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If You Were the Next Steve Jobs… – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review
“You don’t get to tomorrow by solving yesterday’s problems.”
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Seth’s Blog: Understanding critical path
Wow! This piece on critical path could help revolutionize school innovation and transformation. If we would just practice such discipline.
How to integrate w/ #Decisive, #ShipIt, #Switch, etc?!
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Seth’s Blog: Salmagundi on offer is not the shortcut it appears to be
Brilliant advice for schools! (Understandably, out of love for children and learning, schools try to be all things to all people. More and more, schools must consider “What will we be extraordinary in, and what will we stop doing in order to achieve that extraordinary?”)
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How Visual Thinking Improves Writing | MindShift
“She thinks it’s important for students to have a space to express themselves without specific writing assignments or limitations. They write and draw what matters in their own lives and in the process develop their voice, humor, and point of view. They get to play with language and break out of cookie cutter forms of writing like the persuasive essay.”
Connection to #Synergy observation journals.
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Google Reveals Its 9 Principles of Innovation | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
HT @grantlichtman
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From Brooklyn to Jakarta: Teaching Teachers Well | Edutopia
“What if all professional development modeled the pedagogy that school leaders ask of their teachers?”
Great case study piece on using what I call the Golden Rule of pedagogy: Do unto teachers as we would have them do unto students.
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Dive Into Science With Zombies, Superheroes, and Fairies | MindShift
Fabulous case study and example of a teacher who foundationed on student interest and curiosity and THEN worked to ID the formal learning outcomes that we subject-silo in formal schooling. Brava!
#Synergy method
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In India, a School that Empowers Students and Teachers | Edutopia
An incredible job description for TEACHER. Also, navigation to educational innovation and school transformation.
“My role in the classroom is not to deliver content,” Newcomb says. “It’s all about listening — and listening some more. You listen to find out, what do students wonder about? What are their frustrations, their passions? My job is to listen and then make connections, to turn them into knowledgeable networkers as opposed to knowledgeable workers.”
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An interesting look at why we fail to do and accomplish certain things, even when we possess the knowledge and understanding. While the main-thread example is medicine, one could easily replace “medicine” with “schooling.”
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Unstuck iPad app – How to live better every day – Unstuck
“Free-flowing gratitude can help you get unstuck. “Feeling good lubricates mental efficiency…”
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“The need for design thinking. This movement to build a generation of design thinkers could not be more timely or more relevant. We are living in an age of increased complexity, and are facing global challenges at an unprecedented scale. The nature of connectivity, interactivity, and information is changing at lightening speed. We need to enable a generation of leaders who believe they can make a difference in the world around them, because we need this generation to build new systems and rebuild declining ones. We need them to be great collaborators, great communicators, and great innovators.”
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Do You have the Personality To Be an Inquiry-Based Teacher? | MindShift
Great questions regarding the mindset of inquiry-based instruction!
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Informal Learning: Facing the Inevitable and Seizing the Advantage | Edutopia
Great piece about what we call learning and what we call school.
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How do we teach – coach, really – the ways to find one’s purpose? I’ve yet to see a class called “Purpose” in a school course catalog (and I’m not sure I’d want to see it so silo-ed out). Do we help learners understand and uncover and discover their purpose as much as we help them learn punctuation, penmanship, and prepositions?
I love this piece and resource from Unstuck and Stone Yamashita Partners.
May we be as concerned with #Purpose in schools as we tend to be with the other P’s above.
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The Ethics of Innovation & Reform in Education | Connected Principals
Fascinating, provocative blog post about some questions to ask when innovating in education. For example, #2 is “What will be the possible impacts of your action? Predicting and applying systems thinking to this process is critical. Like Peter Senge writes: ‘today’s problems are a consequence of yesterday’s solutions'”
[HT @CenterTeach] -
Steve Jobs: “Real artists ship.” | bwagy
“That’s why the latter option mentioned in my previous post of “Get it out the door asap 80% done. For you will make mistakes anyway. Best get first one out the door so the second, third, fourth are even better.” works best when you’re doing something new, different, innovative… ie worth doing.” [HT @jbrettjacobsen]
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Eight Ways to Communicate Your Strategy More Effectively – Georgia Everse – Harvard Business Review
“Here are just a few communications approaches that will help you effectively reach your employees and encourage behaviors that advance your strategy and improve your results.”
