Shifting Conversations

Your Attention, Please

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I found ourselves wandering around a real bookstore, the kind with actual books in it, reminding ourselves what print on paper actually looks like. It’s not that neither of us no longer read paper books, we still do. (The local library is about 50 steps from our …

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Are We All Powerless?

It’s interesting, to me at least, that whenever I have conversations about the role of power in school cultures, it seems everyone feels powerless. Students, who sit at the bottom of the “power org chart,” feel they have little or no ability to influence the ways in which they experience school. School isn’t a choice …

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Power

Power and Change in Schools

“Existing power relationships in schools are part of the problem and can never be part of the solution.” ~Seymour Sarason, Revisiting The Culture of The School and The Problem of Change A few years ago in a Q&A session with a group of about 40 teachers at a school outside of Detroit, one teacher raised …

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Game Over

One story of school that we rarely acknowledge but that runs beneath almost everything we do is that school is a game to be “won.” At a minimum, students win it by doing what they need to do to graduate and attain whatever academic status is expected of them. Parents win it by doing what …

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We Choose the Stories We Tell

Starting in August, we’re kicking off a new theme in our Modern Learners Community on “Story.” Through our podcasts, book studies, special events and more, we’re going to dive into the many https://modernlearners.communityways that stories define our work in terms of the paths we choose to follow, the ways we measure success, the way we …

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Inspecting for Signs of Decay

I’ve come to read predictions about the future of work with a healthy skepticism. So much click bait. So much preying on fears. So much focused on the technologies instead of the choices we make about the technologies. So much…period. Today more than ever we need to be careful consumers of what’s being written about …

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Fulfillment Beats “Success”

If you’re looking for a pretty compelling read for the summer, Todd Rose’s newest book Dark Horse should probably be on your list, especially if you’re at all interested in education and the shifts that are currently underway in our thinking about schools. In short, it’s about the need (if not requirement) these days to …

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