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COUNTERING THE PERNICIOUS NARRATIVE OF SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES AS PLACES OF INDOCTRINATION
(THIS IS A SECOND ITERATION OF A POST FIRST PUBLISHED IN DECEMBER OF 2022—NOW DELETED. THE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT INSPIRED ME MORE THAN A YEAR AGO HAVE ONLY BECOME MORE PRESENT AND URGENT—PG) As each new year unfolds, the level of anxiety around the educational enterprise in the […]...
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TEACHING IS CLIENT-FACING, PEOPLE!
People may think of classroom teachers as just line workers, busy bees looking after bunches of kids under the supervision and control of principals and heads in front offices who exist at least in part to run interference between tax- and tuition-paying families and the workers assigned […]...
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RULES, POLICIES, AND AUTOMATA
A couple of times a year when passing through New Mexico, I am accosted by Zoltar, who would like to help me. I have yet to consult him, however, as I am generally en route elsewhere. But I appreciate his interest. If you ever watched the 1988 […]...
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RESIST, OR CEDE THE POWER FOR GOOD?
The educational news from Florida these days is almost too dispiriting to read. I am making every effort to keep the state’s very name from becoming code for its headline-grabbing leadership and the continuous executive attack there on principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and social justice […]...
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IN PRAISE OF STICKING AROUND AT YOUR SCHOOL—and why schools should help
NOTE FROM PG: I began this post as a Comment on a wonderful post by Kirsten Lindberg of The Hewitt School (NY) on the National Association of Independent Schools Independent Ideas blog today. As happens sometimes, the thoughts just kept flowing, and what I had was far […]...
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In Memoriam: Joseph Christy, Teacher
We have all had colleagues who have died, suddenly and unexpectedly. It’s a terrible thing, and a tragedy not just for family and immediate friends and coworkers but for an institution and its community. To be sure, “suddenly and unexpectedly” is not meant to imply a qualitative […]...
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I AM THE MERITOCRACY, AND THUS I AM WORTHY OF BLAME
Take a trip with me to 1968. I am about to graduate from my all-boys, nearly all-white (exceptions fewer than the fingers of one hand) independent school. I had pretty good grades and even better standardized test scores, and I am bound for an Ivy League college. […]...
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KEEPING IT REAL—Now, more than ever…
When I was a kid, back when we did air-raid drills in the hallways of my elementary school and listened to regular tests of the big yellow Civil Defense sirens mounted on utility poles here and there in my world, we had no illusions about what war […]...
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OK, BOOMERS. It’s still our turn.
I think of myself as a cockeyed optimist, but that word has been getting some heat lately. Yeah, it’s only a mindset. HOPE is where we must energize our active selves to make the better things we want actually come to pass. That’s nice, and of course […]...
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GRADING—MISERY KEEPS ON LOVING COMPANY
It’s the least wonderful time of the year, with phones jingle-belling and everyone yelling. Grades are coming out, and there is widespread misery and consternation. As kids await decisions from colleges reporting record applications and independent schools reportedly doing pretty darn well, application-wise, every grade short of […]...
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RELEVANT: MATTERS OF LEARNING, ENGAGEMENT, AND MENTAL HEALTH…
I have been poking around among in-school school counselors, whose lives these days are consumed by supporting colleagues and students in acute personal distress, much of it related to the uncertainties, constraints, and ongoing sorrows of the pandemic. I’ve been interested in their overall relationship to academic […]...
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GOVERNANCE AND GUIDING STARS: Time to Get Rid of Impediments to Doing the Right Thing
A metaphor we’ve heard a lot lately has been the “Pole Star”—an institution’s ideals or values that can serve as a moral beacon for leaders making decisions about programs, policies, and practices. The distractions of the pandemic have brought “pole star” into more common use, usually with […]...
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THANK YOU TO THE USUAL GANG OF IDIOTS
If you are of a certain age and perhaps a certain sensibility you will recognize a phrase in the title from your younger days. “The usual gang of idiots” was how the editorial staff of Mad magazine presented itself, and I have lately realized how much I owe to […]...
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YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT; CHECK YOUR MISSION FOR CLUES AS TO WHAT THIS MIGHT MEAN
The education news these days has its sickening aspects: state governments in many of these United States are working to ensure that an honest, evidence-based approach to issues of race and social justice be expunged from these states’ public school classrooms, with certain materials banned outright. A […]...
