The Education Vanguard

Designing, or redesigning the best way for a school to make an impact on the future of our students is a more common conversation among educators today. We are starting to see more and more schools emerge focused on this redesign idea and it is very exciting. Today I talk with Superintendent Cameron Fox about the Verso school, a new concept school set to open in Bangkok in the fall of 2020. Camero...

OverviewDana Kerford started her working career like many of us as an educator in a public school system in her home country. As we typically discover, managing and improving relationships between students is often the key to a successful class culture. Diving in with enthusiasm, Dana researched, read, discovered and built a relationship program for classrooms and schools. She shares her ideas, wo...

OverviewThe future of work and the realities that it entails are still unknowns to many of us.  Multiple job and career changes are likely on the horizon for our students and teaching them to be life long, adaptable learners today will help them in the future. Today I speak with Anna Server, Deputy Principal of Haleybury Middle school in Australia.  We discuss various models for the future of educ...

OverviewWe all know change is tough. It is tough at an individual level and even more so at an organizational level. I always enjoy talking with leaders focused on change and learning their strategies, successes and difficulties.  Today I speak with Kiffany Lychock from the Boulder Valley School District of Colorado in the United States about the changes she fostered in her district. After the pas...

OverviewAs educators, improving the lives of students and how they relate to the world is an essential part of what we do. If you are an international teacher, life is usually stable and your school is well resourced and ready to go.  If you are from Guatemala with an unstable government, frequent violence and many other hurdles to your success, you might just want to give up what you are doing or...

OverviewAs education, and how we educate, changes we seek out new models to learn from.  There is a wide variety of change making schools now and Venture Academies is one of them. Today I speak with founder Jon Bacal about how he and his team bring leadership skills, entrepreneurial skills and personalized learning to a school of over 300 disadvantaged middle and high school students. Hint: It is...

OverviewA focus on social capital in schools and the social interactions it generates is an important part of working collaboratively for organizational improvement. Dr. Jim Spillane, my guest today, focused much of his career on the benefits of social capital at schools like ours. We discuss what social capital is (see Wikipedia’s version here), how to go about developing it in a school system, t...

Play is not an activity itself, but a state of mind. I learned this today from my guest Mark Collard, the founder and director of Playmeo, an organization dedicated to enhancing how humans connect with each other. As we see many schools beginning to understand and incorporate Social Emotional Learning, in their programs, Mark’s emphasis on fun and play as a way increase connections within classroo...

If you are motivated to create change at your school or other organization, yet want to know if the idea you have or the effort you have put forth is actually helpful, then action research might be for you. Action research involves defining and validating a problem, seeing the impact of the solution and more. My interview with Dr. Jayson Richardson goes deep into the action research methodology. B...

“Be careful, not too high.”“I wish you would not do that.”“Time to do homework.”“You have to worry about people out there. ““Come on in we have to go to your next scheduled activity.”These are common phrases parents utter to their children in the world today.  And, as many of us know, this may be a departure from the past where we had lots of free time to explore and take risks while we were growi...

Over time the pressure on our students, especially in the international world, to perform have increased. Couple this with the ever pushy role that technology plays in our academic, work and personal lives, and you have a society of young people facing a lot of stress.  Are our school adjusting to these new realities? Toby Newton, suggests they are not and as the director of  International College...

Early in my life health education was about learning to eat properly, getting exercise, staying away from drugs and other “stuff.”Today, thanks to people like my guest Amy Lauren Smith, we are seeing a more comprehensive and expanded approach to health. Mindfulness, balancing technology, sleep and social emotional learning are becoming a greater part of health education.  Amy and I get into all th...

You may be familiar with Parkour, an increasingly popular discipline that emphasizes efficient movement based on our individual skills and abilities. You might have seen hordes of young people giving it a go. What you might not know is that Parkour is coupled with a mental discipline behind it that syncs the Parkour’s challenges s with the mental discipline needed to carry on and be successful. To...

Martin McKay is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of TextHelp a software company based in Northern Ireland that creates software to help support anyone to better reader or writer. They work with schools but also other organizations so anyone whether a student or a professional has the tools they need to reach their full potential. Martin is an enthusiastic technologist, who has a personal s...

Agency, self-directed learning, rocks, and learning pits.  These are not the words you might typically hear to describe an elementary school on the North Island of New Zealand, but after listening to today’s guests, Gina and Jana, it will all make sense. The Stonefields school located outside of Auckland is a unique, highly collaborative learning environment designed to bring independence and more...

There is a common understanding that a high school student drops out of high school about every 26 seconds.  Many groups, schools, are working to chip away at this tragic statistic and many are using approaches aimed at leveraging a student’s specific talent and interests. For Tony Simmons, my guest today, music is their leverage. Tony is the executive director of the High School for Recording Art...

Today I talk with Louse Favaro about her blog post Reversing and Preventing a Culture of Silence Among Girls The story is shocking, surprising and a good insight into what we may be dealing with as teachers to students in an international setting.  Start with her intro below then head off to read the article. In light of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and the #MeToo movement that followed, Louise F...

Alec Couros has long been in the world of social and digital culture.  He was/is an early adopter in the social world and has watched it evolve from a place for nerds, full of hope for the future, to what it is today.  Recently we have seen much reporting on the downsides of digital culture with fake news, extremist information and louder voices than usual. Alec and I discuss this world, how it ha...

High Tech High is a well known brand in the education world. But do we really know and understand their core values and educational philosophy? How does it impact their students and growth of the organization? Today I talk with Melissa Daniels from the High Tech High organization. Melissa is a director at High Tech High Middle school in Chula Vista, California. Connect mdaniels@hightechhigh.orgBio...

The future. The future of education. This is a topic getting a lot of discussion over the last ten years or so.  In many ways, it has dovetailed the rise of technology and the disruptions we see in the workplace and what it means to have a job, a skill and a career. Today I speak with Brad Latzke a retired international school administrator about his ideas of what the future of education should lo...

If you are going to design an adjunct campus with boarding facilities, remote from your main campus, then it seems likely you will see the development of student independence as the natural outgrowth of the experience. Richard Pratt, my guest today, found that the experience at Chinese International School’s Hang Zhou campus did actually created even more INTERdependence among his students. The in...

Many of us have some great ideas and things we think we should do or make happen.  Sometimes it is difficult for us to take one of those ideas and make it a reality.  We enjoy listening to the stories of those who do though and Kristen MacConnell is one of those people. Kristen sees a need for the combination of conversation about great teaching pedagogies and the sharing those ideas. In addition,...

I really enjoy speaking to people about the changes and shifts taking place in education today.  There are a host of early adopters out there trying and succeeding at bringing contemporary learning ideas more suitable for today’s world. Doris Korda is one of them. Doris is the associate head at Hawken School in Ohio, USA. She leads the Hawken Entrepreneurial Studies program designed to change how...

The combination of the words Green and Bali may conjure up the idea of beauty that we have come to expect when we think about or visit Bali, Indonesia. The popular Bali Green School combines the beauty of Bali, a focus on sustainability and modern learning practices to create a unique student experience. I talk today with Glenn Chickering, a founding faculty and head of upper school at the Green S...

Change is coming!  We often hear that in education today.  We also often see signs and examples of those changes in new schools with a shared commitment to a contemporary pedagogy. But what about larger schools? Schools that are already well established, doing well and seen as successful in many ways. How do they shift? Should they? Today I talk with Tim Stuart, Executive Director for Strategic Pr...