What's Your School's Terroir?

What a pleasure it was to have Pam Moran, superintendent of Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia, Skype into my ISTE session about making innovation teachable. Innovation gets special attention in her district, which has established a “seed fund” to encourage teachers and administrators to test promising ideas. No surprise that Albemarle County PS is one of the districts I profile in my new book, Bringing Innovation to School.

While Pam joined my session via Skype, four of her administrators were there in person. She teed them up to join the discussion by highlighting something unique about each school’s approach to teaching and learning. Patrick McLaughlin is principal of Henley Middle School, which has built its own renewable energy resource center. He showed us the real-time web interface that lets students track the energy produced by solar and wind installations at their school.  It’s a great set-up for inquiry-based projects for innovators-in-training.

Meanwhile, Tracey Saxon from Sutherland Middle School told us about the nature trail that her students have built for their community. It features interpretive signage that invites community members to take part in citizen science activities via mobile devices. Students have documented the building of Hollymead Nature Trail on their school blog.

Principal Gwedette Crummie from Crozet Elementary described how her students use social media to connect beyond the classroom walls and learn engineering principles to help them become better problem solvers. Kathryn Baylor from Jack Jouette Middle School explained how her students tackle inquiry and service projects in their community, using the Expeditionary Learning model.

Clearly, this is a district that doesn’t shy away from innovation, and the superintendent doesn’t look for cookie-cutter approaches from her principals or teachers. Instead, Moran invites each school to figure out its own answer to the question, “How can we teach students to innovate?"

An innovative thinker herself, Moran explained that each school should develop its own terroir. That’s a term she has borrowed from agriculture. Terroir is the sense of place that comes from the earth, giving coffee or wine grapes their distinctive character. I’ve never heard it applied to education before, but I like where she's going with this.

Innovators often think in metaphors. It’s one of the five thinking strategies I highlight in my new book. How serendipitous to have it demonstrated, right before our eyes at ISTE!

Thanks to Pam Moran and her team of innovators for enriching the conversation with their good ideas.

Slides from the session are available here.

See You at ISTE

I'm looking forward to the giant education conversation otherwise known as ISTE. It's a great opportunity to enjoy real-time meet-ups with folks I typically "see" only online, and meet others who are advocates of technology-rich, project-based learning. Here are two sessions I hope you'll consider adding to your busy conference calendars: -->PBL Birds of a Feather Jane and I will co-host a BoF for PBL'ers on Tuesday, June 26, 5-6:15 p.m., SDCC9. We have a game plan to keep things informal and fast-paced, and we'd love to know which questions about PBL are at the top of your list. Please join the PBL BoF group here. By nice coincidence, this session overlaps with weekly PBLchat. Use the hashtag #pblchat to suggest discussion questions, too. -->Inside the New Idea Factory On Wednesday, June 27, 11:45-12:45 p.m., SDCC9, I'll be leading a discussion about how to make innovation teachable. (Details here.) I'll share strategies and insights I gathered while researching my new book, Bringing Innovation to School. I'm delighted that Pam Moran, superintendent of Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia, will be joining the conversation via Skype. Her district is going full throttle on multiple initiatives that encourage creativity, problem solving, and grassroots innovation. Between sessions, I look forward to hanging out in the Bloggers Cafe. Hope to see you there!

Coming Soon!

Solution Tree has set July as official launch for my new book, Bringing Innovation to School. Can't wait to start sharing the projects and strategies I learned about from savvy educators across the country. Meanwhile, thanks to Jonathan Martin for mentioning my book in his excellent review of Tony Wagner's new work, Creating Innovators. I'm just diving into Wagner's book. We have been exploring similar territory, but have brought back different stories to share. Learn more about release details for my title here.

Essential Question: How did it come to be this way?

I've been helping Indian teachers plan projects for their students, and not surprisingly, many of these focus on solving environmental challenges. Scarce water, plastic waste everywhere, bad air, no place to play, all of these issues affect the lives and health of Indian kids. Teachers' projects tend to focus on the capacity of the individual to make a difference. I guess I'm pessimistic-- with such huge problems intense collective action is required. I wonder if instead of personal action projects and awareness campaigns students should practice collective action that has a concrete and measurable result. A result they can reflect on later and think, I was part of something that made a difference and I can keep operating this way. Still muddling over this shift and how to talk about it with teachers. Any thoughts? 

Get Parents on Board

If you're new to project-based learning, chances are you're having some interesting conversations with parents who want to know why you're switching up classroom routines. I've heard parents pointedly ask why their kids have to collaborate on projects.
Here's a new (free) guide from Edutopia to help parents understand why 21st-century learning is essential preparation for their children's future. I've culled resources and ideas from a variety of sources to help parents understand the value of collaboration, critical thinking, communication, and creativity. You'll find examples organized by grade level to help parents get a better idea of what 21st-c learning looks like when it's working well.
(To download your copy, first register for a free user account at Edutopia.org.)

My Turn

My plucky friend Suzie toured India with PBL workshops last Fall and now it's my turn. What an adventure! Right now I'm in Gurgaon, about an hour outside of Delhi and known as the "outsourcing capital of India." A megalopolis in just a decade, "As per the provisional data released by the state, Gurgaons population in 2011 stands at 15,14,085 against 8,70,539 in 2001." That's a 73% growth rate. I look forward to learning what this means for the school I'm working with, Lotus Valley, Gurgaon, and India.

My first school, New Era School in Delhi.

So Much More Than That

We often talk about the importance of student voice and choice in effective project design, but how often does a project manage to help students discover--and use--their voices as citizens? Read an Edutopia interview with one of the teachers whose students produced More Than That as a rebuttal to an ABC documentary about growing up on the reservation.