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HOW TO DO IT: LIVING (UP TO) YOUR SCHOOL’S VALUES AND MISSION
The other day I exhorted schools to start living up to the most meaningful ideals they express in their foundational and aspirational statements, to make missions and values a real part of all of their thinking. I realize that folks may not really have much of a […]...
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THE COMMONWEAL: A PRINCIPLE FOR ALL
THIS POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN JULY 2020 ON THE INDEPENDENT CURRICULUM BLOG. (Content lost in a hosting transfer, alas.) In this moment the world is clamoring for independent schools to be held, and to hold themselves, accountable to a higher standard, and we must examine ourselves and […]...
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INDY SCHOOLS, YOUR IDEALS ARE UNDER FIRE AS HYPOCRITICAL—SO START LIVING UP TO THOSE IDEALS, DAMMIT
In one of my other lives I do a great deal of work predicated on the idea that schools want to be intentional in expressing their missions and values in their programs, policies, and practices. Since my entire life (literally) has been spent in the independent school […]...
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BEYOND PROJECTS ALONE: THREE Ps FOR THE LIBERATION OF LEARNING
Much of the optimistic messaging I have seen since the pandemic began has been about the promise of project-based learning, which has kind of laid exclusive claim to the moniker “PBL”. But some of us have been talking for a while about two other kinds of PBL, […]...
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Open, Says Who?
Cognitive dissonance has become a way of life for us in the past ten pandemic months, soon to be a year of 525,600 minutes and very likely at least that many deaths. But lately I’ve been on the edge of cranial detonation, watching the COVID-19 numbers rise […]...
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BOARD TO DISTRACTION
In my life I am connected to a whole lot of independent schools. Through family and friendships, not to mention professional connections, I am hearing a whole lot about life in schools during this unbelievably stressful time in our educational history. Teachers aren’t very happy, administrators aren’t […]...
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KNOWING THE STUDENTS WE DON’T TEACH by Will Harrington
THIS IS A GUEST POST BY A YOUNG INDEPENDENT SCHOOL TEACHER (currently in search of a position after his previous school downsized due to COVID, BTW). I’m delighted to share Will’s perspective here. Conversations about the start of the school year have been dominated by the question […]...
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THE UNEXAMINED CURRICULUM IS NOT WORTH TEACHING
I said it the other night in a Twitter chat (the #ISEDchat; first Thursdays 9–10pm ET), and I’ve said it privately to folks, so I guess I can say it here, for the world: The unexamined curriculum is not worth teaching. It may have been worth teaching […]...
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GREATER GOOD—A NEW PLAY THAT HURTS SO BAD YOU NEED TO SEE IT
Since I was a kid I have been fascinated by movies and books about schools. This probably comes from growing up on a boarding school campus and taking in my family’s administrative worries with my meals of institutional food from Number Ten cans. From Blackboard Jungle to Lucifer With […]...
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CONFRONTING STUDENT PREJUDICE: Important Questions About a School’s Obligation to Address Hateful or Hurtful Expression; Do Your Values Have Teeth?
A history teacher encounters a dismissive and demeaning reference to gay and lesbian people in a student essay. A Spanish teacher senses that students are obliquely mocking stereotypes of Latinx persons during conversational practice exercises. An English student continually asserts in class discussions of a Toni Morrison […]...
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EQUITY IN EDUCATION: LET’S ELEVATE OUR EXPECTATIONS!
(This essay has been partly inspired by my recent reading of Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All and Steven Brill’s Tailspin. Both books should be on every educator’s #MustRead list. It appeared originally as my “From the Executive Director” message in the Independent Curriculum Group’s March 2018 newsletter […]...
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READING FOR A WEIRD WINTER: McLuhan, MarketWorld, and Adolescence
If there is anything about the winter of 2018–19 that hasn’t been pretty strange somewhere, I haven’t heard about it—and I mean everything from weather to governance. Sometimes I just need to curl up with a good book, and lately I have found a few. It’s been […]...
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TOWARD A NEW JERUSALEM?
I’ve long been puzzled by some of the weirder aspects of William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem.” What was this man talking about, imagining Jesus bopping around England, touching down on a verdant hill here and a sooty factory there? Having taught the poem on occasion, I have pondered […]...
