On April 19 and 20 0ver 60 educators gathered in St. Louis for our second annual sustainability education seminar.  This year we set the challenge to “bust several the predominant myths” of education, mental models of reality that are not actually true, and preconceptions that get in the way of meeting the needs of our students and communities. We explored five myths: Independent and public schools do not collaborate Students don’t do real work in school Students are not yet citizens Teachers deliver curricula, students receive it Tests are the best measure of achievement From the very outset we ... read more...

On April 23rd at 10:30 p.m. Ashley and Louise became grandparents of Asher Adams Cadwell.  Asher is a  9 pound, 12 ounce, baby boy born to son, Alden and daughter-in-law, Caroline.  What a miracle!  We feel blessed to be in Boston this week with the new family to help out and to be fully present to this new, beautiful baby who, by some amazing cycle of life, is related to us. All the genes of knowing how to be with and care for babies, and fully enjoy babies are blooming in Alden, our own first born, handed down to Alden ... read more...

Chapter 1 A few weeks ago I was getting into my car to drive out of a mall parking lot in St. Louis when I noticed a female mallard step off the curb a few car rows away from me and start across the street with several, well actually,… ten ducklings following her!  I could see that the ducklings were having a hard time getting up the curb on the other side and I sped over, making a U turn and stopping my car right in front of the scene of the duckling crossing.  Meanwhile, cars were swerving to miss ... read more...

This is sequel to last week’s blog on What’s Golf Got to Do with It? Bubba Watson won The Masters Championship on Sunday and a whole nation of Attention Deficit Disorder citizens should stand up and take notice.  Why?  Because here’s a young man who knows he has attention deficit issues and has grown to understand his learning style, or, knows how he learns best, and he lives his life accordingly…and, I might add, to the fullest…the MAX.  Here he is describing his approach to golf to David Letterman. He fully embraces his own learning style.  Bubba himself described his ... read more...

  This is a sequel to an earlier blog on baseball and the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals. As I write this, The Masters Tournament, one of four major tournaments on the Professional Golf circuit, is beginning in Augusta, Georgia.  It’s a GREAT tourney, always; played every year on the same golf course.  There have been many great champions. Yesterday, one of the greatest champions, Gary Player, from South Africa, three time Masters champion, gave a thirty minute interview to the press. (Of the thumbnail choices, Gary Player is the gent top right, in a green jacket) He reflected on ... read more...

It is full blown spring in St. Louis. Everything is blooming at once…my mother’s crab apple that we moved 14 years ago to our front yard from her side yard before her house was sold, the wisteria on the post and beam trellis that Ashley built to shelter the brick walk to the back of our house, the pink parrot tulips that we planted last fall, the white lilacs.  All these blooms fill the light, cool spring air with intoxicating fragrance.  Right now, as we wait for our chicken to roast, the pale new leaves of the pear tree tremble ... read more...

Earlier this month, I spent an extraordinary week at Opal School of the Portland Children’s Museum in Portland, Oregon.  I was there co-teaching a graduate education course through Butler University with Dean Ena Shelley and Susan Mackay, the Director of The Center for Children’s Learning. The group of 18 people assembled ranged in age from early 20′s to early 60′s.  We were administrators, professors, undergraduate and graduate students, and teachers.  All of us were captivated by the different kind of school that Opal is and by the life long learning that takes place there every day.  We focused on learning in ... read more...

Picking up from last week’s entry on my reconnection with Trung Le, principal at Cannon Design, an architecture firm doing paradigm shifting work in school architecture, I’ll focus here on a basic reformation in the thinking behind school: school as community…school as the builder of community….school as the creative force in community…school as the creator of culture. Carlina Rinaldi, president of Reggio Children, in Reggio Emilia, Italy spoke at a conference we hosted in St. Louis in 2001.  Just when the generations ushering in a new century were filled with all the promise a new beginning brings (like this spring ... read more...

Louise and I spent two scintillating days in Denver last week at the Second Annual Green Schools Conference, a convergence of 1,500 educators, architects, engineers, businesspeople, chefs, farmers, and many NGO-er’s…oh, yeah, and Arnie Duncan (who gave a keynote address to all on Wednesday morning). Among the many connections I made, I renewed an acquaintance I’d made with Trung Le several years ago at a school architecture symposium convened by Reggio Children in Reggio Emilia, Italy.  Trung is a principal at Cannon Design.  Since I’d met him he had been a key contributor in the writing of The Third Teacher ... read more...

I have been reading about Stanford Professor, Linda Darling Hammond’s research using the results of the PISA, (Program for International Student Assessment) to investigate the consistent low rank of U.S. students on this assessment and the consistent high achievement of students from countries like Japan and Finland.  She points out that the PISA assesses higher order thinking skills and performance tasks which students in high achieving countries practice every day as part of their teaching learning systems. Performance Assessment is a a way to assess what students understand and what skills they have by actually asking them to use their ... read more...