March 8, 2013
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Above are my slides for the webinar I presented yesterday for Simple K12. The full 30 minutes webinar, on video, can be found at their site here, though if you are not a member there I’m afraid there is a $17 fee.
(The slides include a few prepared originally by Suzie Boss for our presentation together at NAIS.)
February 28, 2013
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Although the hour went by much too swiftly, Suzie Boss, Brett Jacobsen, and I had a great time sharing our thoughts on the topic of Bringing Innovation to School today at NAIS AC 13
The slides are above. If you are interested, you can click over to read Mike Gwaltney’s notes from the session.
In my remarks, I made reference to my presentation a year ago at NAIS on Innovative Schools, Innovative Students, which you can find here.
My remarks also drew heavily upon a post I wrote last fall on about the power of peer networking and Steven Johnson’s new book, Future Perfect, which can be found here.
Highly recommended for our attendees and everyone else interested in this topic is Suzie’s book, Bringing Innovation to School.
As a part of our session, we invited attendees to answer themselves on sticky notes questions about how they are, or how they would, bring innovation to school– and as promised, I’m happy to share them here:
Learning assessment?
Learning space?
December 5, 2012
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Two of my great interests and enthusiasms regarding 21st century learning have, until now, felt a bit divorced from and at odds with each other. Yesterday, however, I learned more about a fascinating bridge developing for them.
The first is high quality, authentic 21st century assessment: if we are going to make new pathways in learning that is more meaningful for students, more preparatory for the futures they are inheriting and more engaging for the people they are today, we need to have tools that allow us to evaluate effectively their learning, both to provide meaningful endorsements of these learning paths for the skeptical and, more importantly, to correct our courses to keep doing so more effectively.
The second is the joyful messiness of open-ended and unstructured project-based learning that is found in Fab labs, design-build studios, design thinking centers, and maker-faire type spaces. These places ought to be free from tight strictures– they should celebrate experimentation, learning by doing, trial and error, fast-failure, and never be stifled by narrow or miserable “testing.”
It might be cruel to introduce assessment to these labs and studios, but I want those teachers and students who want to find a way to build in more structure, such that they can better evaluate their own progress, get external feedback, and meaningfully improve their work to have quality ways to do so.
Clearly I am not the only one to think this (and I never am).
The Innovation Portal was launched in the last year or so, (with strong support from Project-Lead-the Way, itself also a valuable resource),and as you view the site you can see it is still developing and rounding out. It provides a platform for
students to create, maintain and share digital portfolios. The portfolios can be used to meet a class requirement or they can be used to submit the portfolio to a scholarship or open contest. The contest owners – or anyone else invited by the student – can evaluate a student’s portfolio. (more…)
November 12, 2012
I enjoyed a great day presenting at ISACS last week in Louisville.
Below you’ll find most of my materials from those presentations; thank you all who attended and thank you ISACS for inviting me.
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Innovation is Iteration: the Marshmallow Challenge
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After this highly interactive and energetic workshop, participants shared with me a set of great ideas they had for bringing the marshmallow challenge back to their schools. One person spoke of being at a K-8 school with “family groups” composed of one student for each grade k-8, and using them there; another said she was at a PS-12 school where the pressure to be perfect and right all the time felt very strong and she wanted to do a school-wide marshmallow experience; another explained they were moving toward an iPad 1-1 implementation very slowly, concerned they needed to get everything in order just right before launching and that she wanted to do this to encourage people to jump in and start experimenting.
November 11, 2012
One of my main projects this year is serving as a member and consultant/writer for the Secondary School Admissions Testing Board (SSATB) Think Tank on the Future of Admissions Assessment. More information on the Think Tank is here; it’s charge is here. As part of my work I am posting a monthly column for the Think Tank; below is a “teaser” that post. Click the link here or at bottom to read it in full.
“Creativity,” Dr. Sternberg replied, when asked what addition to admissions assessment he would recommend if he had to limit himself to just one. Coming from the SSATB 2012 Annual Meeting’s keynote speaker, the former President of American Psychological Association, and arguably the world’s foremost scholar of – and experimental practitioner in – expanded admissions assessment, this is compelling counsel for our Think Tank’s work.
Using Sternberg as a framer and guide for the work of the Think Tank on the Future of Admissions Assessment is a no-brainer, and our time with him in Chicago was enormously valuable. In this post, we’ll take a deeper dive into assessing creativity; in future posts we’ll look at other Sternberg recommendations and many other aspects of expanded assessment for admissions.
Sternberg’s recommendation to prioritize creativity is both narrowly pragmatic and broadly idealistic. Read on….
June 18, 2012
This book has been withdrawn from publication due to issues of integrity, and is no longer available. I was sorry to hear about the book’s problems, and certainly condemn the errors. Nevertheless, I think the particular points shared below are still relevant, and I leave them here on the blog.
I’ve already twice posted appreciations for Jonah Lehrer’s new book, Imagine, but I want to add a short third post here appreciating his thoughts about the book’s lessons for educators. In the last chapter, he profiles the excellence of NOCCA: the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.
