These last few weeks my blog posts have been on the road, as I've traveled almost 5000 miles to and from the Northeast on two different trips. During these two trips, both at the insistence of my friend and colleague Giselle Martin-Kniep. I met Giselle last year during a project we were both working on with the New York State Student Support Services Office.

Earlier this year she invited me to become a fellow with the Center for the Study of Expertise in Teaching and Learning, recently renamed Communities for Learning. A few weeks ago I joined the C4L crew, along with about 40 other fellows, in the woods of rural Connecticut to explore the power of working in a cross-field learning community among education-related folks. I learned a lot, mixing and mashing ideas with K-12 teachers, principals, school coaches, higher ed faculty and others who simply "get it" on a lot of levels. I also presented the meaningful student involvement frameworks to folks, and was able to learn from the experiences of a wide range of educators from across New York State. Very cool. (Note: I'm the first out-of-state fellow in C4L; everyone else is from New York.) I spent more uninterrupted time concentrating on my work than I had in a long time, and for the most part unconstrained by the stuff that shares my daily attention. It was awesome.

If that weren't enough, the next week I was able to spend three days outside of Boston with Peter Senge, one of the "Top Strategists of the Century". With Giselle's prompting, I was invited by Jaimie Cloud of the Cloud Institute to attend the Society for Organizational Learning's Core Course, facilitated by Senge to launching a "National Learning Community of Schools and Communities that Learn for a Sustainable Future". While that seems pretty high-minded, it actually was. Senge strikes me as someone who spends a lot of time thinking and creating high-minded solutions to issues that strike much of society. Check out his book called The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization to find out more about his theories and work.

I'm continually amazed by the range and possibilities of this work around meaningfulness in schools, and I'm concerned that it apparently hasn't struck folks more powerfully before now. Giselle, Peter and Jaimie all show me that the doors are wider than I've imagined, and I am hopeful for a powerful future for this work.