Book Review: Teaching that Changes Lives

If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions. ~ Susanne K. Langer The world’s citizens need to think and act differently. In many ways, this begins with our education system. In a recent blog by Grant Lichtman, entitled “The Problem is Not Climate Change; the Problem is Irrational…
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Book Review: Competing Against Luck

Clayton Christensen, in his latest book “Competing Against Luck”, puts innovation under the microscope. Like all things under a microscope, minutiae is revealed, studied and made clearer. He frames his book as an answer to below: Is innovation truly a crapshoot? Or is innovation difficult because we don’t know what causes it to succeed? You…
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Book Review: The Innovator’s Mindset ~ Couros

George Couros is a Canadian educational leader, who is also prolific social media contributor. He espouses innovation in education, and through his posts has created a sea change in the way people are talking about education, and its future. This is a book that coalesces these thoughts, and adds in some excellent examples of innovation….
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Book Review: Four Dimensional Education

V.U.C.A. originated as a military term to describe the context in which soldiers operate in a theatre of war. It stands for: Volitility Uncertainty Complexity Ambiguity It is the new normal for our students, and (as the authors of this book do a great job of emphasizing) it is the new normal for our teachers…
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Book Review: The End of Average (Todd Rose)

  This book came highly recommended to me because of the way it applies the concepts of Individualism to the self, the workplace, corporations and education. It is not another book about education and personalized learning. Rather it is a book about the fundamental question: “Do we want a system of higher education that compels each…
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A Podcast Worth Listening To… #MakeEdChange

Building on my review of #EdJourney, I sourced this podcast from TeachThought. It is an interview with reknowned author Yong Zhao, who talks about the future of education, and – more importantly – HOW to get there. It’s a 40mins podcast – perfect for driving in traffic! – so here is a quick run-down of…
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#FOMO to #LeadingEdge

Fear of Missing Out… Fear of being left out… Fear of being left behind… As an educator, do we need to feel this fear? Do we need to feel a drive for growth? Now, maybe fear is not the greatest motivator. So how might we rephrase this: Desire to be on the leading edge… Desire…
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The Joy of Community

As I’ve written about before, I took part in the first installment of The Teachers’ Guild, run by IDEO. Its mission is to build collaboration amongst teachers to solve challenges in education. This particular iteration had this challenge prompt: “How might we create rituals and routines that establish a culture of innovation in our classrooms…
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All I Want for Xmas is a Growth Mindset

I’m already thinking about coming back in January, and continuing to cultivate growth mindsets throughout my school. I’ve talked about my school being a Learning Organization, and how many of us have adopted Twitter to help grow our thinking and PLN (#BVGLearns). In fact, it was a colleague, Matt Clark, who posted on Twitter (@mattclark…
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