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IN A DYSTOPIAN WORLD, A COMPELLING CASE FOR INDEPENDENT CURRICULUM?
A colleague observed the other day that the recent proliferation of unusual essay and short-answer prompts on the applications of super-selective universities might have a purpose other than making 18-year-olds commit to a decision on their favorite movie or what, exactly, inspires them. The colleague’s hypothesis is […]...
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TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION: A CHALLENGE TO SCHOOLS
“I (we) wish to acknowledge this land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still the home to […]...
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THE TAINTED PROMISE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
(This post originally appeared on the Independent Curriculum Group Blog as “My Twitter Problem.” It has been edited slightly to serve the transition to my personal blog.) We’ve been hearing it for years: Don’t blame electronic media for the bad things kids do using electronic media! Kids […]...
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THE SENSITIVITY GAP
As an educator, a some-time college counselor, and the parent of college-age kids, I watch with great interest the various morality plays unfolding on college campuses—many of these on so-called “elite” college campuses. Between trigger warnings, micro-aggressions, and the spread of awareness of sexual assault and harassment, […]...
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A Story in Anticipation of #NAISAC in 2016
When I was in high school I remember the excitement every year when my uncle, who lived across the street and was doing his stint as “headmaster” of the small boys boarding school that was still at that time the family business, prepared each year for “NAIS.” […]...
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The People of My Village
It happened again the other day, when I started a story, “In my village….” Apparently this is hysterically funny. Villages, it seems, don’t happen any more in the kind of world where someone like me could possibly live, and in living memory they never have. Over-educated, middle-class, […]...
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Literacy and Luck
I’m a lucky man. Upon occasion I do reflect in my old age on the heaps of cultural and social capital I carry around, or rather that carry me around, elevated perhaps above my true existential worth by flukes of race and gender and the socioeconomic accident […]...
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My Challenge to Schools
Stories of schools transformed and students’ lives transformed are always inspiring and always thought-provoking. Fare on transformational teachers has infused my life from The Blackboard Jungle to Conrack to Les Choristes, but transformational schools are another matter. From Ted Sizer’s Horace books to watching a video about […]...
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Notes on the News
I often muse on the news but seldom write about it, but several of today’s stories in my part of the world are particularly compelling. The pieces that catch my eye tend to be cautionary tales of both positive and negative import relative to topics that have […]...
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Covered Bridges: Demographics, Economics, and the Education Conversation
One of my pet projects for the past few years has been to find ways to increase the real, teacher-level discourse among educators from the private and public sectors, in all their manifold incarnations. The metaphor I and my colleagues in this endeavor has been that of […]...
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Milestones: The Interested Child turns 100
It’s been a week for even more milestones, and if you’ll allow me a moment of pride, I’ll share that the Independent Curriculum Group just took on its 75th Partner School (which makes a total of 78 Partners, with The Association of Boarding Schools, the Progressive Education […]...
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Learning to Improve: Improvement Science and Defining Our Problems
I enjoy school strategy statements. These days they take the form, variously, of strategic visions, strategic priorities, or the tried-and-true strategic plans. Most of these are pretty interesting, although one can fault the form as being perhaps a little bit too standardized, like Brill Building hit songs […]...
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Back Like a Truant Kid, with Excuses and Promises
It’s the middle of July, for crying out loud, and never before have I been so laggard in maintaining this blog. I plead both personal and professional reasons; I’ve had plenty of mostly welcome distractions—with an unhappy sidebar—that have been keeping my head busy in other ways. […]...
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Some Thoughts and Resources on Independent School Teaching
About ten years back, based on an article I had written for Independent School magazine, I was asked by the National Association of Independent Schools to put together a proposal for a book on hiring, training, and retaining teachers. An Admirable Faculty: Recruiting, Hiring, Training, and Retaining […]...
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The Untapped Power of Protocols
I’m following the Twitter stream from the NAIS Science of Learning and 21st Century Schools Summit, and at this particular moment the magic word is “protocols.” To my mind, that’s deep magic, of the very best kind. I first encountered protocols as a participant in Steve Seidel’s […]...
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Standardized Testing and College Admission: A Counselor’s Lament
The whole college admission thing has been wed to standardized testing in a big way for longer than we care to remember, and for all those years its flaws haven’t exactly been a secret. Five decades ago, my high school experience at an independent school in New […]...
