The Strange Reality of Engagement
The reality of “student engagement” hit me square in the face yesterday as I sat in an ASCD presentation by Alison Zmuda and Robyn Jackson. In it, they shared their keys to engaging students in the classroom. During the session, I couldn’t help but compare with…
Full Speed Ahead Down the Road to Nowhere
Part of my job as a curriculum supervisor involves doing professional development with teachers about curriculum and instruction in mathematics. With implementation of the Pennsylvania Core Standards (based on the Common Core State Standards) coming quickly, we are…
Why Digital Learning Day is Important
Three years ago, I toured the Library of Congress for the first time. Today I am here again, this time for Digital Learning Day. Although I have been involved with helping to organize this event since its inception in 2012, and have had the privilege of attending the…
Common Core Toolkit for Principals: Part 5
May Toolkit: What Not to Wear Do There are two ways to implement any new set of standards: the right way, and the wrong way. Of course, the reality isn’t this neat and tidy, but there are definitely some errors to avoid during the…
Common Core Toolkit for Principals: Part 4
April Toolkit: A Little Rain to Water the Flowers The Common Core State Standards are not all songbirds and sundaes. There is some rain: critics of the standards. It is worth knowing about the criticisms. Before the next faculty meeting,…
Common Core Toolkit for Principals: Part 3
March Toolkit: Starting the Shift (Yes, I am aware that the March toolkit is being published in April. Life tends to happen, and I allowed it to delay the post. I will publish the April toolkit next week to get back on schedule.) Before…
A Day at the Newseum: Digital Learning Day 2013
Yesterday I had the enormous privilege and opportunity to participate in the Digital Learning Day national event at the Newseum in Washington, DC. I first got to be part of the opening keynote panel, where I spoke on revitalizing assessment with digital tools. I was…
Common Core Toolkit for Principals: Part 2
February Toolkit: Mission and Transfer within the CCSS Before the next faculty meeting, read your district’s mission statement. (Ours is on the district web site.) A well-crafted mission statement is all about transfer: making sure that…
Common Core Toolkit for Principals: Part 1
As part of my district’s plan to realign our curriculum with the Common Core State Standards (which we are calling the C4 Project, for Cheltenham Common Core Curriculum), I will be developing a Toolkit for Principals. Each month, I will prepare a four-part package of…
Anastasis Academy: A Fresh Approach to School
On Wednesday, I had the privilege of visiting Anastasis Academy in Centennial, CO, about a half hour outside of Denver. I’ve known two members of their team, co-founder Kelly Tenkely and teacher Michelle Baldwin, for several years. Being in town this week for the NAGC…
Gifted Education Needs to Be a Struggle
NPR aired a piece on Monday morning about how Japanese schools (at least in the elementary grades) promote struggle as the pathway to learning and understanding. It was a profile of work by psychology professor Jim Stigler. The essence of it, and a nice parallel with…
Learning as Cuisine
As I’ve been working on my session for this Saturday, I’m referencing a metaphor for thinking about learning in terms of food, one of my favorite topics. Since I won’t have the time to explore this idea thoroughly in the session, I decided to expand on it here. But…
Interactive Fiction and the Common Core
This Saturday, I will be presenting a session on Digital Storytelling with Interactive Fiction at the NAGC Conference. I’ve written about Interactive Fiction before so I won’t go into an explanation of what it is here. IF has a great deal of potential, however, for…
Book Review: How to Create a Culture of Achievement
In my last post, I talked about how I believe we have gotten as much mileage out of the current system as we can get. There’s no juice left in the orange, and squeezing it further will just extract bitterness from the rind. I suggested that instead of relentlessly…
Faster and More Intense
It was May of 1977. My dad and I sat in our seats at the Eric’s Place theater in Philadelphia as the house lights dimmed and those now-famous words appeared on screen: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.…” I was ten years old and for me, Star Wars was an…
21st Century Administrators: New Roles, New Responsibilities
In a way, the job of school district administrator is like a tugboat. If you have ever watched a tugboat work, it appears far too small for it’s job of maneuvering huge ships around a crowded harbor. Yet a smart tugboat pilot knows exactly where to push or pull on…
The Ultimate Secret to Education Reform
Yesterday evening, I was speaking with Tony Baldasaro who noticed a theme running through several of the ASCD sessions he had attended. That theme echoed one I had been noticing as well, and which I have reflected on several times in the past. “It’s all about…
Edcamp as PD: Shifting Mindsets (Part 2)
To follow up my earlier post with a thought that was still marinating before, another thing that I have been working on at school is creating more professional development that looks like the kind of learning we want to see in our district classrooms. As a leader, I…
Edcamp as PD: Shifting Mindsets
I just attended a session by three of the founders of Edcamp, Kristen Swanson, Ann Leaness, and Christine Miles. They shared an interesting statistic: in the two years since the first Edcamp Philly, there have been 101 separate Edcamp events around the world. There…
Connectedness and Uncomfortable Thinking
I am attending the ASCD annual conference in Philadelphia, and spent yesterday in a day-long pre-conference session by Bobb Darnell about encouraging an environment for high achievement for all students. During the session I learned some new things and gained some new…
Hacking the Math Curriculum
You know it’s not your typical inservice day when you find the Assistant Superintendent playing Monopoly with a group of third and fourth grade teachers. That is exactly what you would have seen last Friday, however, as some of our elementary teachers learned how to…