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Mr. President: Just Go With the Flow
A day after Landon Donovan’s dramatic game-winner in the World Cup, I find myself thinking about the unpredictable beauty of soccer — and the work I do in public education — in a different way. Click...
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Tribal Leadership, Chicago & Organizational Culture
I’m in Chicago this week attending the National Charter Schools Conference, and on the plane this morning I continued reading a book that was recommended to me last week by Zappos’ Tony Hsieh, called...
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How to Start a Movement
Find out all you need to know (well, maybe not all, but . . .) from this 3 minute video, courtesy of a TED talk by Derek Sivers.
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Building Democratic Learning Communities
On July 28, I participated in a live web discussion about democratic learning communities with Classroom 2.0′s Steve Hargadon. It was an interesting and sometimes chaotic discussion. While Steve was...
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Education Inception
(This article also appeared on the Huffington Post.) I just watched Christopher Nolan’s remarkable new movie Inception, a futuristic film about a group of people who, through a variety of means, plant...
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Kid Whisperers
In theory, Buck is a documentary about horses, and a cinematic profile of the laconic cowboy who has learned to speak their silent animal language. In fact, Buck is a documentary about how people (and...
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Empathy for a Killer?
As the bizarre courtroom faces of James Holmes start appearing in newspapers alongside the beautiful lost faces of the twelve people he murdered, I wonder: is it possible for feel empathy for a person...
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This is what student learning looks like
This movie was produced by five-year-olds as a culminating project for a study of butterflies and habitats. It’s worth noting that this happened at a first-year-school that had never done this sort of...
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The World is Watching Chicago, Once Again
In 1968, student protesters stationed outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago broke into a spontaneous chant that quickly crystallized the tenor of the times: “The whole world is...
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The Empathy Formula
For over a year now, I’ve been working with a remarkable group of people at Ashoka who believe empathy is the foundational skill we need in order to become effective changemakers in modern society —...
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A Year of Wonder
I admit: I’m the type of person who sees every New Year as a chance to reboot, revisit and refresh. And this year, 2016, I want to try and sustain a yearlong exploration of wonder. Part of the reason...
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Discipline in schools moves toward peacemaking
The first time he got in trouble, 7-year-old “Z” kicked his teacher — getting him into more trouble. A few months later, shortly after his grandfather passed away, he kicked his teacher again. In many...
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The Beautiful Struggle
I’ve yet to meet a grown-up who, at some point, hasn’t felt a bit like a hamster in the wheel – spinning mindlessly towards some opaque goal, and for some abstract, poorly understood reason. Life can...
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180: Mississippi Rising
Of our fifty states, I can think of no other whose local history — for better and for worse — captures the essence of the larger American story. In a sense, we are all Mississippians. To wit, our next...
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To reimagine learning, we must reimagine the physical space of “school”— but...
For more than a century, the physical layout of American schools has been as consistent as any feature in American public life. Although the world around us has been in a constant state of flux, we...
View ArticleEd Sheeran’s new song about school shows that he has no idea what he’s...
Look — I love Sesame Street, and I especially love its new model of having famous singers adapt their songs for the show. A Katy Perry song about romantic mind games becomes a story about playing with...
View ArticleWhat are the central elements of a healthy human identity?
What are you wondering about these days? What are you struggling with? What is becoming clear to you? My answer to all of these questions relates to a new book I'm writing, and to my ongoing search to...
View ArticleAt Blue School, the Learning is Alive (Literally)
Gina Farrar is not your typical New York City school leader. For starters, she’s from the deep South -- although any remnants of a Southern twang have long since disappeared. She’s also quiet and...
View ArticleThe Most Famous Nursery Schools in the World — And What They Can Teach Us
Reggio Emilia, a mid-sized city that sits roughly halfway between Milan and Bologna, is not your grandmother’s Italy. For starters, it’s more hardscrabble than picturesque -- heavily graffitied, with...
View ArticleThe Art of Jazz
Imagine a country: imperfect, divided, diverse, contradictory, inchoate, in search of a more perfect union. Now give that country a sound, a feeling, and a form.
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