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Born to Create, Driven to Learn?
Are we born to create? Does the drive to learn represent what it means to be human? About twenty years ago, I began to think deeply about the relationship between creativity and learning, perhaps...
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Wandering and Wondering about Educon 2.4
The Journey: It’s been two weeks since EduCon 2012 and lots of posts have been put up since then. I’ve postponed writing until the experience soaked in a bit more. The distance to Philadelphia that...
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Imagine Joy … as the goal
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to hang out with kids and educators at our regional Destination Imagination(DI) Tournament. Quite a few of the young people on teams at the regional tournament...
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World Peace Game: No Standard Problems – or Solutions
This past week, I had the opportunity to travel by bus to the Pentagon with John Hunter, career teacher and creator of the World Peace Game, twenty-three of the latest crop of 4th grade world peace...
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Bridge to College: Valued Space for Learning
The mark of a land’s worth isn’t found in its monuments. It resides in its children. From boys hanging out on a free afternoon at the Bridge to College program in Dublin to a four-year old sharing her...
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Experimenting with Learning New Stuff Isn’t Just for Kids
I’m continuing to play with a free collage-making app that I recently downloaded… and wondering about its use as tool for learning. I can see kids using it as a way of organizing digital images to...
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In the Garden: Seeking and Finding Connections to Land, Air and Water
I spent some time yesterday reflecting upon a Connected Educators Month EdTechtalk: Teachers Teaching Teachers in which I participated last week with a diverse group of educational thinkers. Our...
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Why not Children as Teachers – not just Learners?
This morning I glanced occasionally at a range of adolescent orangutans engaging in problem-solving play and stick-based learning with, and from, each other on an Animal Planet show. They were teaching...
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Finding Our Way on the S-Curve .. confident, competent, contemporary learning
Last year, a middle school teacher commented that students wanted to share their stories “with the world” and so they wrote scripts, directed, acted, and turned their stories into a variety of ‘silent”...
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Abandoning the Space Shuttle… a Lesson for Educators
The U.S. Department of Education, and more than a few state-level departments, could take a lesson from NASA. On a recent evening, I had the opportunity to again hear one of my favorite local...
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#WhatIWrite: A National Day of Giving Voice to Learners and Educators
I write to feel, to think, to live, to connect, to make sense, to communicate. Why I write and what I write cannot exist separate from each other. What I write at work remains pretty basic; responding...
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The “K Playbook”: Professional Learning for a Lifetime
A mentor once said to me that he had never seen a kindergartener arrive at school with the idea that he or she was not a learner. During my professional years spent as an elementary principal, I...
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Our Kids Are Talking. But Are We Listening?
Voices of learners inform the compelling purpose of our roles as educators – why we exist. The voices of learners, if we listen to them, also call us to question whether 20th century “command and...
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11 Reasons Why I am Thankful for American Education: Revisiting Perspective
Horace Mann once wrote “the public school is the greatest discovery of man.” He understood the importance of public education as a foundation for creating a culture of democratic participation in...
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Gratitude Past Due: Lessons on Culture… People… Determination
I often find myself awake in the early morning hours in front of a flickering screen searching for words to describe how I feel about micro-conversations in which we share, chat, discuss, and, with...
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On Fence Designers and Citizen Thinkers**
Who are the learners today who learn in the moment because of their own interests or because they need to do so? The learners who don’t just learn on command when we want them to learn? Where are the...
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Learning Naturally
I’ve been thinking about the end of the cycle of another school year. Of course, there is no end to school really – no end to learning ever. School is simply one anchor point in the day in the life of...
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Unhurrying the Hurried Educator: A Convo about Personal Learning and Passion
My first iPh*ne reconnected me with a love of photography that I’d abandoned at some point. Perhaps it was because I had become so consumed with my professional work. Or, maybe it simply reflected the...
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A Summer of Maker Learning
Coder Dojo Maker “… Design and thinking is … idea of making creative leaps to come up with a solution… allows people to not just be problem solvers with explicit, but also tacit knowledge… they are...
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Three Stories: One Influence
One: I am listening to Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed. It’s full of research about all the topics that educators discuss when they see children, adolescents, or teens who struggle because of...
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