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Article based on The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the 5 Skills of Disruptive Innovators Focus on concluding three chapters, People, Processes, and Philosophies, which draw on and offers 15 takeaways for Principals and School-Leaders.

What You Can Do to Become Stronger Innovation Leaders in Your School: 1. Own as Principal the role of Innovator-in-Chief: You can't delegate innovation. 2. Make your practice of "active innovation" visible. 3. Create complementary teams in school leadership. 4 . Observe closely what other principals and schools are doing. 5. Arrange for employee swaps. 6. Ask "Why?" 7. Seek people who had invented something, held deep expertise in a particular knowledge area, and demonstrated a passion to change the world. 8. Remember that innovators want to work with and for other innovators. 9. Embed innovation as an explicit, consistent element of performance reviews. 10. Develop formal and informal processes to facilitate knowledge exchanges. 11. Network externally. 12. Practice Beta testing and Prototyping. 13. Build many small, diverse teams. 14. Communicate and reinforce that Innovation is everyone's job. 15. Make innovation an explicit core value of your school. 16. Give more time for innovation. 17. Create "a safe space for others to innovate. 18. Model your risk taking and your learning from failure.

The book is framed around the Five Core Skills of Innovators, a framework highly valuable for ourselves and our students: What are we doing to do more of and become better at *Associating, *Questioning, *Observing, *Networking, *Experimenting.

The 5 Attributes of Content Curation are … Seeking, Sorting, Synthesizing, Socializing, and Sharing. *Seeking is when students Identify, Investigate, Explore, and Inquire into an idea or question. *Sorting is when students Collect, Organize, and Contextualize those pieces that they discover. *Synthesizing is when those students then make Connections between information and ideas, when they Make Sense of these things and go on to Innovate and Create NEW information and ideas. *Socializing is when students Communicate, Collaborate, Revise, and Peer Assess as part of the LEARNING process. *Sharing is when students Propose ideas, solutions, and brand NEW questions. It is when they Publish and Present these things that show again as Dr. Wagner says…"What they can do with what they know."

The Finnish education system is one of the best performing and most equitable in the OECD. With Prime Minister Julia Gillard's promise to make Australia one of the best five performing countries for education in the world, what can we learn from the Scandinavians?

The Great Schools Partnership, Inc. is a nonprofit school-support organization committed to redesigning public education to improve the quality of learning for all students. Our focus is not on a single classroom, school, or district, but we work at all levels of the educational system-from the classroom to the statehouse-in the effort to shape America's finest secondary schools.

This web site offers great resources and webinars on various topics relevant to our work!

A great resource for PBGR, personalized learning, innovative schools. We are hoping to visit a few affiliates this year.

Sponsored by the Great Schools Partnership This blog has posting valuable to all educators in considering their practice. Samples of posts include: Brain Research, Differentiation, Collaborative Group Work and Student Feedback

"...as a culture, our collective bias is toward extroverts. The popularity of work environments with 'open plans' that have no, or low walls and constant noise are completely focused on extroverts. She also notes the current popularity of what she calls, 'new group think', which revolves around work being done in groups and highly valuing collective thinking."

Interesting blog, great book. Really makes me think about how we design learning experiences...especially when we attempt to foster creative thinking.

"If you mistakenly believe that the most effective leaders are Extroverts, that using teams to brainstorm is the best way to foster innovation, or more simply, that Extroversion is a choice, you must read this book. Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology as well as relevant case studies, Cain effectively debunks the Extrovert Ideal, and equally important, helps us to better understand and value many of the attributes and behaviors associated with Introversion."

Earlier this year, for example, a school in Stockholm made Minecraft compulsory for 13-year-old students. "They learn about city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future," said Monica Ekman, a teacher at the Viktor Rydberg school.

I have a BA and MA in English, but in my doc degree I'm focusing on the inter- and trans-disciplinary studies of complex systems. I'm reading a ton about math, science, and computer programming lately and find myself questioning why I chose English over a STEM field so many years ago. One reason: the science classes I did take in high school sure didn't seem to be pointing me toward profound questions like these.

