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Why We Need More New Schools (Even with Enrollments Down and Closures Ahead)
After a two-year investigation including hundreds of interviews, Kim Smith and Jen Holleran published a landscape of innovation in US K-12 education. What they found was a lot of confusion because there is not a single unified landscape. There are mu...[Read More]
Here are our design principles. What do you think?
At Getting Smart, we partner with organizations that help collectively reach our mission of actively building the future of learning by designing, accelerating and amplifying equitable innovations that empower all people to thrive and lead in a compl...[Read More]
Youth Design Day: Mapping Civic Learning Across Pittsburgh
By: History Co:Lab “What would a map of every opportunity in Pittsburgh where young people feel powerful and seen look like?” On June 25th, at the Civic Learning Ecosystem’s Youth Design Day, youth leaders, educators, civic organizers, and community ...[Read More]
How the ‘Portrait of a Graduate’ Infuses Student Learning with Joy and Hope
By Shannon King, Ph.D. Accountability is crucial in education. As educational leaders, we must ensure students meet high learning standards. However, our single-minded focus on standardized testing is extinguishing the joy of learning for many studen...[Read More]
Making Learning Relevant to Students’ Lives and Communities
By Josh Schachter and Melinda Englert When 80 middle school students from Billy L. Lauffer Middle School, a Title I school in southeast Tucson, hopped off the bus at the University of Arizona, it was not for an ordinary field trip. Despite living jus...[Read More]
Redefining Creativity in the Age of AI
Recently I received an invitation to speak at an upcoming global education summit in Beijing. The organizers asked me to give a presentation on the two topics that have dominated my work for the last 30 years: Project Based Learning and 21st Century ...[Read More]
Remember This Year
I have had “write year-in-review” on my To Do list for about a month-and-a-half now. But every day I ignore the task, hoping that I’ll feel more like writing tomorrow. Tomorrow is the last day of this year, and I don’t anticip...[Read More]
Behaviorism, Surveillance, and (School) Work
I was a speaker today at the #AgainstSurveillance teach-in, a fundraiser for Ian Linkletter who is being sued by the online test-proctoring software company Proctorio. I am very pleased but also really outraged to be here today to help raise money fo...[Read More]
What Happens When Ed-Tech Forgets? Some Thoughts on Rehabilitating Reputations
I was a guest today in Chris Hoadley’s NYU class on ed-tech and globalization. Here’s a bit of my rant… Thank you so much for inviting me to speak to you today. I have been really stumped as to what I should say. If you look at the ...[Read More]
Ed-Tech and Trauma
Here are my remarks today from a Contact North webinar with Paul Prinsloo: “Why Technology is Not the Answer.” So I want to apologize at the outset for being a bit unprepared for today’s webinar. As you may well know, things have be...[Read More]
The End
A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from my friend Eli Luberoff, the founder and CEO of Desmos. It was news I’d been anticipating — dreading, really — for some time: the startup had been acquired. Amplify was buying its curriculum divisi...[Read More]
Hope for the Future
This is the transcript of the keynote I gave today at Digifest. (Well, I recorded it a couple of weeks ago, but it was broadcast today, and I popped in for some “live” Q&A afterwards, where I was asked the obligatory “do you hat...[Read More]