What week of wonderful experiences this year at the Global Education Conference. Many thanks to Lucy, Steve, all the amazing volunteers, moderators, presenters & sponsors! 

I shared my reflections on the conference in a post called How can they know? on the Cooperative Catalyst blog. I would love to hear what you got out of the conference and what ideas you have for next steps.

Richard Close & Joni Schwartz shared some appalling stats during their Techniques on How to Handle Poverty presentation.  It is truly shocking to find out how much our educational system is failing young black men, that children in poverty are facing educational trauma and that our…

Belief is powerful stuff. 

As John Mayer writes in his song Belief:

"Belief is a beautiful armor

But makes for the heaviest sword

Like punching under water

You never can hit who you're trying for"



Because it is so powerful, belief in things like plans, ideologies and pedagogies can definitely cause collateral damage and unintended consequences.  What…

I just attended the iEarn Adobe Youth Voices session - highlighting voices from US, Brazil, Romania, South Africa & Uganda. I think empowering kids to share their voices and ideas for changing the world is one of the most important things we can do for them. 

It was so interesting to hear perspectives from other countries, especially somewhere like Romania…

I didn't really know what to expect from this conference, but now I think I'm one of the luckiest people on the planet to have found out about it and then actually decided to participate. You know the old adage, "you get what you pay for", which follows closely on the heels of "nothing in life is free". What you pay for this conference is time and what you get are an amazing array of ideas, tools and contacts. But there is another cost as well and that's the cost of knowledge - of learning…

I'm flipping out, but in a good way, over Alan November's keynote - Leadership: Managing the Transition.  Why am I so excited?  He put into words what I have been feeling for some time about where education should be heading.  Where's that?  Alan November suggests that maybe "student knowledge is where the action is."   Why's that?  Alan found that every time he showed student tutorials to students and asked them what they thought, they say "our teachers know too much, our teachers explains…