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Another Invisible Knapsack: Independent School Privilege (My Take)
PREFACE, with a slightly red face: Little did I know (or remember) when I wrote this last night that Guybe Slangen, the organizer of the very Private Schools with Public Purpose Conference referenced below, had put this very same concept into words in a piece for Independent […]...
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Que Será, Será: The Future of Independent Schools is Not One Thing Only
As usual I had a pretty amazing experience at the National Association of Independent Schools Annual Conference just ended (read participants’ thoughts here), buoyed along by some happy personal news and some uncommonly fine socializing. The student musical groups were a delight. Our Independent Curriculum Group reception […]...
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MINDSETS: Of Schools, Faculties, and Teachers
I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the challenges of school change, and my experience over and over again has been that exceedingly well-intended, creative, clever, professional, and deeply caring educators—whether singly or in groups or representing entire schools—bring to each new question, large or small, […]...
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What is the Independent School Presence in Education Programs?
Regular readers know that I am passionate about involving more independent school people in the larger—national and global—conversation about education. There are more than a few challenges in making this happen, including some assumptions and stereotypes that get not only in our own way but in the […]...
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My Part in Independent-Public School Dialogue at Upcoming Conferences (Re-Post from #PubPriBridge)
(NOTE: Regular readers will know of my passion for developing an independent school–public school dialogue, and this post on the PubPriBridge.net site, which supports the biweekly #PubPriBridge Twitter chat, details some upcoming events in which I will be participating under the #PubPriBridge banner. If you’re interested in […]...
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Building the Public-Private School Bridge: A Construction Update
On rare occasions it is vouchsafed to us that something important in our lives should be truly important to others. This week a former student wrote a little disquisition for the Atlantic online on the matter of how educators in different sectors ought to be connecting with […]...
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The Thing of It Is: Free Will and the Internet of Things
About every 30 years or so Hollywood cooks up a horror movie titled The Thing. Even if the 1951 version, which I saw at a Saturday kids’ matinee when I was growing up, had a longer moniker (The Thing from Another World), posters and trailers emphasized “The […]...
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The Higher Calling: Mission-Driven Schools, Duty, and (Public) Service
This is about words that can sometimes sound out of tune to the contemporary educational ear, but words that we have heard often lately in important contexts: duty, obedience, service. When I hear these words, I tend to envision uniformed men, rigid countenances, shiny weapons. At first […]...
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11 Things That I Wish “21st-Century Education” Evangelists Weren’t Doing So Much Of
One thing I have noticed about those lists of “My Top Ten Blog Posts of 2014” summaries favored by many bloggers is that many of the most widely read blog posts are comprised of listicles, urgent-sounding enumerated lists of must-dos or must-haves or pet peeves. Because Not […]...
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THE MINI-TERM PROMISE
When I was in college I envied friends at colleges with “Jan Terms.” From my vantage point at a ponderous, grad school-ridden university, these four-week terms looked pretty appealing, great examples of nimble, student-interested-based programs that could happen in smaller liberal arts colleges to make education fresh […]...
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Sitting Down to Turkey in Discomfort With My Privilege
Our epitaph will no doubt be that we were good people, nice people, who tried to do the right thing. Once a year we were even thankful, unless of course we were on an early morning shopping spree or being forced to work selling gadgets and gewgaws […]...
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CODING IS JUST THE NEW SURVEYING
A tip from a wise friend, Thomas Steele-Maley, brought me back to some old school reading the other day: Theodore Sizer’s The Age of the Academies, from 1964. A look at the roots and fruits of the pre-Civil War “academy movement” in the United States, the little […]...
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THE DATA PARADOX: MORE DATA, MORE QUESTIONS
I’m on the train home from a very interesting conference, “Using Data to Make Thoughtful Decisions About Schools” at the ridiculously gorgeous (especially on a sunny late fall day) St. Andrew’s School in Delaware. (In a synchronicitous link to a previous post here, St. Andrew’s was a […]...
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INNOVATION: AND WHO’S THE CULPRIT, NOW?
In today’s NAIS Bulletin blog post, National Association of Independent Schools president John Chubb asks, “Are Colleges the Culprit?” For generations, he notes, schools—independent schools chief among them, often enough—have laid the blame for congenital curricular conservatism at the door of colleges. The fact is, “what colleges […]...
