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I recently visited the National Museum of African-American History and Culture In Washington, D.C. As I walked through the Afrofuturism exhibit, it was inspiring to see how out-of-this-world thinking has allowed Black visionaries to create new future...[Read More]

By: Shannon Murtagh  In 2021, deep in the midst of COVID, we surveyed Chief Innovation Officers (CIOs) working in public school districts across the country about the skills, core work, and mindsets that were most important to innovate for equity. Th...[Read More]

By: Dr. Tyler Thigpen A buddy of mine, Paul, works for a major airline headquartered in Atlanta. The airline deploys him to examine new technologies. He assesses whether integrating them will improve plane flights and, if so, what the ripple effects ...[Read More]

After a two-year investigation including hundreds of interviews, Kim Smith and Jen Holleran published a landscape of innovation in US K-12 education. What they found was a lot of confusion because there is not a single unified landscape. There are mu...[Read More]

At Getting Smart, we partner with organizations that help collectively reach our mission of actively building the future of learning by designing, accelerating and amplifying equitable innovations that empower all people to thrive and lead in a compl...[Read More]

By: History Co:Lab “What would a map of every opportunity in Pittsburgh where young people feel powerful and seen look like?” On June 25th, at the Civic Learning Ecosystem’s Youth Design Day, youth leaders, educators, civic organizers, and community ...[Read More]

By Shannon King, Ph.D. Accountability is crucial in education. As educational leaders, we must ensure students meet high learning standards. However, our single-minded focus on standardized testing is extinguishing the joy of learning for many studen...[Read More]

By Josh Schachter and Melinda Englert When 80 middle school students from Billy L. Lauffer Middle School, a Title I school in southeast Tucson, hopped off the bus at the University of Arizona, it was not for an ordinary field trip. Despite living jus...[Read More]

Recently I received an invitation to speak at an upcoming global education summit in Beijing. The organizers asked me to give a presentation on the two topics that have dominated my work for the last 30 years: Project Based Learning and 21st Century ...[Read More]

I have had “write year-in-review” on my To Do list for about a month-and-a-half now. But every day I ignore the task, hoping that I’ll feel more like writing tomorrow. Tomorrow is the last day of this year, and I don’t anticip...[Read More]

I was a speaker today at the #AgainstSurveillance teach-in, a fundraiser for Ian Linkletter who is being sued by the online test-proctoring software company Proctorio. I am very pleased but also really outraged to be here today to help raise money fo...[Read More]

I was a guest today in Chris Hoadley’s NYU class on ed-tech and globalization. Here’s a bit of my rant… Thank you so much for inviting me to speak to you today. I have been really stumped as to what I should say. If you look at the ...[Read More]