Today I am making a pledge to abandon that metaphor (“Abandon Ship!”) as it seems to give us a ready-made excuse for slowing down, or giving up on, priorities we have named as being mission-driven and strategic. The metaphor slows us down because it traps our thinking—it becomes an accurate metaphor because we have chosen to believe it. From now on schools are not big ships. Schools are challenging enough without having them have to be ships as well.
Differentiating Traditions From Bad Habits #tbt
It may be helpful to think of it this way: imagine that every school has a ledger that marks the long-term debt of bad habit against the revenue of tradition. My fear is that an audit of that ledger in many of our institutions might reveal that bad habits are costing us more than we choose to recognize.
School People and Highway Engineers: A Slightly Uncomfortable Reflection on the NAIS Annual Conference
I began to wonder to what extent are school leaders like the highway engineers that Bryson lampoons. It was not a comfortable wondering.
My answer: perhaps we are more like highway engineers than we would like to admit. Maybe we in fact ARE highway engineers.
Response to Questions from the MEMPHIS BUSINESS JOURNAL
“THE SPEED AT WHICH THE WORLD IS CHANGING SHOULD CALL US TO GRADUATE STUDENTS WHO KNOW THINGS, YES, ABSOLUTELY, BUT THEY SHOULD ALSO KNOW HOW TO MAKE MEANING FROM KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTAND HOW TO WORK WITH OTHERS TO MAKE SOMETHING VALUABLE OUT OF THAT KNOWLEDGE.” [Last week the Memphis Business Journal published an article about Memphis […]
An SGIS Faculty Meeting: Engaging, Listening, and Choosing the School
Without ENGAGEMENT, classroom experiences are empty calories, a virtual skimming across the surface of learning. Most dangerously, such experiences can become cynical exercises in jumping through hoops for academic rewards.
The Head’s Letter: Responding to a Changing World
The Head’s Letter is a monthly newsletter largely for heads of independent schools. Published by Educational Directions Incorporated, it focuses on topics of particular importance to school leaders. They were nice enough to ask me to write the piece I copied below as the cover of their December edition.The topic I discuss in The Head’s […]