Great Discussions About Education

I apologize for not updating the blog this week.  My goal is to update the blog at least twice a week so I guess I will have to have posts two days in a row!  The reason that I have not updated is that I have been enjoying so many great conversations with people about Penn-Trafford’s education as well as the future of education.  Yesterday I met with a group of parents and we spent two hours talking about how we can work together to improve the learning experience for the students in our school district.  My take away from that meeting was the school district must continually strive to become the best communicator possible.  Parents must have all relevant information easily accessible to them so they can help guide their children through school.  We also spent time discussing how education should be crafted to meet the students at their intellectual, social, and interest level.  After all, all students should have an educational experience that is tailored exclusively to them.

I also spent some time this morning with a group of teachers that I am calling my “guinea pigs”.  On September 22^nd I posted a link to a web site that invites people to “reinvent” education.  The process involved in the “reinvention” is called design thinking and I have used aspects of design thinking through my years as a superintendent.  The web site invites people to form teams to work though a self paced course and the end result would be a project that would reinvent education.  I asked a group of teachers to meet with me a few times to work through the class and evaluate the process as well as the finished product.  I am simply overjoyed with the way the first meeting went.  The discussion about the potential direction of education, and the enthusiasm to provide the best learning experience for students was AWESOME!  One of the tasks this morning was to view videos that would challenge us to think differently about education.  The videos that the group chose as exemplars are here, here, here, and here.  Please view them, I think you will find them inspiringly challenging!