What’s interesting is what does not happen [at the school.] The students don’t sit in chair and listen to a long lecture. Many rooms don’t even have chairs. They don’t retrieve textbooks or being a series of exercises designed to raise their test scores on standardized tests… Instead, students spend their time creating: they walk over to their instruments and sketchbooks and costumes and get to work.
Lehrer quotes the school’s CEO, Kyle Wedberg, with an emphasis which resonates loudly with the thinking on this blog: we need to advance learning by returning to learning by doing, by creating learning environments where the greater emphasis on students doing the work of the subject under study, and using the best tools available to do so. Wedberg:
We’re 120 years behind the times in all the right ways. At some point, vocational education became a dirty word. It became unfashionable to teach kids by having them do stuff, by having them make stuff. Instead, school became all about giving kids facts and tests. Now, I’ve got nothing against facts and tests, but memorization is not the only kind of thinking we should be encouraging. When we obsess over tests, when we teach the way we’re teaching now, we send the wrong message to students. We’re basically telling them creativity is a bad idea. (more…)
January 5, 2012
(This is the third post in a series; be sure to read the first for context).
This Class project was a year in the making: It began last spring, and I posted then about the class plans and my conversations with the working group as they “pitched it” to me and sought my approval and sponsorship. It is worth checking out this previous post to show the sequence, beginning with designing and planning and now culminating in completion:
Below are the student overview of the project’s purpose and procedure, and after the jump (more) is the Solar Oven Project.
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Purpose: The purpose of this project was to provide the school’s students with an environmentally friendly way to charge their laptops.
Procedure 1. Screw wooden beams onto the preexisting structure. 2. Cut L-shaped metal to the correct length to fit the desired mounting angle of the panels and cut L-shaped metal to fit the length of the panel. 3. Attach the metal to the panel. 4. Attach the panel supports to the metal running the length of the panel. 5. Put the panel on the roof. 6. Attach the panel by screwing it to the structure. 7. Run conduit from the panels to the wall. 8. Drill a hole through the wall. 9. Run the wires from the panels through the hole. 10. Attach the panel wires to the charge controller. 11. Attach the charge controller to a car battery. 12. Attach the car battery to a power inverter. 13. Run a power cord from the inverter to a wall outlet outside. 
(more…)
December 13, 2011
A recurrent theme on this blog is advocating learning by doing in the 21st century, and I argue that we should be seizing the opportunities new technologies present to facilitate our students in shifting their focus from consumption to creation, from receiving information to producing knowledge and applying it to become themselves active innovators.
We have been working throughout our curriculum to promote this idea– see the way that our AP Gov’t class has written their own textbooks or created their own political campaigns complete with TV ads and websites as examples. Our Design Built Tech Innovation class, often celebrated here on the blog, is a highlight of our efforts in this direction.
In the TED talk above, MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld explains that we need in our schools a “Fab Lab — a low-cost lab that lets people build things they need using digital and analog tools. It’s a simple idea with powerful results.”
We’ve won the digital revolution; let’s look after the digital revolution to what comes next.
I’ve never understood the boundary between computer science and physical science… Computer science is one of the worst things ever to happen either to computers or science.
I started a new class, How To Make Almost Anything. Students were not there [in this class] to do research, they were there because they wanted to make stuff.
Just year after year — and I finally realized the students were showing the killer app of personal fabrication is products for a market of one person. You don’t need this for what you can get in Wal-Mart; you need this for what makes you unique.
[paraphrase] When we opened FabLabs, we found a pattern: Empowerment begins, and then Education follows, serious, hands on education, Problem-Solving follows, and in turn Businesses grow around this problem-solving, and eventually there is Invention: real invention happening in these labs.
So, we’re just at the edge of this digital revolution in fabrication, where the output of computation programs the physical world. So, together, these two projects answer questions I hadn’t asked carefully. The class at MIT shows the killer app for personal fabrication in the developed world is technology for a market of one: personal expression in technology that touches a passion unlike anything I’ve seen in technology for a very long time. And the killer app for the rest of the planet is the instrumentation and the fabrication divide: people locally developing solutions to local problems.
With this as inspiration, we at St. Gregory are pushing ahead to develop further our own version “Fab Lab” in Dennis Conner’s Physics classroom. Already it is an astounding place, filled with terrific tools and resources for construction, measurement, and analysis. Students are building solar energy stations, trebuchet catapults, and much, much more in this FabLab. But we are not done: there is more to do.
Next on our list is the installation of a 3D printer, ordered recently from MakerBot and which will be ready to go for students next month. (more…)
December 7, 2011
The TEDx talk above is a treat, presented by two faculty members of the d. school (Design) at Stanford, one of them, Scott Witthoft, an alumnus of our school, St. Gregory, and a great example of what we mean when we say we “create innovators.” Scott Doorley is his colleague; their titles are co-directors of the Environment Collaborative .
The talk is engaging and visually enriched by the slides; it should be said that it is not particularly detailed, comprehensive, or sophisticated. It serves as a lovely prompt to think more carefully about what we want furniture to do for us, and their specific topic, though not deeply explored, is what we want furniture to do in classrooms to promote creativity.