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SLOW-GRADING TEACHERS: CANARIES IN OUR COAL MINES
This is what students call “Early Decision week,” and college counseling offices are quietly freaking out as they collate the last bits of paperwork to send off to colleges in support of students’ applications. When I directed such an office, the bane of my existence at this […]...
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Disruptive Innovation: The Mirror and the Crystal Ball
The other night on the #PubPriBridge Twitter chat we took on the topic of change in schools, and the conversation surfaced some pretty strong feelings on the point and purposes of change. Consensus, I feel comfortable saying, lay on the side of change, Heck, yes! but change […]...
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Will Your Smart Watch Save the World?
At some point in 1968 my high school Spanish teacher—a rather gloomy fellow, he was—recommended that we read Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. First published that year, The Population Bomb was a kind of pop science (if you can say this about the work of a Stanford […]...
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A Hard Truth About the Way We Treat Children
The teaching profession and most of the non-profit and social service sector operate on an assumption that has seemed unassailable to me all of my life: that human beings innately and inherently love and value children above the lives of adults, above all things. “Women and children […]...
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Ferguson: Tethering Ourselves to What Matters
A while back I realized that once upon a time I was actually in Ferguson, Missouri. It was around Christmas of 1970, and I was visiting a friend—in fact a girlfriend—in Florissant, the other town with which Ferguson shared its high school. Ferguson and Florissant were then, at […]...
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The Blame Game: Elite Colleges and Students’ Double Lives
It’s been a tough summer for “elite” colleges—those eight or ten or twelve schools whose names everyone knows and about which everyone has an opinion. I suppose these schools should be pleased that their brands, or at least the collective “Ivy League” brand shared by eight of […]...
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The Original Disruptor: A Cautionary Reflection on DEAD POETS SOCIETY
The tragic death of Robin Williams has moved us all, no matter what our special memories of his oeuvre might be: Mork, Adrian Cronauer, Peter Pan, or even John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt in one of my favorite films, To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar. For […]...
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Twitter as the New Sampler, and Reflections on Tweets of Wisdom
In some ways my summer Twitter feed is an extension of the visits to historic sites that my antiquarian family (first with my parents, later with my children) has been making all of my life. On some wall of every Colonial or 19th-century or early 20th-century house […]...
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Strategic Thinking and—School Therapy?
Over the past few years I have found myself moving in circles that involve school advancement as much as the teaching-and-learning side of the house. Here I have been made privy to both the anxieties of independent school leaders on matters like enrollment and fiscal sustainability and […]...
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A Letter to New Teachers
Note: This post originally appeared here in July of 2011. It has proved to be both popular and durable, and as the 2014-15 2015-16 school year approaches, it seems appropriate to re-post it—PG If it hasn’t already, within a very few weeks school will be starting, and […]...
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Paying It Forward: Further Thoughts on Why We (or at least some of us may) Teach
In my last post I suggested that a powerful motivation for some teachers seems to have been a desire to “correct” the teaching that they themselves experienced. I probably implied, without meaning to, that this is a sole impetus for those “restitutional” teachers, as if they were […]...
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Restitutional Teaching: Another Thought On Why We (or at least some of us may) Teach
I have had some wonderful teachers in my life—a solid bunch in my public elementary school and another group in my independent junior high–high school. They shaped and influenced my life in ways I wish I could still tell them about; I’ve managed to get to the […]...
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Failure Studies
We’ve been reading quite a lot about failure lately, and clichés and nostrums aimed at getting teachers to embrace failure and to encourage students to do the same trip up and down my Twitter stream at the same rate similar exhortations to embrace “excellence” might have done […]...
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My Father’s School—for Me
For a long time after my father died two and a half years ago, I would occasionally have dreams in which he was present in the world of the dream but not present in my direct experience in the dream. He was there, but not right there. […]...
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Being Who You Are
A recurring moment in my life as an overnight camp administrator for many summers was when older campers and staff—many time “lifers” who had been campers and moved on—declared in some comfortable setting that “camp is the only place I can really be myself.” I never actually […]...
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Celebrating Transitions and Interested Children
Year’s-end is upon us, and there are so many things to think about. I’m reblogging this from The Interested Child, which I write mainly for parents but whose content generally falls within the realm of education. (You might also check out this Interested Child post on “summer […]...
