A few days ago, a superintendent who I respect very much sent me this Twitter message in the middle of a back and forth about what real, relevant change in education looks like. “Too many look for cookbook recipes to use; unfortunately more educators are cooks than chefs.” That really got me thinking, especially in

Where does school improvement end and transformation really start?  I don’t know about you, but more and more I am hearing the terms used interchangeably, and if you throw in school reform the conversation can get very muddy. While reform is a term most often applied to ‘fix’ a school or school system that is

In recent times I have become quite intrigued by the impact assumptions have on the effectiveness of our decision making, and sadly our wonderful world of education, and in particular edtech is too often cluttered with a myriad of unfathomable assumptions on which poor decisions are made. As an example we could start with some

It’s been about 16 years since I published my first blog post. I was there at the birth of Twitter and Instagram and delicio.us and most of the other social media tools that are in wide use today. And I’m sure I’ll be an “early adopter” of whatever the next great connective tool is. But

It’s hard to think of many words that are more misused or abused in our schools than “vision,” and even if we discount the number of times it’s confused for mission, its role as the North Star too often seems to be trivialized if not by definition, then certainly by execution. Certainly the article Will

About two weeks ago, I ran a whole day workshop at a large, high-performing public elementary school.  We’d been working for most of the day around their plans to move to a modern learning environment, but as is typical of many schools their use of technology had really only played a marginal part in their

From time to time, I grow weary of the shallowness of the discussion around education and technology and change. I’m in one of those cycles right now, I think. (It’s in some way attributable to the general emptiness of the current political rhetoric, I’m sure. There’s a picture of Donald Trump in the dictionary when you

Last week on my own blog, I posted an essay by a high school student who was assessing the state of his education. It is marked, he writes, by a state of uncertainty and inconsistency. Here’s a snip: Kids love to learn. They hate school. School has become a life draining institution that takes passionate,

“My students love it,” she said. “It hasn’t changed the content, but it has definitely changed the way I deliver the content.” That from an article on what I consider to be the oh so awful wonders of tablet technology and more in a school as reported by the Houston Chronicle. A sentence that in many ways

As we start the new calendar year, and in southern climes a new school year, it’s probably a good time to test our holiday brains with some simple questions around what we call “school time.” Have you ever wondered who actually decided that around 180 days was the perfect amount of time students should spend in