If our goal is a "whole child" education for every child, here are some essential questions: How should a modern school be managed and led in a world where the ground keeps constantly shifting? How can a single educator piece together a coherent vision of "school today:" management, leadership, curriculum, teaching, tools? Does "21st-century learning" have any real and special meaning? What's certain is that the schools we're striving to create today are not your father's (or your mother's) schools.
I am not a huge fan of posts that start with a number and proceed to a command: "83 Things You Must Do To Be The Teacher You Want to Be;" "Thirteen Cs Your School Can't Survive Without." In general I find these overwhelming, dispiriting, and ultimately pointless; add them all together and you wind up with an infinitude of impossibility and a guilt-trip headache. I have used this pitch a few times, and I'm rather sorry I did.
I find my thinking on education and learning fragmented enough without reducing its elements to lists. When I've actually tried to do this, I wind up with a mental construct that looks like the Strategic Directions to Hell, a road paved in bullet-points of noble intention.
A whole bunch of things in the world of education interest me, deeply these days, and I've written about them all on my blog—in scattershot ways, no doubt, bringing me up against a stricture laid out the other day by
3-26-14 The Whole Child Blog — Don't Settle for the Okey-Doke in a Third Narrative of American Education — Whole Child Education
Don't Settle for the Okey-Doke in a Third Narrative of American Education — Whole Child Education: THE WHOLE CHILD BLOGDon’t Settle for the Okey-Doke in a Third Narrative of American EducationMarch 26, 2014 by Whole Child SymposiumAn independent school leader and public school parent, Chris Thinnes (@CurtisCFEE) is the head of the Upper Elementary School and academic dean at the Curtis School in L