Dan Coleman

Recently, Dan’s been wondering about: What does it mean to have learned something? He’s fascinated by what we mean when we say we’ve “learned.” There’s a Before when we didn’t understand, and an After when we did. And in the middle, a mystery!

Dan Coleman is a designer and a teacher whose career has bounced between the worlds of education and innovation consulting.

Dan has been a high school teacher and a college professor and a graduate school dean; at liberal arts colleges in the country and progressive high schools in the suburbs and high-need charters in the city.

He led the design and build of two teacher education programs (at Bennington and with MIT), helped run high schools (in Boston and New York), and the turnaround of the individualized, cross-disciplinary graduate division at Skidmore.

Dan has also worked with an educational non-profit that taught teachers how to teach writing, and in edtech, with a company designing a digital language arts curriculum for middle schoolers.

In his more recent incarnations, Dan has done a range of different kinds of work at the intersection of human-centered design and learning. At Continuum (a global innovation group), Dan helped start a practice that taught companies how to develop their own innovation capacities, and in the years since, he has worked with for- and non-profits to discover new strategic directions and build the systems they need to learn their way there. 

Nowadays, Dan is trying to figure out how the close reading he loves to teach is something like the design he loves to do—how looking long and hard at the details can turn the answers we’ve taken for granted back into questions worth thinking a whole lot more about. 

Dan concentrated in the humanities at the University of Chicago and did his doctoral work in English at Cornell.

Find out more about what Dan’s been doing at Big Sky Blue.