Some key quotes:
We think about tables a lot, not for what they are but for what they do.
What role do you want a table to play in a creative learning environment or experience?
We think of creative spaces as spaces where people make things, like a Fab Lab, or any places where an idea gets embodied or advanced: Where do the ideas lead students? What are their next steps? A critical aspect of designing that table or that experience is leaving room to evolve. (more…)
December 5, 2011
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Vodpod videos no longer available.
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Several of my great enthusiasms come together in the the video above and below from the School at Columbia and their outstanding, superb Tools-at-Schools project. Don Buckley, the School’s Director of Innovation, seems a prime driver here. For me, watching the videos is a wonderful learning experience; I was able to learn more about the design process (so crucial to innovation), visualize quality PBL in action, and at the same time gain new understanding of how school furniture can be updated to better enhance innovative learning environments.
Several elements stand out:
1. The program gives students real-world tasks connected to their own experience and relevant to their lives, tasks to which they themselves can bring their own expertise. (more…)
November 20, 2011
[cross-posted from Connected Principals]
Heidi Hayes Jacobs: ”If you’re not updating your curriculum, you are saying that nothing is changing.”
“Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of school administrators who responded to a recent survey said 1:1 computing classrooms where teachers act as a coach for students are the future of education.” (T.H.E Journal)
“Innovative teaching supports students’ development of the skills that will help them thrive in future life and work.” (ITL Research)
One of the most exciting books of the year for those of us seeking to become ever more effective as innovative school-leaders and leaders of innovative schools, and, even more importantly, seeking to facilitate our students’ development of more innovative mindsets, is the new book from Clayton Christensen (et.al), The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the 5 Skills of Disruptive Innovators.
(Bill Ferriter has written brilliantly about this book here, here, and here).
The book is framed around the Five Core Skills of Innovators, a framework highly valuable for ourselves and our students: What are we doing to do more of and become better at
It is my aim to write more about these five traits, particularly for teaching and learning, but here I want to focus upon school leadership and the book’s concluding three chapters, People, Processes, and Philosophies, to draw and offer 15 takeaways for Principals and School-Leaders: What You Can Do to Become Stronger Innovation Leaders in Your School:
1. Own as Principal the role of Innovator-in-Chief: You can’t delegate innovation:
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” Steve Jobs.
Christensen:
“In the most innovative companies, senior executives didn’t just delegate innovation; their own hands were deep in the innovation process… (more…)
October 2, 2011
Regular readers here know of my fondness for Steven Johnson, and my enthusiasm particularly for his 2010 book (the book of the year, I think), Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation.
Now comes his next book, the Innovator’s Cookbook. I am eager to read the book and will certainly share more here soon, but the video above is a taste and a teaser. It asks us as educators who seek to cultivate innovative mindsets among our students to think about what we are doing to help them “get a little lost,” “get out of their normal environments,” and have “show and tell sessions,” when they share with each other eclectic arrays of what they are learning about in the wider world.
September 19, 2011
[cross-posted from Connected Principals]
“Dad, there’s your favorite word again,” my son calls out, a tad cynically, when we are driving to school listening to NPR and a reporter uses the word innovation. I am aware that my son, and others, believe this word has become too much of a buzz-word and perhaps a fad, too often so broadly defined that it becomes generic, empty in content, and devoid of true significance.
But, I refuse to be deterred.
Like Tom Friedman in the New York Times, President Obama, and many others, I think the word and the concept capture and describe something both wonderful and incredibly important in our world today– and in fact, more important than ever before in our fast-changing times. Educational innovation, and, more importantly, educating students to be innovative, are the intertwined twin concepts I spend the most time trying to learn about more deeply, understand better, write about more often, and implement more effectively.
Looking back, I recognize now that the slogan change made in my first months (2009) at my school, St. Gregory, by the Board of Trustees and myself, came too soon and too abruptly, without enough preparation and inclusion, and I regret the rushed process. But, nevertheless, I love the phrase which adorns our website, brochures, and advertisements and which looms large on the walls of our major meeting areas: Creating Leaders and Innovators.
Creating Leaders and Innovators stood proudly tall in foot-large letters high up on our gymnasium wall in 2010 when Tony Wagner, Ph.D., visited our school and spoke beneath this banner to an audience of nearly 500 about the educational change our fast-changing world demands and how we can bring about this change.
So it should be no surprise that I am greatly enthusiastic about Dr. Wagner’s forthcoming book, (April, 2012),Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World. I think every 21st century educator who seeks to strengthen our national and global future by teaching our students to be more creative and successful problem-solvers should put this book on the very top of their must-read list for 2012.
Last week, I had the good fortune to participate in a webinar organized by Edleader21, the fine “Professional Learning Community for 21st century educational leaders,” with Dr. Wagner, and I received his permission to share this “preview” of his forthcoming book’s exciting insights and lessons. (These are my notes recapitulating his remarks, not a verbatim transcript.) (more…)
21k12 