Teachers create and transform energy. They are the dynamos of educational change.
If one foot is in a bucket of steam, and the other is in a bucket of ice, you are not, on average, comfortable.
You cannot switch teachers on and off as if they were PowerPoint presentations.
High performing organizations have cultures of creativity and risk. They encourage workers to innovate and play.
Capacity building originally meant helping people to help themselves. Now it means required training to deliver imposed policies.
Time is the enemy of freedom.
The teacher has more power than the Minister.
In Finland, within very broad government guidelines, teachers create their own curricula together across schools in every community and district. They don’t confine collaboration to their own individual schools and to just implementing other people’s ideas.
There is no algorithm for creativity.
Arrogance is the conjoined twin of ignorance.
Every solution has a problem.
Improvement is about doing something better; innovation is about doing something new.
On school culture: It’s hard to eat something you’ve had a relationship with.
Adolescence is about digging out the iron inside irony.
Evaluation schemes that implicate 100% of the staff to detect a small % of incompetents are a waste of time.
Culture is the possibility and impossibility that bacon and fruit can appear on the same plate.
We will not achieve high performance in education if we replace teachers with machines or turn teachers into machines.