Sometimes you are awed by the company you keep. Poughkeepsie Day School is honored and inspired by its partnerships with two remarkable local organizations – The Queens Galley and Heart Street , both in Kingston. In Stone Soup and a New Partnership in November 2007 I wrote Becoming a global citizen has to begin close to home. For students it…
Two of my favorite education videos in 2010 have to do with motivation. In this first one, Stanley schools Dwight in “The Office” with commentary from Alfie Kohn. And in this one, those wonderful animators at the RSA deliver the message from Daniel Pink’s Drive: the Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us. And now Laura Graceffa has suggested a book…
Drowning in data overload? Drenched from drinking from the fire-hose of information? Help is at hand: the Guardian now has a new Data Blog for data journalism and visualization. And mapping every city, every town block by block here is a searchable census analysis via the NYTimes. Check out your neighborhood. And just take a look at this graphic of…
I check my Twitter feed first thing. It’s an early morning routine that helps give me a quick scan of the world and of the edusphere in particular. Today, President Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-free Kids Act into law. Child nutrition and school lunch are hot topics and the PBS NewsHour has taken notice. I follow the NewsHour so I…
I like these words about our Fall Festival Reimagined: Three Cheers – from the Poughkeepsie Journal today: To Poughkeepsie Day School’s First Fall Festival Reimagined, an ambitious new festival designed to celebrate the local and the global community. Visitors were given festival passports to mark the places and things they learned about during the day — and there was a…
Lorrie Jackson recently interviewed me via email on the topic of heads of school and their use of social media. Her questions and my answers (slightly tidied up) are below. You can read her interviews with several heads of school here. 1. Why should heads of school be involved in social media? As the institution’s leader, school heads need to…
Thanks to my Twitter feed I saw this short BBC news piece about recently discover aerial photographs of the battlefields of the western front. Watch it if you can. Taken from an airship in 1919, the scale of the devastation is revealed in new and astonishing ways: Shattered towns and villages, the shell-holes and the thousands of miles of trenches…
So here – as promised – the Ned Hallowell five-step solution for happiness and all that ails us including schools and schooling. And as presented at Mohonk on Friday it was a welcome antidote to the one-size-fits-all formula of more of the same that has failed us for decades. It is always good to be skeptical of anyone who claims…
The NYSAIS heads conference is always valuable and 2010 was no exception. I usually hear NAIS president Pat Bassett in a mega ballroom with all the flashing lights and hoopla of the annual conference. It was good to hear him in the more intimate setting of the dining room at Mohonk. His talk – top trends to look out for…
Bullying, violence, discrimination and the ethical climate of high school. Charles Blow wrote about what he termed the Private School Civility Gap in the OpEd pages of the NYTimes last Friday. He was drawing on the study issued last month by the Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics. It surveyed over 43,000 students on a whole range of issues concerning…
Childhood is another country: they do things differently there.* Great researchers and thinkers about education (think Froebel, Piaget, Vygotsky and so many others) have always known that children are not miniature adults. Their work demonstrates basic truths about childhood development: While growth can be encouraged, supported and enriched, the essential developmental milestones and timetable for growth remain fairly constant. What’s…
I rewrote Seth Godin’s blog entry for today: Organizing for joy. I hope he doesn’t mind. The word “joy” made it irresistible. Traditional schools, particularly large-scale high schools, are organized for efficiency. Or consistency. But not joy. Traditional schools crank it out. Students show up. They pay attention. They get grades and awards to measure success. The problem with this…
Prior to the industrialization of education, the education model was centered around a single-room school house consisting of one teacher with many students throughout many grades. The teacher was a facilitator of an instructional design that had students teaching each other. The younger students benefited from the knowledge of the older students and the older students benefited by reinforcing what…
100% of PDS high school students agreed with all of these statements on the HSSSE : I feel safe in this school I am treated fairly in this school There is at least one adult in this school who cares about me I feel supported by the teachers in this school Adults in this school want me to succeed Teachers…