Every Tuesday and Wednesday night, I teach a 4-hour pedagogy class. I use the design thinking cycle to plan the course (a topic for another blog post) and so as I teach, I am in the Highlight and Fix phase. I thought I would give…
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William Chamberlain is one of my favorite teachers on Twitter. He is bold, humble, relentless, and unabashedly curious. The other day he tweeted this out, so, as a joke, Philip Cummings and I both turned these into “inspirational” quote images for tweets. As I think…
This morning, I logged into Twitter and noticed a stream of education articles. Several described how homework is ruining childhood. A few mentioned why schools are crushing creativity. I noticed my own blog post describing how “kids aren’t tired of learning but they’re tired of…
Note: I’m sure my thoughts on this topic have been heavily influenced by Dean Shareski. If you don’t read his blog, go check it out. For the last four days, I have been back at home with my family. We have had deep conversations….
When I was a kid, I thought the epic life was the big life. You know, hit the game-winning home run. Slay a dragon. Conquer a distant land. When I got older, I still believed that the epic life meant doing big things. Make…
There are days when I am working that I don’t feel like I’m working. I sit down for three hours and plan out the anatomy of a course. I chip away at a new syllabus. I hop over to a Google Document and leave feedback…
Over the last three years, I have realized that there were key things I want to learn more about. The first topic was business. Although I didn’t see it this way at first, I quickly realized that as we launched a blogging platform, we were…
To Whom It May Concern: My son is a curious kid. He’s high-energy and artistic and he loves thinking deeply. He’s a sensitive soul and sometimes the smallest amount of criticism can feel crushing. I could tell you the ideal way to teach him. I’d…
Dr. John Spencer
I’m a professor and a maker. Sometimes I make things. Sometimes I make a difference. On a good day, I get to do both.
