Jim McLaughlin's Blog

Inspired by Sandy Speicher’s vision of the designed school day of the future, reader Shelly Blake-Plock shared his own predictions of that ideal day. How close are we to this? The post was written in December 2009, and Blake-Plock says he’s seeing some of these already beginning to come to fruition. via 21 Things That… Read more

…what if cultivating a successful inner life was front and center on the leadership agenda? That was the question Todd Pierce asked himself in 2006 after years of experimenting with the full menu of trainings, meetings, and competency models in his capacity as CIO of biotechnology giant Genentech. He had just scoured the development reports… Read more

Terrific summary.  Of note: ‘Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. “Oh,” he mentioned at one point, “and there are no private schools in Finland.”‘ via What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success – Anu Partanen – National – The Atlantic. Read more

The last few years have seen a sea of changes in business intelligence BI. The proliferation of data and advances in technologies are pushing the pace of innovation. Here are 10 BI trends to watch for in the months ahead. Big data gets even bigger Self-reliance is the new self-service The “Consumerization of Enterprise Software”… Read more

Language arts and math are crowding out untested subjects, such as art, music, foreign language and sometimes science, say 3rd-to-12th grade public school teachers surveyed by Common Core. The problem is greatest in elementary school. Among those who say crowding out is taking place in their schools, virtually all (93%) believe that this is largely… Read more

This week Ken Kay completed a seven part series on Becoming a 21st Century School or District. At the core of the series is the identification of four skills to be fused with content and the 3Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic). The four skills are: Critical thinking Communication Collaboration Creativity via 21st Century Education and… Read more