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It’s Been a Week for Questions
As I try to sift out the experience of a week, sometimes I reach a point of desperation that comes out in the form of questions. Some recent ones: The post-Santa Barbara conversation over misogyny in the “nerd” community has gone in some interesting directions. But I […]...
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Retreat for Academic Leaders, October 2014
Readers may be interested in this upcoming event; I hope to meet some of you there: The Independent Curriculum Group, a consortium of schools sharing a commitment to school-based, mission-driven, teacher-created curriculum and assessment, is excited to invite members of your school community to our inaugural INTERNATIONAL […]...
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Thoughts on Independent Schools’ Responsibilities
From time to time I post thoughts on issues of national policy to my blog at Education Week, which is called Independent Schools, Common Perspectives. In the interest of bringing this content to the attention of Not Your Father’s School readers, I just wanted to let you […]...
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Data Are People, Too
We keep hearing about data, and how data analysis is going to help education chart its own course toward salvation. I’ve been swimming in a sea of data lately, trying to make out some landmarks. When the accrediting process for independent schools added a kind of data […]...
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Girls and Maker Culture: Nothing New
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of experiencing Poughkeepsie Day School’s admirable “From STEM to STEAM and Beyond” conference, including an outstanding “un”-keynote by Pam Moran and Alison Dwier-Selden and some terrific sessions on STEAM education and “Maker” culture in schools. As I bade farewell to […]...
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The Narrative We Need for Strategic Change
Yesterday I found myself in a discussion with a head of school who was decrying the ways in which—in his opinion—the tradition of teacher autonomy has limited the development of new and improved practice in independent schools. Taking the long view, I have to say that I […]...
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“Grand Unifying Theory” reblogged at ASCD Whole Child Blog
I am delighted to let readers know that the previous post here, “A Whole-Child Education for Every Child: The Grand Unifying Theory of Education,” has been reblogged by ASCD at its Whole Child Blog. For those who support the idea of whole-child education and who believe that […]...
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A Whole-Child Education for Every Child: The Grand Unifying Theory of Education
I am not a huge fan of posts that start with a number and proceed to a command: “83 Things You Must Do To Be The Teacher You Want to Be”; “Thirteen C’s Your School Can’t Survive Without.” In general I find these overwhelming, dispiriting, and ultimately […]...
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Is the New SAT Worth Cheering About?
I want to believe that there are reasons to cheer on the new SAT as much as the next person, but I keep coming up with more questions than reasons to stand on my school roof and dance. I know that David Coleman, in all sincerity, sees […]...
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Whatever Our Passions, There Is a Time to Be Still and Listen
Every now and then I am overcome by guilt over my own role in this echo chamber of the blogosphere. I’m as guilty as the next guy of (un?-)helpfully providing lists of “11 Things Your School Has to Be Thinking About”; it’s a bit about arrogance (I’ll […]...
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Umbridging: Outsourcing and the Threat to the Heart of Schools
The other day I wrote here about outsourcing, the tendency in schools these days to hand over responsibility for a myriad of institutional tasks to third-party vendors whose efficiencies and expertise ostensibly make it easier, and maybe cheaper, for schools to let someone else do it. In […]...
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On Outsourcing: Lunch, the New SAT, and Why We Need Independent Curriculum
When I was a child at my father’s school, the barber, the dry-cleaner, and the linen truck were the primary outside service providers. I remember the happy day Pop inked the contract with a food service company, in one gesture removing his most vexatious operational burden. Pretty […]...
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Partnership, Community-Style: Schools in Their Proper Place
Sometimes at conferences I find my mind wandering, heading off into little neural riffs and speculations triggered by something I’m listening to. Since there’s probably not going to be a quiz on the presentation, I guess this is allowed. Quite possibly this should be the point of […]...
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Why Twitter Beats February
It’s February, in case you hadn’t noticed. The weather, mercifully not snowing in Boston, at least, remains bleak and gray, the skies matching the snowbanks along the streets and sidewalks. Some vast percentage of the Lower 48 has experienced extremes of weather in the past month or […]...
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Complementarity, Not Competition: A Birthday Wish
The school vaguely alluded to in the name of this blog was indeed my father’s school, and before that it was his father’s school. Today my father would have been 90, an age that I suspect he is happy never to have attained, as his final mid-80s […]...
