Note: This is the final article in a four-part series answering the question, “Does education really need to change?“. You can read the first, second, and third posts here. It seems after all this research I’ve done on the current state of education and all the reading I’ve done on the future of learning, that one […]
Remember waiting? We used to wait for our favorite song on the radio. We used to wait for a TV show to come on and watch simultaneously with millions of people. We used to wait for our kids to come home without being able to text them. We used to wait for phone calls. We […]
Last week I asked you to fill out a survey about professional development. Many of you (342 to be exact) took time to fill out this survey and share your thoughts on professional development in education right now. At this point I think I’m supposed to say, “Wow, these results really surprised me!” Except that […]
A young man was restless in his studies. He couldn’t stay focused on school work, and found himself consistently skipping classes, missing due dates, and working on projects that meant something to him…rather than for a class. A year into college he realized it was a waste of money, and not for him. He was […]
First, I just want to say thank you to all of my blog readers for helping make my new book, Learning By Choice, hit #1 in Amazon in Education over the weekend. It is a humbling experience to release a book out into the world, but I’m so excited to be a part of the conversations already happening […]
Imagine you’ve been teaching for 15 years. In those 15 years you have grown as a professional, learned new technologies, shifted with the standards, had new initiative after new initiative started in your school, and seen the way you have been evaluated move from observations to data back to observations and data. In those 15 […]
This was originally published in a TeachThought guest post. John Maeda grew up working in his family’s Seattle tofu store in the 1980s. He was a bright and curious student who self-taught himself some computer coding in high school with no internet to learn from. Like many high school students he had dreams, but very little […]
I recently lead a team of six Middle School teachers and our Middle School Principal on a school visit. We are just starting a Chromebook pilot with our 6th, 7th, and 8th grade Language Arts teachers, and this visit was to a school district that has a 1:1 Chromebook initiative running from 5th-12th grade. It […]
I sensed the anticipation as soon as I entered the classroom. Groups of students were huddled together flipping through notes and documentation. A few were going back and forth about what they were going to say. As I headed to the whiteboard a hush fell over the room and one student asked, “do we get […]
It’s the same game. The same course. The same clubs. The same ball. Yet, its so difficult and challenging every time. Past winners fail to make the cut. Rookies play like they’ve got nothing to lose. And as we watch, we understand that it’s as psychologically and mentally tough as it is physically. So, what […]