THOUGHTS
The number of times I wrote “Wow!” in my notes — well, shoot, let me count real quick — 16. 16 times.
“All change is harm.” 🧐🤯 My friend Caitlin Harper shared so many valuable insights on managing change in today’s Ways We Learn Podcast, but that one in particular keeps rolling around in my head. As in: even something seemingly good, like her example of free money, changes the status quo in (definitely) unpredictable and (possibly) …
Question for you: what’s the most important factor in learning? 🧐 I’ve got a new Ways We Learn Podcast episode dropping tomorrow, and a bonus episode in a week, featuring Amin Shaykho of Kadama. Kadama is a tutoring app for the gig economy. It’s an awesome conversation about how Amin built the company and how …
A wise coach of mine once told me to celebrate my wins. So here goes, and I hope you’ll join the celebration: 🎉 I’ve just been named a Top Thought Leader by The Upside, and earlier this year I became a Top Thought Leadership Voice on LinkedIn! 🎉 I’ve been trying to channel my years of …
Pro tip: you don’t know what other people are thinking. 😵💫 So find out! Have you ever thought an employee understood their task, but received a result very different from your vision? Or, after you completed part of a project, found out that your understanding of your client’s needs was different from theirs? 😠 Here’s …
How best to appreciate a teacher during National Teacher Appreciation Week? Tell them! 🧑🏫 My Latin teacher in 7-8 grades was Dr. Paul Pietrow. (He was Mr. Pietrow then — not yet a doctor, just a recent college graduate finding his way.) He only taught for three years before going to medical school and likely …
Delivering really bad news or a difficult conversation?Don’t deliver a “sh💩t sandwich.” (This is more often called a “compliment sandwich”: sandwiching difficult information between two slices of good.) It’s a reasonable approach for giving constructive feedback or routine performance reviews: Here’s what’s gone well, here’s what you need to improve, and here’s the generally positive …
Mine is inquiry. We prize decisiveness, creativity, empathy, and plenty of others. And they’re all important! But I think approaching situations with questions has served me best. In the classroom, it looks like asking how a student got to their result, or why their problem-solving approach was successful. Approaching with inquiry, even when the student …
Think back to your school days. What do you remember learning? Not the subjects or topics you know you learned, but what learning activities do you actually remember? My memories don’t include most of my time in classes. I remember the fact of taking courses, but would be hard-pressed to tell you what I learned …
I went down a rabbit hole of Gen AI and engineered an AI ghostwriter! A human ghostwriter would try to understand and mimic the voice and style of your writing. Your AI ghostwriter Invisible Ink does the same thing!
(I haven’t lost my mind. Allow me to explain.) Math and math-adjacent fields faced a crisis in the 1970s when digital calculators arrived in students’ hands. These were just basic versions, nothing close to scientific or graphing calculators (just go look up the TI-30!), but they were a quantum leap ahead of the slide rule …
✅ Consider politics: deepfakes are already influencing elections. 👩🎓 Consider education: I recently showed a team of teachers how to generate an entire term paper with Gen AI. (Chicago-style citations and all.) 🎭 Consider industries: OpenAI‘s Sora videos, or Midjourney‘s images, or Anthropic‘s Claude AI writing. Then consider Gen AI has been in the public …
That question was at the heart of the professional development session I ran last week for Horace Mann School‘s History Department. I think the teachers left a little less certain about the answer. (Which was one of my goals. Sorrynotsorry.) I showed them how, with just a few minutes of prompting, Generative AI can create …
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