Let me try to paint this picture. We were sitting in our school conference room on a Skype call with a Norwegian company, First Scandinavian, who creates and runs Newton…
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Last year over 60,000 students from 600+ schools, in over 12 countries and four different continents participated in our second annual Global Day of Design. The hashtag went viral as students and…
I’m sharing out my process below for writing my new book, The PBL Playbook: A Guide to ACTUALLY Doing Project-Based Learning. I used design thinking as a framework to write the book…
Ahh, IKEA. If you are anything like me, you probably have a love/hate relationship with IKEA. I love walking through their store, putting our kids in childcare, and seeing all…
Many teachers have done the spaghetti and marshmallow challenge in the classroom and called it a STEM project. It’s a great activity, but is it really a STEM activity? Sure there’s…
The Global Day of Design just wrapped up on May 2nd. If you want to see what happens when 80,000+ students embrace design thinking, check out the Twitter stream and…
Last year over 40,000 students and 450 schools from 5 continents participated in the very first Global Day of Design. The hashtag went viral as students and teachers shared and…
My daughter lowered her eyes, looked at me, and said, “I can’t do it.” I looked back and asked her again to put one foot on the board, push off…
I distinctly remembering learning how to type. It was hard. I had been a hunt and peck perfectionist up until age 14 when my school provided a computer course focused…
Last April, we had over 50,000 students participate in the Global Day of Design (and next year’s GDD is slated for May 2nd). It was powerful to watch students embrace design thinking…
A fresh start. Isn’t that what so many want in education? Whether you are a student, parent, teacher, administrator, or community member, we all have our opinions on what school…
Raise your hand if you have spent over 14,000 hours in school during your lifetime. If you grew up in the Unites States, or a country with similar education philosophy,…
When I was in sixth grade we were tasked with one of my favorite school projects of all time. We were allowed to choose a book to read and then,…
It’s the morning of Edcamp Leadership, and all around the world educational leaders will be learning from each other, sharing ideas, and talking about how to better their schools, classrooms,…
I failed a lot this year (you can read about them all here in my failure report), but also had some amazing successes with teachers and students at our school….
Our new book, LAUNCH: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student, has been out for almost a month now and the response has…
When my students were doing the 20% Project (Genius Hour) in my class we had an “Epic Failure Board” (inspired by a number of people) where they would pin up…
In the widely known “invisible gorilla” experiment, volunteers watched a video of different groups tossing a ball and were asked to count the number of times the ball was tossed. In a surprising…
My daughter had her first “lip sync” performance tonight at a school event. Her and a bunch of first-grade friends had been practicing a routine for “Call Me Maybe” for…
This is the third post in the “Design Thinking in the Classroom” series. Read the first and second post here. In David and Tom Kelley’s book, Creative Confidence, the authors…
In the first post of this series, I shared my biggest fear as an educator (being ineffective and my students not caring about learning). We looked at the role choice, inquiry,…
It is almost time! Tomorrow, on April 26th, 2016, thousands of students from around the world will participate in the very first Global Day of Design. Over 350 schools from…
A little over a year ago, John Spencer and I tossed around an idea for a book called The Creative Classroom. Given our combined experience with design thinking (as educators, leaders,…
When I was in 3rd grade my best friend Mark and I built a treehouse out of wood scraps we found in the forest behind his house. We were makers….
Mohini was a regal white tiger who lived for many years at the Washington DC National Zoo. For most of those years her home was in the old lion house—a…
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been asked the same question multiple times after speaking, “Do you still believe Genius Hour and 20% Projects are the best way to engage…
Design thinking is a flexible framework for getting the most out of the creative process. It is used in the arts, in engineering, in the corporate world, and in social…
In the movie, The Martian, there was a quote in the last scene that really hit home, when thinking about my role as a teacher and leader. It comes from…
