here’s your Friday moment of EduZen to think about over the weekend. As always, would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for reading this week. Alfred North Whitehead (1916): The solution which I am urging is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one […]

We talk a lot about personalized “learning.” But what we’re really saying is personalized “teaching.” Either the human or the algorithm deduces the gaps and then supplies “personalized” curriculum to fill them. Either way, the student is the object of the personalization. Someone or something else is deciding what the student “learns,” and how it’s […]

As much as I agree with my friend Chris Lehmann that “technology should be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible,” we’re still a ways off from all of that. But if I forced you to choose the one of those three adjectives that we’re struggling with the most in schools, which would you select? I think […]

Empathy and “design thinking” and attending to the “end user” are all the rage these days, and with good reason. They are responses, I think, to the increasing separation we’re feeling in our world between the haves and have nots, different races, different political persuasions. Everywhere, the fault lines seem to be expanding, and we […]

Here’s your Friday moment of EduZen to think about over the weekend. As always, would love your thoughts: Neil Postman in The End of Education (1995); What we needed to know about cars–as we need to know about computers, television, and other important technologies–is not how to use them but how they use us. In the […]