I work in education not because I believe it has solutions to offer, or because young people need to be job-ready, or because there is a canon of knowledge students must master. I am in education because it is where institutional failure has difficulty hiding. Education is not separate from the larger system. It is [...]
Metabolic ontology begins from a simple observation: nothing lives by remaining what it is. Existence persists only through continual transformation, through the conversion of decay into the conditions for further life. Entropy is not disorder but the movement that makes order temporary. Biology calls this metabolism: the exchange of matter, energy, and information that maintains [...]
Pushing “student agency,” “real-world experiences,” and “competencies” will never transform education. It’s all window dressing or delusion. Education will be transformed when we stop believing assessment of learning is the end goal.As long as we are measuring individual outputs, we will remain stuck in the same paradigm. We still consider learning as something we can [...]
Regenerative education rejects the old ways of assessing students as individuals, considering skills as ends, and allowing projects to languish on the Google drive. Instead, it invites us to listen deeply to the voices in our community (human and other-than-human) who have engaged with and been affected by each project. Regenerative education calls for new [...]
I find it puzzling how the “flipped classroom” is so often presented as a new groundbreaking and transformative idea, with the potential to unlock the power of formative assessment and personalized learning. I am not suggesting that exposing students to the material at home and then practicing what they learned in class can’t be useful [...]
I am feeling quite a bit of anxiety, stress, and confusion as I type these words and my feelings have nothing to do with COVID, well, not directly anyway. I am tense because it is mid-afternoon and my son Nico hasn’t started on his school remote learning modules. He tells me he will and I [...]
The silver lining around the coronavirus pandemic is that there is sense of coming together amongst people from all parts of the world and this has translated into efforts to support, help, and listen to one another. Social media is full of messages from educators sharing or asking for ideas and resources to meet the [...]
Coconut Thinking 