Working At The Edge

Make School Different: Digital leadership & Transformation

Valuing Strategic Foresight in K12

By

I love thinking about the future, particularly how it will impact how we learn. I love thinking up possible scenarios in the K12 space that might exist as a result of new technologies, and have previously written about how strategic foresight should be considered a new leadership competency. Because of this passion, I was drawn […]

Principles of Student-Centered Learning

By

If you are interested in the learner-centered movement, be sure to take a look at the work from Education Evolving, an organization from Minnesota committed to drawing on three strategic levers to advance the work: thought leadership, policy advocacy and educator networks. In the area of thought leadership, they have a Publications section on their website. […]

Leadership Challenges Assumptions

By

In The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters, Peter Block pushes us to think about the importance of pursuing the why question before answering the how question. Think about it: in your learning environment, what is the ratio of why questions to how questions? I don’t have any research on this, but from my own experience, I would […]

Creating the Conditions for Authentic Learner Voice

By

If you’ve previously read this blog, you are aware that my colleague, Lynn Fuini-Hetten, and I host a podcast (Shift Your Paradigm) that delves into learner-centered education broadly and learner-centered leadership more specifically. We are currently working through all of our interviews, sorting out themes and principles for learner-centered leadership. For me, one of the […]

How might we be radical?

By

From vocabulary.com: Radical If something is considered extremist or very different from anything that has come before it, call it radical. The noun, radical, comes from the Latin radix “root,” and in fact, radical and root are synonymous as technical terms in fields such as math and linguistics. In more everyday language, a radical is someone […]

Purpose of Education

By

For as long as I’ve been associated with K12 education (just about 50 years if you go back to when I started going to school), the focus has been dominated by a push model of content dissemination. The curriculum represents a body of knowledge/facts that we assume one needs to be successful in the world […]

Distinguishing Leadership

By

When you hear the word leadership, what associations do you make? What is leadership? What is leadership not? This past year, I had the opportunity to participate in a Learning Lab hosted by Education Reimagined. Facilitated by Allan Cohen, the group of dozens of educators from around the country arrived at the following artifact distinguishing leadership: Leadership is […]

Shift Your Paradigm Podcast – Memorable Podcast Conversations

By

Several years ago, my colleague, Lynn Fuini-Hetten, and I started our own inquiry into learner-centered leadership as we got more engaged with the learner-centered education community. Education Reimagined worked with us to connect us to many learning environments around the country to interview leaders and learners in varying learner-centered models. Over the past year, Lynn […]

TLTalkRadio – Memorable Podcast Conversations from 2019

By

My colleague, Lynn Fuini-Hetten, and I have been hosting a podcast on education and educational leadership for 6 seasons––TLTalkRadio! For this post, I thought it would be fun to recap some of the most interesting conversations from 2019. It was challenging keeping it to a dozen, but here are some of the stand-out conversation. Enjoy! […]