These ARE great questions, and I'll share them with my district Diigo. As students begin to take ownership of their learning, creating big questions is important.

This Huff Post blog post by Karen Gross, President of Vermont Southern College, explores what's needed for the transition from high school to higher ed.

This was very interesting - and has huge implications for how schools move ahead.

Another piece that puts the focus of Innovation on People rather than Programs. My personal belief is that #EdReform should start and end with empowering PD which is Personal and Purposeful. With that, what if schools modeled their PD on the Rowland Foundation's model of #EdReform? What would it look like if PD were not determined and delivered but instead supported and shared? What if PD were about providing resources and teaching teachers to be data collectors, researchers, developers of innovation? 2 year Action Research cycle? What if every teacher in a school spent a school year coming up with a hunch, collecting data, researching ideas around their hunch...then spent the second year testing it out/implementing it in the classroom, more data collection, presenting outcomes to their peers, and collecting feedback for reflection and refinement?

"What has proved to matter is...the building of knowledge and innovation skills, which are much harder and take longer to get in place and maintain. Leading-edge competency in one's area of practice is indispensable; practice at turning ideas into reality is a must." "...while learning is hard work, and the value is not quantifiable, it is the only way to remain valuable in an economy that thrives on innovation. The more you invest in your people's knowledge, the more innovation you can expect to reap."

"The Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE) is your resource for quick, to-the-point fact sheets that will help you make the case for CTE with policymakers, businesses and the public. Check out our general, sector-specific and issue-specific fact sheets..."

Resource for Work-based Learning...relevant to those thinking about VTed Act 77.

To be eligible for a garden grant, applicants must be a ... nonprofit K-12 school that is developing or currently maintaining a school garden project that will help children engage with fresh fruits and vegetables. Garden projects may be at any stage of development; planning, construction or operation."

At the conference there were a number of schools interested in the work being done by Peter and Tom. This might be good "seed" money to start similar programs.

"...funding to support efforts in the school community to 'make a difference' through the collaboration and involvement of schools and local communities."

"...the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have already upended the music and book industries, humbled enterprises from Kodak to the Postal Service (not to mention the newspaper business), and helped destabilize despots across the Middle East." Ten years ago who would have thought that these institutions would be "threatened" by computers? Are schools evolving rapidly enough to meet the challenge?

Where neuroscience meets pedagogy.

The Rigor/Relevance Framework is a tool to examine curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The Rigor/Relevance Framework is based on two dimensions of higher standards and student achievement.

This is great! Thanks Adam. I feel like so often schools have aspirations of quadrant D, but spend so much time focusing on quadrant A that they never reach those aspirations. This reminds me a lot of Stephen Covey's time management matrix...schools spend so much time in quadrant 1 being reactive (Putting out fires aka chasing standardized test scores.) that they never get to focus on being proactive (quadrant 2) and really think about what we want our students to learn in school.

What if we applied the psychology of what makes technology attractive to students...to our practices in the classroom? Using this idea, instead of using more technology in the classroom, why not design the traditional human / face-to-face classroom experience to be more like what makes technology so engrossing to modern students? Do these principles sound familiar... Deliver information in bite sized chunks, Create mental models, Use short stories to help process information, Learning happens and is remembered through repetition, People are motivated by Progress and Mastery, Sustained attention lasts 10 minutes, and the use of Progressive Disclosure. Progressive Disclosure an interaction design technique often used in human computer interaction to help maintain the focus of a user's attention by reducing clutter, confusion, and cognitive workload. This improves usability by presenting only the minimum data required for the task at hand. Here are 100 little articles that could have big implications in the classroom.

PLCs, Common Core, Next Gen and Problem Based Instruction and Paula Denton.

"When you issue an open invitation and gather together a large group of self-nominated passionate stakeholders from a broad cross-section across a system or organization and ask them to vision your shared ideal future, anything can happen."