School Ahead: Recent Episodes
Jeff Moore
Paradigm, purpose, and presence in the leadership of American public schools--this is a "white hot iron" moment in our profession. We must reinvent teaching and learning to advance equity, achieve radical personalization, and provide opportunities for impactful service learning. Jeff Moore, your host, has served as a teacher, a superintendent, and almost everything else through a thirty-year career in the field. He offers deeply personal reflections on lessons learned, and thoughts on lessons yet to be learned. Jeff is sharing as himself, and does not represent any school or organization as he opines (sometimes recklessly) on the state and future of public education.
It's not just kindness and love for their own sake, but greeting the broken things--and the broken people, both inside us and outside us--with love and compassion for the purpose of improving. That's a pretty spiritual idea, but it's also an idea from cognitive behavioral therapy. In any event, schools have a mission that's incredibly important today, and that is to teach them all in every action we take. We might as well be kind to one another in front of kids.
School Ahead is by Jeff Moore. He's sharing all of these thoughts as himself, and is not representing any school or organization.
Wielding reckless and negligent oversimplifications, I talk briefly about various different purposes of public education, starting with the Founders. The tensions between these purposes are part of the reason why public education has failed to take control over its own paradigms. The solution? I think it has something to do with being every purpose at once.
School Ahead is by Jeff Moore. He's sharing all of these thoughts as himself, and is not representing any school or organization.
This discussion focuses on shared decision-making in schools, but approaches the whole thing through the lens of shared purpose, rather than shared decision-making for its own sake.
I promised some links ...
https://dmj.dmgroupk12.com/articles/theories-of-action-aligning-priorities-and-resources
https://k-12leadership.org/tools/creating-a-theory-of-action/
(Note ... that second one requires an email address to register.)
School Ahead is my podcast, and I'm sharing all of these thoughts as myself. In these conversations, I'm not representing any school or organization.
Thoughts on leadership in public education, in public service, in a mythological warband hunting a swamp monster and his mother ... whatever. Cameos by Sergiovanni and Nouwen. Dewey is in there somewhere, too.
Anyway, it's about the future, dammit. And we are the architects. We are so, so awesome at humility!
Thanks to my Dad, for good modeling of the Politics of Good Work. Also, thanks to Coma-Media on Pixabay for the beautiful music. Check them out, and support them on Patreon.
School Ahead is my podcast, and I'm sharing all of these thoughts as myself. In these conversations, I'm not representing any school or organization.
An introduction, and also a chance to make sure that the dusty microphone I dug out of the milk crate in my basement still works ... This is a short discussion to preview what I intend to talk about in the first season of School Ahead. I will, of course, stray widely in the months ahead as new thoughts come up.
Other things in that milk crate: an ergonomic trackball, minus the ball; several Zip cartridges; a tumbleweed of tangled USB cords; an external CD/RW drive; a Palm VX with a cracked screen; a pile of AOL CD's; a stylus from a Motion LE1600 tablet computer (the best stylus ever); a Windows 95 CD.
School Ahead is my podcast, and I'm sharing all of these thoughts as myself. In these conversations, I'm not representing any school or organization.