Failure and risk-taking are essential to the creative process. It is rare that good original, creative work or ideas come together in the first try. Thus, an important component of engaging in creative practice is both an acceptance of potential failure as well as a...
What is the role of values and principles in educational leadership? What can we learn from inspirational educational leaders? How did they develop their moral/ethical compass, and more importantly, how do they bring these perspectives to the work that they do? These...
ASU recently hosted, what is known as, the world's largest scientific gathering, the annual conference of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. As as part of this conference I was invited, along with Ariel Anbar and Trina Davis, to talk about our...
I was recently interviewed by Matt Schneidman (Curator, Creator, Podcast Host) for his Fishing for Problems podcast. Matt also publishes an ed-focused newsletter. Our discussion was broadly framed around educational technology and the TPACK framework - but...
Danah Henriksen and I were recently invited to present a keynote (and conduct two workshops) on design thinking and STEAM education at the 2021 NV STEAM conference, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art and Desert Research Institute. Of course, given the pandemic...
How do we design a school for the future? This recent article seeks to capture (in the form of a case study) our recent experience in designing such a school. The design process was a collaborative process involving a partnership with a local school district and the...
REMOTE K12: The Connected Teacher Summit, was a one-day virtual summit hosted by ASU, designed for K-12 teachers and those that support and enable teachers in district public, charter and private schools. I presented a talk titled: Technology in teaching &...
I was recently invited (along with Sean Leahy and Jodie Donner) to present at the Winter Games, Digital Immersive Experience organized by ShapingEDU at Arizona State University. Our talk was titled Learning Futures: Designing the Horizon. We described our session as...
What if education systems were doing more and thinking differently about preparing learners to thrive in the future? The Learning Futures Podcast (from Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College) is a series of conversations on improving education and the future of learning....
EduSummIT is a global community of policy-makers, researchers, and educators working together to move education into the digital age. The last EduSummit (2019) was held in Quebec, Canada and I was a member of Thematic Working Group 3 (TWG3) on Creativity for Teachers...
Over the past couple of months I have been asked to give presentations at a variety of different conferences or organizations spread across the world. They are archived below. I was invited to give a talk as part of the Dean's Lecture Series at the School of...
In his book The child and the curriculum; and The school and society John Dewey identified four key impulses for learning that he placed at the foundation of the curriculum. The key education challenge, he argued, is to nurture these impulses for lifelong learning:...
Last year I was in Israel to present at the Meital Conference. When I was there I was interviewed by Lior Detal, the education correspondent for TheMarker - which led to an article in the magazine. Earlier this year, once the COVID crisis was in full swing, I was...
Written for my dear friend Sonya-Gunnings Moton, on her retirement from the College of Education at Michigan State University. Dear Sonya, wishing you all the very best on your retirement. Just want to say how much I have valued having you as a friend and colleague...
How do you design for change in complex systems—like education? Implementing large-scale changes within educational systems can be a challenging task. Doing so requires many actors, working at different organizational levels (and perhaps across organizations), to not...
“What knowledge is of most worth?” is a question asked over a 100 years ago by the English philosopher, Herbert Spencer. His unequivocal answer was—science. This question (and his answer) resonates even today, though the context within which it is asked, and how we...
The economist and thinker Andrew Scott once said something that blew me away. He said that: The 20th century created the idea of teenagers and retirement. I had never considered that the idea of teenagers and retirement was a 20th century idea. These seemed to...
S. Giridhar (Giri), Chief Operating Officer of Azim Premji University (APU) and I had a chance to chat for a Silver Lining for Learning side conversation. Giri is a good friend and we connect at multiple levels. We both went to the same undergraduate institution (BITS...
One of the significant changes in my way of thinking about technology integration has been a shift in focus—away from designing training and programs that target individual teachers to designing systems (both at K12 and higher education levels) that support teachers...
It is rarely that I hear a talk that blows me away. We have all seen the TED talks, and their mutant offspring. The over-hyped music and catchy taglines; the speaker in front of a rapt audience; the crafted delivery with its carefully punctuated pauses and reveals,...
All of us involved in social design (and I include education in among those as well) ask ourselves, or are asked this question: How do we measure the impact of the work we do? This begs the question, why measure in the first place? Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest...
Essential tensions in design. Image designed by Punya Mishra Design facilitators play an important role in the open-ended collaborative design process. This becomes even more important as design based approaches expand to groups and teams that may not be as familiar...
The COVID19 crisis has disrupted education globally at an unprecedented scale. In some ways, we are living through the largest educational social experiment in history! Over the past year I have been involved in a range of initiatives, discussions, interviews, and...
Note: This is the second of two posts on the value of school by Kevin Close and Punya Mishra. Read the first post: What value do schools bring? Revisiting Accountability In the previous post we argued that schools play a varied and rich role in the economic, social,...
Note: This is the first of two posts on the value of school by Punya Mishra & Kevin Close. Read the second post: Revisiting Accountability. What value do schools bring? The accepted assumption is that schools are sites for learning and the role of educators to...
Mike Crowley has a guest post on the silverlingingforlearning.org site titled: If we need to be right before we move. (If you haven’t read it, I recommend it strongly. Go ahead follow the link above. I’ll be waiting). [Pause] Welcome back. I think Mike makes some...
Is the Covid19 crisis the tipping point for online learning? As we wrote in our introduction to the Silver Lining for Learning webinar series …this crisis has forced schools and universities to close, pushing often unprepared institutions to move teaching and learning...
A week or so ago, Yong Zhao reached out to Chris Dede, Curt Bonk, Scott McLeod and me with the question: What would happen to our global and local educational systems, if the Corona virus outbreak lasted for a year? We met a week ago (via zoom, what else) to discuss...
This is the second of two posts on the topic of bringing principled innovation practices to designing learning futures. In this post (by Cristy Guleserian & Punya Mishra) we dive deeper into how these practices of PI connect with our model of design. In particular...
This is the first of two posts on the topic of bringing principled innovation practices to designing learning futures. The first post (co-authored by Punya Mishra & Cristy Guleserian) focuses on the need for designing learning futures, and how the PI practices...