Inquiry & Reflection for Better Learning
My professional life wanders in between physical infrastructure and human infrastructure. I’ve worked on teams focused on building out information networks. Some of those teams have attended to emotional and social networks to the same level of detail and intentionality. Most have not. I’m at the CoSN Conference in Nashville, Tennessee this week, meeting almost […]
Read More The Infrastructure of Belonging – A Note from #cosn2022Some of this post has been in my drafts folder for maybe a couple of months now. It was inspired by some planning work that Katie and I were doing for a workshop at reMAKE Education in California the week before last ((More on that in another post.)). It’s also inspired by a conversation I […]
Read More On Boundaries, Constraints, & KitsI was a visitor in a school today where it was time to transition from a paper and pencil warm up to a computer assisted practice session. The class was moving well. The students were alternating between partner talk and whole class instruction. The teacher was attentive to the needs of the room. But when […]
Read More An Easy Win for Educational IT PeopleI’m writing this morning from the last morning of the Building New Pathways Working Meeting, which stopped being a Listening Retreat and became the Working Meeting at around 10:30am yesterday, as the larger group of assembled National Writing Project leaders headed home and a smaller subset of the group stayed to begin their work as […]
Read More Badges. #nwpleads Badges.I’m working this week from Austin, Texas, where I’m at the Building New Pathways event with the National Writing Project. One of my more interesting consulting projects right now is working on this project, a deep dive into how we build and sustain new pathways for leadership development in the local sites, and the national […]
Read More Me, #nwpleads, and 2 Metaphors for NWP LeadershipAt the library, I’m working with a team of really smart folks who want to offer the best opportunities for our patrons ((I’m still getting used to calling the people I serve “patrons.” But I like it.)). One of the reasons I wanted to work with the Clearview Library District was the intensity with which […]
Read More Making a Maker Space. Again.Earlier this week, I had the honor of giving a talk in the CSU Literacies of Contemporary Civic Life speaker series. With my time, shared below, I talked about some of our work around professional learning and agency, as well as some of my thinking on the essential actions/literacies/habits that should be in our schools. […]
Read More Let’s Hack School: A Recent Talk at CSUI become more and more convinced each passing day that learning and culture are habit-based skills ((Maybe skills isn’t the right word. But perhaps you know what I mean.)). We either have healthy learning habits, or healthy cultures, or we don’t. Any organization can improve its habits. But habit formation and cessation aren’t events. You […]
Read More Building (Better) Organizational HabitsOne thing that never seems to be in short supply in the learning organizations I work with is a steady stream of new priorities, initiatives, and programming. There’s always an agenda, pet project, new idea, or something fresh, exciting, and game changing that’ll make all the difference for everybody in the organization. I get it. […]
Read More Suppose We Just Left Them Alone?Last month, I took my three daughters skating. They’ve all been to the skating rink plenty of times, and are at different levels of skating expertise. Ani and Teagan both motor along at their own paces, leaving their four-year-old sister, Quinn, and me behind as they skate it up to whatever loudly pulsating track is […]
Read More Skating Along