I'm a journalist who writes about the power of teaching and learning to improve lives and transform communities. Author of Bringing Innovation to School: Empowering Students to Thrive in a Changing World and co-author of Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age, I'm inspired by educators who push the boundaries of the traditional classroom. I'm on the National Faculty of the Buck Institute for Education, and have also helped nonprofit organizations design programs that teach both youth and adults how to improve their communities with innovative, sustainable solutions.
Blog Posts
In southern Sudan, a region wracked by decades of civil war and famine, hope is rising. A new secondary school is going up in the village of Marial Bai.
Read More.Long before I arrived in Philadelphia for Educon 2.1, I was picking up clues that this was going to be a different kind of education conference. There would be no sit-and-get workshops, according to organizer extraordinaire Chris Lehmann...
Read More.Michele McRae retired from a long and enjoyable career as a professor of English and French, only to find herself bored silly as a retiree. "I lasted about three weeks," she says. And so she got busy.
Read More.Months before Americans chose Barack Obama as their forty-fourth president, Crista Lawson, from Aubrey Park Elementary School, in Eugene, Oregon, had a hunch that the 2008 election would prove to be historic. "I wanted my kids to pay attention and be informed about this election," she says.
Read More.Dan Meyer knows that textbook-driven teaching hasn't served his students well. That's why they wind up taking remedial algebra with him in ninth grade. "They either need more time on content, or they've really been burned by traditional math instruction," says the teacher from San Lorenzo...
Read More.Before she attended a summer leadership event sponsored by Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., Allie, a sixteen-year-old from Pasadena, California, says she had heard both of these words: social and entrepreneur. "But," she adds, "I had never put them...
Read More.On a recent late summer morning in Portland, Oregon, I walked past the downtown farmers' market, where vendors were setting up their lush displays of fruits and vegetables. Food was on my mind, but for a different reason. I was on my way to a forum for young people about how they could help...
Read More.I first met Greg Tuke a decade ago when he was running a program called Powerful Schools. The nonprofit organization was working to strengthen schools serving some of the lowest-income and most culturally diverse neighborhoods in Seattle.
Read More.When teachers talk about how much they and their students gain by connecting with learners in other parts of the world, their enthusiasm is downright contagious. Yet for all the promise of learning across distances, these wonderful...
Read More.When Ashraf Ghani talks about world events, his words carry the weight of experience: After twenty-three years of exile from his native Afghanistan, he returned after the fall of the Taliban to serve as finance minister for the...
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