My email response to a leader seems to deserve a place on this blog: The purpose of education is to help people learn. Learning is a natural physiological process of the human brain. Nature, then, defines the rules within which educators (and education policy makers) must play. While it might be convenient for policy makers Read More
Category: Leadership
Planning and Goals
A short excerpt of a school leader’s comments on goals and the valuable planning methods she had discovered. All of the leaders articulated the expectation that they follow prescribed planning methods. Carol indicated the expectation had been formalized in her school district. “Once the state department of education started taking about SMART goals, we were Read More
Types of Data
Different problems require different methods, and all education researchers must understand the nature of the problems they study and the nature of the methods available so that data can be ethically gathered and reliable conclusions can be drawn. In general, education researchers may use either quantitative research methods or qualitative research methods. Quantitative methods are Read More
Does America Need More Innovators?
This question is addressed in a collection edited by Matthew Wisnioski, Eric S. Hintz and Marie Stettler Kleine that is available from MIT’s Open Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/does-america-need-more-innovators The innovation imperative has been a permanent part of my professional life in education. The motivation to innovate and the practices that were labeled innovative have changed (the innovative Read More
Becoming Educated
As any teacher with more than two years of experience knows, education is an endeavor that is rich with fads. Each year it seems, the initiatives that were held up as “essential to the progress of the school” at the beginning of the previous year are forgotten and at the start of the next school Read More
“You are not being a team player.”
Another in my series of terms education leaders use and the real meaning behind the well-intentioned term. Usage: uttered by one (who either is more powerful or who believes they are more powerful) towards another in an attempt to get the less powerful to go along with a bad idea. Ostensible meaning: we value teamwork Read More
A View of Technology
Historians of technology recognize the collection of human technologies includes both hard technologies and soft technologies. Hard technologies include the artifacts—from stone axes to automobiles to computers—that humans have built and that can be held and manipulated. Soft technologies include those practices—from language to banking to computer software—that function as technologies but that cannot actually Read More
Decision-making and Facts
Research depends on “facts.” In the vernacular, fact typically means information that is true and accurate; implicit also is the assumption that the fact is objectively defined so that every observer will agree on the both reality of the fact and the meaning of the fact. A more sophisticated view of facts recognizes the role Read More
What Leaders say about Iterative Design
I recently worked with some education leaders to design some educational technology projects that were organized around educational design research. Some of their reflections after we finished give us insight into the workflow of leaders. Rachel (one of the leaders) made observations of the differences between the planning that was commonly expected to be followed Read More
#edtech for #edleaders: Some IT Network Vocabulary
The adjectives “robust” and “reliable” are used to describe IT networks. Robust describes the capacity of the network to connect users and provided them with the network information each request in a timely manner. A robust network will allow many users in a classroom to connect with little delay, and there will be little latency Read More