Everybody’s Designing

The ability of instructional leaders to identify high quality teaching, hold it up as exemplary, and support all teachers in making incremental progress toward being exemplary remains crucial under the social-distancing regime, but it’s more difficult than ever because everybody’s designing. State boards and their bureaucratic hordes convene in dimly-lit video conferences to conjure the …

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Treating Classes Like Gatherings, Part Two: Teaching With Generous Authority

(If you haven’t read part one, about establishing purpose, consider starting there.) After providing solid advice on how to approach a gathering’s “why,” Parker offers guidance on designing the core of the experience and facilitating it effectively. The core of that advice: “Don’t be chill!” A ubiquitous strain of twenty-first-century culture is infecting our gatherings: …

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Innovating on Curriculum

A feature of innovative schools, and probably innovative organizations more generally, is a tendency to under-design from the top*. I’ve worked at two K-12 schools designed to continually innovate, and each takes a slightly different approach to avoid over-fitting theory on praxis. First a note about constant change: One might reasonably think that, yes, the …

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Machine Poets of the Apocalypse

A frontier in machine learning seeks to mimic human learning by assembling computers into teams to solve problems. This type of deep learning, called “reinforcement learning,” allows machines to acquire knowledge, take collective action with that knowledge, and observe the consequences on their world and on their teammates.  This machine deep learning environment unsurprisingly mimics …

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