Welcome!

Welcome to the blog of Zaq Roberts, Associate Head of School at The Berkeley School in Berkeley, CA. I blog about a wide variety of topics, from classroom moments I witness, to administrative events and conversations, to the educational blogs, videos, and books I am reading and watching, and how they are influencing my thinking. I hope this eclectic approach will give you insight into the many ways that I am engaging in advancing the school and strengthening our program, and I welcome your thoughts and comments!

This blog takes its name from a quotation by Archimedes that reads "Give me a lever long enough, and I can move the world." The TBS mission speaks directly to the need to engage a changing world, while many of the experiences in our program focus on the development of students' agency and authority. TBS is the lever by which we all - administration, faculty, students, and parents - can together move the world to be more humane, compassionate, and responsive. To borrow an important Montessori phrase, it is our way to remake the world.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Disrupting tuition

Clayton Christensen, author of the highly influential book Distrupting Class, has an excellent new video about disruptive innovation posted last week at HBR. It's got me wondering if the way tuition works at independent schools presents an opportunity for disruptive innovation, and what that might look like. The only two options I'm aware of currently employed are partnering with outside funding sources such as corporations or funds, which comes with significant limitations and directives from those financial sources, or employing a sliding scale for tuition, which very few schools do sustainably, since tuition assistance essentially functions to create a sliding scale that is more predictable and manageable. Let me crowd-source this: anyone got ideas?

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