Working At The Edge

Make School Different: Digital leadership & Transformation

Finding the Uncommon Dots – #1

By

I love thinking about the future, bumping up against ideas and having conversations about how outlier ideas should or will impact our work in K12 education. As leaders, we need to be spending a good deal of our time looking beyond the immediate reality for “disruptive” ideas, trends and innovations, ideally creating urgency for change within our schools. My colleague, Lynn Fuini-Hetten and […]

The Culture of “School”

By

I’m revisiting my highlights in Ron Richhart’s Creating Culture of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools. A revisit to any great text surfaces new questions. One of my biggest questions drawn from the text is What kind of intellectual life are we surrounding our children with at home, school and in the classroom? You’d […]

Diving more deeply: Time to get beyond the surface?

By

I shared a blog post a few months ago (Everybody shares, nobody reads) about our consumption of information from blogs and Twitter. I’ve since shared my frustrations with numerous colleagues about the large amount of surface conversation out there, both online and at face-to-face gatherings. I may seem a little judgmental and cynical with this […]

Busting myths of creativity in education

By

Education isn’t the most creative or innovative sector of society. Sure, we have classrooms within our system and schools around the country known for innovative practices. Generally, though, the field of education is firmly rooted in an industrial model and not too willing to change. As a superintendent, I work with those in my district […]

Make School Different @ #KTI2015

By

This past week, I had the pleasure of speaking to this year’s class of Keystone Technology Innovators (#kti2015). It was a pleasure to speak with such a group of dynamic and dedicated educators! A bonus: three teachers from Salisbury Township School District were present – Jen Brinson (@jbrinson21), a KTI Lead Learner; Linda Helfrich (@LindaHelfrich), […]

Work of significance – What’s your superpower?

By

Earlier this summer, I crafted a post titled What’s your leadership focus?  In the post, I challenged us as leaders to not be driven solely by the urgent and the important, but to make room for the significant – work that will have a long-lasting impact, beyond that which is just urgent or important. This past […]

Are we developing leaders for the 21st century?

By

Do we have an educational leadership crisis? Are we developing educational leaders – in our schools and in our universities – for a world that was? Or for a world that is to be? In her TED talk, Roselinde Torres shares her research around the questions – What makes a great leader in the 21st […]

Growing Success to Positively Impact Culture

By

Who doesn’t love Sylvia Duckworth‘s sketchnotes (check them all out on Fickr)? Her latest is The Iceberg Illusion, with “success” being the iceberg. While our stakeholders (teachers, students, parents, community and fellow administrators) may be able to identify “success,” they don’t necessarily understand all the factors “behind the scenes” — dedication, hard work and good habits; disappointment, […]

Curious about innovation in K12

By

For a few weeks, much of my curiosity has centered on this idea of innovation (whatever that is!) in schools and the leadership required to bring it about. An earlier post, Leading Innovation for Systemic Change, represents the early stages of my curiosity. Over the past few days I’ve generated some inquiry questions on innovation in […]