Recently, Educator Competencies for Personalized, Learner-Centered Teaching from the Students at the Center Hub crossed my newsfeed. It’s a valuable resource to fuel conversations about the changing role and skill sets of teaching in a learner-centered environment. The competencies, “build on and push beyond the best existing teaching competencies and standards to capture what educators need in […]

I really enjoyed reading the recent whitepaper from the National Center for Innovation in Education, Leadership for Learning: What is Leadership’s Role in Supporting Success for Every Student? The topic is of particular interest to me because I have a hunch that there is a different set of knowledge, skills and mindsets necessary for leading […]

I enjoy reading several books concurrently. It’s useful for making connections between different, sometimes divergent, ideas. Two reads that I’ve been thinking about lately: A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger (listen to our podcast with Warren on TLTalkRadio) and Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in […]

In a previous post, I wrote about the need for school leaders to play the “long game” – visioning beyond standardized tests scores, archaic teacher evaluation systems and ranking schools based on test scores.  As leaders, we need to constantly be standing at the edge of our organization and patrolling the border between “now” and […]

My curiosity on the topic of leadership and learner-centered environments was piqued this past week as I had the opportunity to participate in a convening of superintendents on personalized learning at the White House and Department of Education in Washington, DC. I have never been in a room with so many people thinking about and […]

As a practitioner, I know transforming an organization for deeper learning (moving from school-centered to learner-centered) is not easy. As an observer of my own practice and the practice of other educational organizations seeking transformation, there are many reasons why it’s difficult to gain momentum, some of which include instability in organizational leadership, volatility in […]

In Pennsylvania, the Department of Education recently released School Performance Profile Scores to the public. Using a complex (and convoluted) formula, the SPP is designed to inform the public of the academic performance measures of a school through a single score. Around the same time as the release of the SPP, I read a post […]

Want to get educators to stop and think? Remind them that our children five and under will graduate in the early 2030s. And then ask them if they wonder what the world will be like 15-20 years into the future. Ask them to go back 15-20 years and notice how much our lives have changed […]

Leadership Arguably, the most significant role of an educational leader is communicating a compelling vision for learning in the classroom and throughout the organization – school or district. I keep coming back to this quote from the recent book, Illuminate, by Duarte & Sanchez whenever I think of the influence a leader has over the vision […]