“It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night”  – David Ogilvy I’ve been thinking a lot about learning lately, and how best to make what we choose to teach in schools poignant: meaningful, relevant, and memorable. Reflecting on the quote above, I think educators can learn a lot from the marketing sector. from Disney’s 1959 “Sleeping Beauty” – the e

Forgive me, but I was a bit tricksy in the title of this post. I’ve been thinking about this for years, probably, but as I see society seemingly crumbling before us in recent months it’s become more of a nagging preoccupation. I’m a big fan of simplification…abstraction…distillation – of getting to the “ness” of something. What if our curriculum  – any curriculum in any school – was based on just two domains…lenses through which one can peer and prod at everything? PHILOSOPHY

In my presentations on creativity, I always suggest to folks to have a dream diary…some sort of notebook by the bed to record thoughts upon waking or archive actual dreams, if vivid enough. The artist Salvador Dali notoriously fancied pinning down the meanderings of his subconscious, even devising methods to force himself awake in the midst of a dream. The most well-known anecdote involves him falling asleep holding a spoon over a tin plate, and when it would invariably drop

Lately I’ve been chatting about edtech with a friend and in discussing how to get teachers (or anyone in any organization for that matter) not only interested in but embracing technology integration it occurred to me there might be a trajectory of sorts. What must you start with to get the “buy-in”? How do you progress from there? How might one show the possibilities so that folks can start thinking in this language rather than merely translating? I generally simplify things

The other day I was struck by an article on Cultural Literacy  in one of my favourite magazines, Wired, which claimed: “When it comes to living in the here and now, your education is incomplete” After teaching Middle and High School (emphasis on Juniors and Seniors) for the past 22 years I could not agree more. Kids seek relevance more than anything. They want to know WHY the curriculum (usually “chosen” for them) is something they need to know and HOW, specifically, it will