Working At The Edge

Make School Different: Digital leadership & Transformation

3 Key Components of Digital Transformation – Pt. 1: Lead it

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This coming week I’ll have the opportunity to share the story of our digital transformation in the Salisbury Township School District with an audience of school leaders just beginning their journey. While our work has been documented in detail on TL2020.org (and previously TL2014.org) and in our published iBook, I want to prepare a simple […]

4 Ways to Move Compliance to the Side of Your Plate

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I’m enjoying reading the latest book from Lyle Kirtman and Michael Fullan: Leadership: Key Competencies for Whole-System Change. There are many ideas in this book that will challenge the thinking of most readers. Take for instance the title of Chapter 4 — Moving Compliance to the Side of Your Plate. Too many of us leaders […]

Transform, not reform – A transformational vision for education in the US

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This past September, the non-profit Convergence released A transformational vision for education in the US, the outcome of Education Reimagined, an initiative of Convergence dedicated to the realization of learner-centered education in the US.  Founded in 2009, Convergence has an interesting mission: to convene people with conflicting views to identify solutions for action around national […]

4 steps to deeper conversation

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Last month I shared a post on the lack of deep conversation, primarily on social media – mindlessly retweeting content and reading blog posts without connecting to the writer or ideas. At the time, I shared the hunch that a lot of surface level conversation is driven by a lack of focus, but I didn’t […]

Finding the Uncommon Dots – #1

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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”

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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?

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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 […]