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“I think academic environments are artificial environments.

People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment.

You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

institutional inertia seems relatively simple: institutions, organizations, and people tend to remain at rest (i.e. satisfied with the status quo) or in uniform motion (i.e. slightly tweaking the status quo over time), unless that state is changed by an external force (i.e. transformation).

“Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace,”

the gravitational pull of the status quo is so incredibly strong, that escaping it can be a monumental task.

The big idea behind the concept of maker empowerment is to describe a kind of disposition—a way of being in the world—that is characterized by seeing the designed world as malleable, and understanding oneself as a person of resourcefulness who can muster the wherewithal to change things through making.

The concept of maker empowerment is meant to be somewhat broader than the label of maker. It certainly includes maker-types—i.e., hackers, DIYers, and hobbyists—but it also includes people who may not define themselves as wholly as makers, yet take the initiative to engage in maker activities from time to time.

We teach art, or history, or auto mechanics not solely to train practitioners of these crafts, but to help all students develop the capacity to engage with world through the lenses of these disciplines—even if not all students will become artists or historians or auto mechanics. The concept of maker empowerment aims for this same breadth.

Dewey wrote about knowledge as a verb, an action upon one’s environment.

creating Makers that view the world as malleable, not just through products and goods, but in social-political-economic systems

...make sure there is space for students to find problems

“Telepressure is a workplace problem, not a worker problem. We learn how to respond to email through our colleagues’ behavior, and it’s a consequence of the social dynamics within a work environment,”

In this world of stress and pressure, how do school leaders become enablers of work-life balance? Most research points to starting with how we as leaders model that balance.

“If we are to serve as stewards of productivity and engagement, we must pursue excellent performance as leaders in all four domains — work, home, community, and self — not trading off one for another but finding mutual value among them.”

But what are they betting on? AltSchool is a decidedly Bay Area experiment with an educational philosophy known as student-centered learning. The approach, which many schools have adopted, holds that kids should pursue their own interests, at their own pace. To that, however, AltSchool mixes in loads of technology to manage the chaos, and tops it all off with a staff of forward-thinking teachers set free to custom-teach to each student. The result, they fervently say, is a superior educational experience.

heir own weekly “playlists,” queues of individual and group activities tailored to the specific strengths and weaknesses of each kid.

This puts AltSchool at the intersection of two rapidly growing movements in education. Along one axis are the dozens of edtech startups building apps for schools; along the other are the dozens of progressive schools rallying around the increasingly popular concept of personalized education. The difference is: AltSchool is not just building apps or building schools. It’s doing both. In that way, AltSchools are more than just schools. They’re mini-research and development labs, where both teachers and engineers are diligently developing the formula for a 21st century education, all in hopes of applying that formula not only to other AltSchools, but to private, public, and charter schools across the country.

untapped opportunities involve further personalization of the curriculum, teaching, and assessment.

Schools will no longer be just free-standing buildings but will be more integrated into community life.

Segregating students by age will become less prevalent within learning spaces.

bringing human-centered design to education, government, healthcare — the sectors that need it most — requires a few important culture shifts:1. We need to bust out of siloed design practices.2. We need to develop ever-broader capacities, taking an interdisciplinary, deeply collaborative approach.

We turn our own questions on ourselves: What if we could help design education that readies today’s kids for the technologically enhanced (and challenged) environment they’ll grow up into? While we’re at it, what if we could then start addressing the very policy that shapes those educational institutions? That kind of moonshot systems thinking requires both agility and scale — it requires networked organizations and creative collectives. It requires designers who never stand still.

when individuals with their own aspirations and talents come together to build upon each other’s work and drive toward a greater goal, we can gain traction on much bigger challenges — and find new ways forward.

“executive function,” the ability to self-regulate, the measurement of which turns out to be a better indicator of success in school than the results of an IQ test. Kids with good self-regulation skills are better able to control their emotions, resist impulsive behavior, and become self-disciplined and self-controlled.

how do we reconcile today’s anxious parents and the highly structured environment with our children’s need for unstructured, self-regulated play?

The primary requirement for unsupervised play is uninterrupted stretches of time

the speed and scale are going to shock those in education charged with preparing our children for it.

Like so many other things that we think of in the future tense, (climate change, surveillance, etc.) the changes in work have already arrived, we just don’t seem to realize it

we need to start thinking differently about what it means to be “career ready” (as well as, I suppose, “college ready.”)

“We have not correctly legitimized a culture of childhood,” says Lella Gandini, a longtime Reggio teacher, “and the consequences are seen in all our social, economic, and political choices and investments.”

To counter this, Reggio’s schools are relentlessly child-centered — not to achieve notable results in literacy and numeracy, but to achieve notable qualities of identity formation and to ensure that all children know how to belong to a community.

The teachers follow the children, not plans.”