About

I’m an educator and musician.  I love learning, I love teaching, and I love creating opportunities and structures for other people to learn and teach — in schools, in art, in writing, and all settings.  Everything we do has an element of education, regardless of our work.  And it is at intersections between unlike things that we learn the most.

I curate and edit a weekly newsletter called The Educator’s Notebook.  It collects education-related news from around the web for the purpose of promoting innovation in education, and it is read around the world by teachers, school leaders, nonprofit directors, foundation leaders, charter chain managers, startup CEOs, conference organizers and more.

I founded Athena, a Wikipedia-meets-Facebook for teachers. The field of education has no professional memory: while doctors and lawyers have hundreds of years of practice indexed and recorded, teachers reinvent the wheel every day. Athena provides a place for teachers to collaborate and share practices.

I’ve presented separately on the topics of creativity and cognitive science at SXSWedu, NAIS, the College Board, the OECD, and elsewhere here in the US and abroad.

I serve on the Advisory Board for SXSWedu, the Center for Curriculum Redesign, and the Middle States Association Responsible AI in Learning.

I consult on the topics of AI in schools, strategic planning, and more with Aptonym.

I was Head of School at King’s Academy, a coeducational, American-style boarding school in Jordan, in the heart of the Middle East. King’s Academy provides a world-class education to students from over 40 countries and from all socio-economic backgrounds. ~50% of students at King’s Academy receive some form of financial support. My work at King’s focused on the pandemic, governance, financial sustainability, and scaling impact.

Prior to my time at King’s Academy, I taught at Deerfield Academy for fifteen years and held a variety of leadership positions. I particularly enjoyed teaching about the history of language, Paradise Lost, the evolution of literary form, digital humanities, fundamentals of grammar and rhetoric, and, well, lots of other things, too. There is so much to be curious about.

For four years I lived in New York City, where I was a musician, composer, writer, political organizer, grad student, and general enthusiast of life. I am presently working on a full length musical set in a school.

I love meeting people and learning from them. We and everything are all works in progress.  Especially in the digital age, we only benefit from extending the discourse.  Thanks for your contributions.

For more information on my work, visit my home page or LinkedIn.

Peter Nilsson
mail:  pbnilsson (at) gmail.com