It’s National Teacher Recognition Week and so all week I’ll be posting on teachers, teaching practices, and education more generally. Why? Because I don’t think there is anything more important for our future than how we are educating our children (and ourselves) right now. Which means that teachers are incredibly important. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from the kind of attention given teachers in the media and from politicians in recent years. Politicians, in particular, have heaped all kind of blame on our teachers for the state of our kids’ education even as they have been slashing school budgets, laying siege to...

In another of my favorite TEDTalks, Sir Ken Robinson – an expert on education, creativity, and vocation (he calls it discovering your element) – identifies creativity as perhaps the most important quality for us to develop if we are to solve the problems of our generation. Yet he is concerned that most of our schools are not set up to nurture creativity at all and, in fact, often hamper its development. While he talks about education, however, don’t be deceived, this Talk is for all of us, as we think about how to cultivate creativity in all of our roles and tasks. This particular TEDTalk has been seen by more than...