A Baker's Half-Dozen Quotes

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
--Henri Bergson, French philosopher (via Joanna Seymour, ADE)

Lesson plans should be that, plans. Students and teachers should have the ability to transform lessons into authentic learning opportunity.
- Jackie Gerstein EdD, Argosy University

In today’s schools, students typically learn individually and at the end of the school year, we certify their individual achievements.  But the more interdependent the world becomes, the more we need great collaborators and orchestrators. For a more inclusive world, we need people who can appreciate and build on different values, beliefs, cultures.  The conventional approach in school is often to break problems down into manageable bits and pieces and then to teach students how to solve these bits and pieces.  But in modern economies, we create value by synthesizing different fields of knowledge, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated, which requires being familiar with and receptive to knowledge in other fields.  

- Andreas Schleicher- Head of the Indicators and Analysis Division at the OECD.


Using CC allows downstream users to customize content, and in some cases can help students save money on textbooks. Chuck Severance, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, was able to publish a textbook in 11 days (available to his students for $10) because he remixed an existing book offered under an open content license.
-Timothy Vollmer - Policy Coordinator Creative Commons



“My business is circumference,” Poet Emily Dickinson writes. This is also the business of leadership. To understand the significance of circumference we need to acknowledge the new mindset required of leaders for integrative whole mind learning. As we struggle with new discontinuities, fragmentation and sudden change it is vital for leaders to think in more complex and holistic ways. This involves a shift in focus from a narrow and reductive emphasis on individualism based upon an industrial model of managing where the leader is the strong dependable self-made individual or hero towards a style of leading which expands the circumference within which the leader leads.
- Michael Jones- leadership educator, writer and pianist



Getting teachers to put themselves out there and blog is the challenge. Too many of our educators believe in “Do as I say, not as I do” teaching philosophy. We need more transparency in education. We can make that happen with more thoughtful and responsible educators blogging to the world.

- Tom Witby -- Adjunct Professor of Education at St Joseph’s College in New York.

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Flickr CC Photo courtesy of quinn.anya

Hard Fun

I was a recipient of a recent email by Dr. Rae Niles* in which she referenced Seymour Papert's concept of "Hard Fun".  The phrase whacked me right between the eyes.  Monday through Friday, last week, I was engaged in "hard fun."

On Monday and Tuesday I was mentoring two Challenge Based Learning teams - one from Toledo Central Catholic High School and the other from LeGrande (IL) Highlands Middle School. Both groups were straining like mad to get from "big ideas" to interdisciplinary action plans for projects they could launch with their students immediately.  This was a hard task made no easier by the Geography-Science-Language Arts and Math-Science-Language Arts groupings of the teachers.

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday I engaged with challenge teams at Mercy.  We tried to wrestle big ideas like global citizenship, right to life, and Reimagining Detroit into challenges for our students.  This was literally exhausting.  After one period our principal, Carolyn Witte,  said that the experience gave her a headache by thinking so hard!

Yes, this is hard.  But for me, absolutely fun and intellectually challenging.  I like this as much as anything I do professionally, and will be on the lookout for as much "hard fun" as I can find and the immeasurable value it has for education at our school.

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*Rae currently is national manager professional development manager for Apple.
Flickr CC photo by Peter Gerdes