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 [...]
Published in the International School Network Magazine in January 2025. This is not a call to action. We have enough of those. It is an invitation to slow down and consider, to ask questions and to dialogue. Social Media created the conditions for a post-truth world. AI might create the conditions for a post-trust [...]
This article was published on IntrepidEd on 18 May 2024. The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed—William Gibson We might find comfort–even some excitement—when we witness schools unveil and roll out their sustainability programs. We hear about fresh new solar panel installations, commitments to reduce printing by 50%, the deployment of [...]
This article was published in IntrepidEd News on 28 December 2023. All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.—Friedrich Nietzsche I used to teach Global Politics. One of the throughlines of the course was the concept of power. We started the year [...]
This article was published in a slightly abridged version on IntrepidEd News on 1 August 2023. No two journeys are ever alike, because no two pupils are ever alike —Daniel Quinn I spent the best two months of my life during the summer of 2019. I’m not suggesting it was the easiest or most relaxing [...]
This article was published in an abridged form in Getting Smart on 14 June 2023. It was also published on Intrepid Ed News on 5 July 2023. I'm not getting myself all worked up over how generative AI is going to revolutionize the world of education. I'm not spending too much time trying to find [...]
This article was published in Intrepid Ed News on 25 August 2022. Part 1 Part 2 Sometimes you just need a good ol’ crisis to shake things up, to get things moving. It’s like the story of the frog you put in tepid water and slowly turn up the heat. The frog won’t ever realize [...]
This article was published on Intrepid Ed News on 27 July 2022. Quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote, “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” I think the same can be said about what we look for in our students; it’s all about the questions we ask. When [...]
This article was published in IntrepidEd News on 9 June 2022. There is no distinction at all between the everyday world (samsara) and freedom (nirvana). There is no distinction between freedom and the everyday world. —Nagarjuna Futurephobia is not a word that we come across very frequently considering its potential impact. You’ll find only a [...]
This article was published on Intrepid Ed News on 12 May 2022. I ended the previous chapter with a teaser, one that I promised in this installment to explore: Can we really have learner-centered and competency-based education in our current education system? The thing is, this might be the wrong question to ask because it [...]
This article was published in Education Reimagined's Voyager on 4 May 2022. This article was the #1 read in 2022 in Voyager. No matter what happened during the pandemic, no matter how much we think the world may have changed, if we continue to hold the same values that make the old system thrive, nothing [...]
This article was published in Intrepid Ed News on 14 April 2022 This is the second installment of a longer series, a long conversation (Chapter 1 can be found here). It builds on the idea that there is no one future of education because we are all on our own journeys, and that includes schools. [...]
This article was published on UNESCO’s IDEAS LAB on 11 March 2022. While the UNESCO report Futures of Education came out with much fanfare and generated much excitement, its most powerful consideration has received surprisingly little attention. It’s not that the authors haven’t put this consideration front and center—on the contrary—yet somehow it has eluded [...]
This article was published in Intrepid Ed News on 23 March 2022. This is the first installment of a longer series, a long conversation. It builds on the idea that there is no one future of education because we are all on our own journeys and this includes schools. With not even one-fourth of the [...]
This article was published on Intrepid Ed News on 18 Feb 2022. I have been wrestling with a question for months, looking for clues to an answer in conversations, books, podcasts, and quiet moments of reflection. I’m not the first person to have posed this question, and for centuries it has created significant, sometimes bloody, [...]
This article was published on IntrepidEd News on 4 Jan 2022. I can’t keep track of how many conversations I have had where at some point my counterpart declared that something or other I’ve proposed “will never happen because…” I’m not suggesting I’m some kind of soothsayer or that I’m the holder of Truth. I [...]
This article was published on Intrepid Ed News on 1 February 2012. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change—Max Planck, Quantum Theorist and Nobel Laureate This is less a blog than it is a call for us to collaborate on developing this idea of learning as a [...]
This article was also published on 2 December 2021 in IntrepidEd News. Every once in a while you come across an idea that is so full of possibilities, your imagination runs wild, unleashed. When you share your thoughts with others, you might indulge in fantasizing together about what how future might unfold; or you might [...]
Note after weeks of reflection: I also want to let the reader know that the word "part" can, and maybe should, be substituted with "nested whole." Parts as a word is problematic because it is associated with mechanisms ad machines. Nester wholes connotes essence in itself. That said, I will leave this as an issue of [...]
This article was inspired by my conversations with Louka Parry and David Penberg. It was published in IntrepidEd News on 1 October 2021. Sometimes I fixate on a subject or idea and find myself buying a bunch of books and watching videos to feed my curiosity and further my understanding of a single topic. Recently, [...]
What if instead of an education system based on “show what you know,” which can discourage curiosity and creativity because of the right answer syndrome, what if we built a learning system that conceived achievement as the quality of questions the learner asks, not what they are asked to know? The power of this learning system of questions is in how it would foster curiosity and creativity, because if a learner stops asking questions, they stop learning.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” —John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club So much space is taken up rebuking the Industrial Revolutionary model of education that still inspires most schools today. You can hear, watch, and read people questioning why it [...]
This article was also published on 28 August 2021 in IntrepidEd News. This may sound odd, but I love calling for help when my computer decides to go rogue, not following the plan that I so carefully and naively laid out before class. I fumble a bit with the cursor and click the same icon [...]
This article was published in Intrepid Ed News on 10 August 2021. Our lives take different courses based on the decisions concerning us made by people we often don’t even know. This is because selection processes that are out of our control determine what will happen. Most people taste this process for the first time [...]
Coconut Thinking 