Edu Change & Student Advocacy

In my last year of being a high school principal, I was reminded once again about the power of taking student work public. Then high school senior Destiny Anger – who later graduated from UC Santa Cruz and is now a Customer Relationship Manager and Marketing Specialist in the San Francisco Bay Area – used social media showcasing of her senior project to alter the trajectory of her career. As part of her senior project, Anger partnered with Helping Orphans Worldwide on a local awareness project. She was eventually connected to key organizational leaders in New York through a video she posted on her personal Facebook. The video had spread to her school’s Facebook page, and then onto Helping Orphans Worldwide Facebook page. Destiny’s story is not unique. However, it does depend on how much our schools use digital spaces and other public channels to showcase student work. Students need to have their work assessed, critiqued, evaluated, appreciated, and experienced by as many people as pos...

Conferences, Professional Development Changing Dramatically for 2021-22 As we are exiting this unprecedented time of lockdown, many people are beginning to think about what professional development is going to look like next year. People who know me know that I'm a little bit of a conference junkie and I've run a few events in my time, including one of the largest edtech events in the US. I would like to take a moment here to share what I think is coming in the coming year.  These may be changes that will become permanent. Conferences People are social animals, and we will still have many events where people get together to experience the buzz and excitement of seeing their friends and great presentations face to face.  But in a similar way that schools will change, with a new, permanent element of hybrid capacity and a comfortable sense of what's possible with online learning, I expect to see more events that have hybrid elements or a continuation of events that are 100% o...

     For those that are continually advocating for a complete redesign of our education system, there are many potential areas of focus. Some are now suggesting that standards - what many cling to as foundational - may be the last bastion of a dying educational ecosystem.  Voices of A Learning World      Earlier this year, there seemed to be a tipping point on the horizon that spelled something beyond standards and standardized assessments. Indeed, PBLGlobal’s Thom Markham - along with 17 other international educational thought leaders - launched Voices Of A Learning World . They advocate, among other things, that our standards are the problem. Their focus is to support project-based approaches and wellbeing as key elements of an emerging learning system that they foresee overtaking industrial models of teaching. And they think instead of institutional arms creating the standards, that rather students, families and community should ascertain the appro...