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In Tuesday’s post, we challenged the familiar parent-teacher conference model: the teacher reports, the family listens, and everyone leaves with a folder of information and a vague promise to “stay in touch.”
What if the conference became something more useful?
A partnership conference treats f...
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In this week’s fall series, we’re reimagining one of the most familiar rituals in school: the family conference.
Too often, conferences become a polished version of “reporting out.” The teacher brings grades, attendance, behavior notes, and a list of next steps. The family listens, asks a few q...
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Tuesday’s idea was simple: October does not have to be a march toward winter break. It can be a second beginning.
By this point in the year, we have useful information. We know which routines are holding, which students are still hovering at the edge of participation, and where our original pla...
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In this week’s Hacking School conversation, we’re looking at a moment many classrooms quietly reach every fall: opening routines have faded, the first assessments are back, and everyone has a clearer sense of what is and isn't working.
October is just around the corner and October is often seen...
Welcome back to our subscriber-exclusive implementation series for the first 90 days of school. On Tuesday, we explored the transformative philosophy behind Problem-Based Learning (PBL): shifting our classrooms from places where students memorize answers to vibrant laboratories where authentic, i...
Welcome back to our 10-part journey through the first 90 days of school. If Tuesday was about embracing the mindset shift from compliance to true competence, today we roll up our sleeves. As educators and instructional leaders, we know that mastery-based learning sounds phenomenal in theory. But ...
For generations, the default architectural blueprint of schooling has relied on a tidy, sequential promise: Sit quietly, listen to the lecture, memorize the formula, and then, if you are lucky, apply it to a contrived problem at the end of the chapter. We package knowledge into neat, sanitized in...
For over a century, our educational systems have operated under a silent, unexamined contract: time is fixed, and learning is variable. We give students a predetermined number of weeks- a semester, a term, an academic year - to master a complex set of concepts. At the end of that arbitrary window...
Welcome back to our exclusive 10-part series on navigating the first 90 days of school. If you joined us on Tuesday for our deep dive into transdisciplinary learning during Weeks 7 and 8, you know we challenged a fundamental assumption of modern schooling: What if our students stopped studying su...
The Big Idea: Beyond the Bell Schedule
Imagine walking into a high school building at 8:00 AM. For the next fifty minutes, students sit in Period 1 learning quadratic equations in algebra. At 8:55 AM, the bell rings, books slam shut, and those same students shuffle down the hall to Period 2 to me...
Welcome back to our subscriber-exclusive series on designing your first 90 days of school for lasting impact. In our last session, we explored how to dismantle the compliance trap and establish radical student agency during the opening fortnight. Today, we step into Weeks 3 and 4: a critical junc...
You’ve got the ideas.
But what happens when it’s time to turn them into an actual lesson?
That’s where the Hacking School Design Lab comes in.
Our new subscription gives educators the practical how-to behind the ideas we share every Tuesday.
Members get Thursday Implementation Labs, lesson design...