[HT @ChipHouston1976] -
Turn Creative Fear Into Fuel – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat
“Fear has the potential to be a driving force in your creative process.”
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Unstuck – Finding Purpose: 20 true stories
“purpose defines who we are and what we do in life.”
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Reframing Failure as Iteration Allows Students to Thrive | Edutopia
“At New York City’s game-based learning school Quest to Learn, sixth graders take risks in the process of designing a Rube Goldberg machine, which enables more creativity, innovation, and engagement.”
[HT @eileen_fennelly] -
Imagining the Future of Learning Takes Hold at Miami Valley School, Dayton | The Learning Pond
Great examples of innovation-portfolio items at Miami Valley School.
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Beautiful film outtake w/ transcripted narration of the critical bedrock of curiosity!
Updated: Quick resource pack for #NYSAISnow #NYSAISahdh
What you’ll find here, in this post, is a quick resource pack for the fun work that @GrantLichtman and I were fortunate to do with NYSAIS – the New York State Association of Independent Schools. We were at Mohonk Mountain House for the annual Assistant Heads and Division Heads conference, and the group of educational leaders focused on Time, Space, and Curriculum in educational transformation and innovative schooling.
- Bo & Grant’s facilitator scratchpad and switchboard (Google doc with intended learning arc and links to resources and slidedecks).
- Jim Tiffin’s (@JimTiffinJr) Storify – in three parts – archiving some of the pre-conference buzz, ideas from the keynote address on Wednesday night, sessions on Thursday and Friday, etc. In the keynote, Grant and I focused on “priming the pump” for how schools can utilize and amplify human curiosity and lessons of innovation to (r)evolutionize time, space, and curriculum use in schools. Thursday and Friday, we dove deeper into those ideas with workshop formats and facilitation.
- Jim Tiffin’s visual notes from the keynote Wednesday night. THANKS, Jim!
- And Grant “signed me up” for an impromptu Twitter meet-up lesson at 2:45-ish on Thursday! Love that NYSAIS spontaneously used some “unconference” thinking to enlist what learners wanted and needed…and created a spontaneous session. I so enjoyed using a lot of “yes, and…” improvisational format to mine the experience among those who attended this flash-mob session when they could’ve been hiking and playing around Mohonk in different ways. It was a fun session sharing insights from one of the most powerful professional learning tools I use!
- Jenny Kirsch’s blog-post reflection from NYSAISahdh. Thanks, @MsJennyKirsch!
“If you would like to help us design school…” #MVPSchool #MVIFI
I love my school for so many reasons. Just this morning, I received an email that provided me with yet another reason. The email was sent to the entire Upper School student body, and I was copied. It was an email rich in design thinking. It was an email full of trust that honors the wisdom of the “student.” It was an email full of promise for the depths of design – at the intersection of creativity and functionality.
Design thinking is people-centered problem solving. It is fundamentally concerned with and connected to the users of the things being designed. It is full of empathy and creative, critical thinking applied to real-world issues and challenges.
The most ambitious school leaders are serious about the design of “school.” How could one not be in our current era – to continuously think, design, and act for the best learning experiences for our learners. To give anything less than such critical attention would be unthinkable. Even if one determined to leave school “as is,” it would be superb if such decision making stemmed from thoughtful research and design, rather than status quo or de facto operations.
So, here’s the email. What a glorious invitation. How grateful I am that such is commonplace where I work and learn!
All,
I hope you all had a great weekend.
If you would like to help us design school for the “Experiment” and “Produce” phases of the projects, we need your ideas and help.
I invite you to join me either for lunch Wednesday or for breakfast Friday (on me) to discuss how we might best design the school day to position you for success.
Click here to sign up. [active link in original email]
There are only 50 available slots this week, and there will [be] more opportunities in the near future.
Enjoy your day,
—
Tyler S. Thigpen
Head of Upper School
Mount Vernon Presbyterian School
