Have a look at this study of a bull by Pablo Picasso: It starts off with intricate drawings and step by step Picasso moves from detail to just the essence of what a bull is, using just a handful of lines. Sometimes we have to ‘cut the bull’… We have to look at the essence […]
Category: lessons
“Learn to live with ambiguity.”
am·bi·gu·i·ty noun • uncertainty or inexactness of meaning in language. synonyms: vagueness, obscurity, abstruseness, doubtfulness, uncertainty; • a lack of decisiveness or commitment resulting from a failure to make a choice between alternatives. Ambiguity has potential to be a catalyst to new learning. It can be the spark to kindle lateral thinking and creative solutions to huge problems […]
Twitter EDU
UPDATE: This post has been vastly improved on, and made into an ebook. Click here to access a free copy of Twitter EDU. Below, you’ll find the material this ebook is based on, but the ebook is much more comprehensive, just as easy to read, and engages you with Twitter while you read. Pick up […]
keep it simple
I’m going to share two seemingly unconnected videos. The first one I found by searching for the origin of this story, which I have been thinking about recently, after hearing it years ago: What Is “The Good Life” Parable – Mark Albion The second one is Ramsey Musallam’s TEDTalk, 3 rules to spark learning What […]
Risk and Reward
I've been reading Seth Godin's Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, and he wrote this: How to be Wrong: “The secret of being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal. The only thing that makes people and organizations great […]
A Lesson on Win-Win
After years of teaching this lesson I finally wrote it down for my masters terminal paper for the University of Oregon: DEVELOPING AN EFFECTIVE MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT LEADERSHIP PROGRAM. Yesterday, I revisited this with current Inquiry Hub students and incoming students for next year. I should have spent more time on the debrief, but I […]
Lessons on living life
Two days ago Zach Sobiech died. He was 18. It was expected. I just sat with my wife and oldest child watching this 22 minute video. It says more about how to live your life than anything else that I’ve seen. Watch it now. Here is Zach’s full song “Clouds“. Here is the celebrity lip […]
Perspective
Moped We are on vacation in Thailand. Four days ago I hopped on a moped to take a practice spin before talking my girls for a ride. My first mistake was staying too close to the edge of a bend in the road… which led to driving over some gravel on the road… which led […]
Homework
I question the value of most homework. Example: A math teacher teaches a concept to 30 students, then assigns 40 questions in the text. Here is a typical breakdown of student experiences… Group A+: These 3 students knew the concept before it was even taught, not a single of the 40 questions are remotely helpful […]
3 keys to a flipped classroom
If you are planning to use the ‘flipped classroom’, then you might want to think about a few key ideas. Background: On Connected Principals Jonathan Martin has written a couple posts on the Flipped Classroom. In his first one, Reverse Instruction: Dan Pink and Karl’s “Fisch Flip”, he says: Increasingly, education’s value-add is and […]