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Getting Something Out of Snow Days (and not the way you think)
The phone rang at 5:22 this morning, and she would have slept through it. But I answered and handed it to my spouse so that she could receive the news that she could go back to sleep. School was closed. This has been a common scenario this […]...
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In Which I Confess to Lacking Grit, Apparently, and Blame It on Family
The most exciting place I knew growing up was the “everyday” living room of my grandparents’ house. It was just across the street, so I could go there whenever I wanted. The room also served as the main reading room of the “library” that was their house, […]...
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Looking Inward, Looking Outward: Good for Us All
A large part of my life these days is a kind of distillation of what it has been for a while: advancing the work of independent schools. I’ve got threads going relating to curriculum and assessment, data development, professional development, even marketing. It’s all pretty fun, and […]...
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Ambassadors All: A Proposal
I posted this message yesterday (January 8) in several of the National Association of Independent Schools online communities. Since these are for members only, I was encouraged to find a more public forum. So here is the message, as posted: Over the past year or so I […]...
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EdCamps and the Dialogue We Need
This afternoon I spent several very happy hours exploring yet another confluence of really interesting and powerful notions, the UnConference and the Google Hangout. The place: EdCamp HOME 2.0. I just want to put it out there that one of the more educational aspects of EdCamp Home […]...
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Teamwork and Grace
I found myself in an interesting conversation yesterday with a coeval—in fact, a high school classmate. We were watching a hockey game involving our distant alma mater, the unlikeliest of fans and the unlikeliest of alumni lettermen in this sport—I the one-time manager and he the statistician. […]...
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Holiday Greetings: Family Style!
Lamarck may have had it wrong—critters don’t evolve on demand—but I’m always amazed at the speed with which certain things can become so ingrained in our consciousness as to constitute a kind of species memory. Vast tracts of my brain are devoted to old advertising slogans, songs […]...
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Profit and Profiteering in Education
Lately I was gently (and privately) chided for expressing skepticism about the role of business enterprises—the people who sell us our computers, our textbooks, our desks, our apps, our standardized tests, our paper towels, and our trays of ravioli—in schools. Can’t live without ’em. Gotta have ’em. […]...
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Reflections on Standards, Grades, and Excuses
These are strange times for educational standards. First, there’s political polarization around the Common Core has everyone a swivet: Are they evil imposed from above, a federalist plot to undermine local control of schools? Or are they a Trojan horse for more testing and yet further reductions […]...
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A New Conference Experience: The Association of Boarding Schools
I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from my first experience at The Association of Boarding Schools annual conference, but, as good events do, #TABS13 (as the hashtag goes) left me with plenty to think about and a sense that some of the things I’ve been yammering […]...
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School Thanksgivings, Past and Present
Back when my father’s school was still really my father’s, and even my grandfather’s school, Thanksgiving meant something a little different for me than for most kids. Like many boarding schools, the school remained in session during what is now the ubiquitous “Thanksgiving break.” Instead of scampering […]...
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Mission and Admission–Some Reflections
Last week I and my friend Tiffany Hendryx of Crane MetaMarketing presented a webinar for the Association of Independent School Admission Professionals called “Selling Mission: Aspirational Statements as Selling Points.” Our mission, if you will, was to remind admission officers that their schools’ mission statements, mottos, taglines, […]...
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Thinking Retention: Beliefs and Dreams
It’s the time of year when schools are thinking extra hard about next year’s enrollment numbers, which means it can also be the time of year when some families are thinking about making a move. Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak with a faculty about retention […]...
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AISAP Webinars Coming Up, ASAP!
Readers may think that I’m something of a nut on mission statements and other aspirational declarations made by schools. I think these matter a great deal, and that schools that understand their own missions and use them to power policy and program development. Aligning what a school […]...
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Tradition! Remember, remember…
At some point when I was off at college, my father had an idea: Since his school was at that point pretty close to half Canadian, perhaps adding some sort of Canada-friendly event to the year would be good. Since many students already (mostly) went home for […]...
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Where Do Teachers Do Their Best Work?
Here’s a challenge: Ask your faculty, “Where, in all your efforts here, do you do your best, most important work?” If your school is truly mission-driven and values-based, and if you provide your students with anything more than a daily sequence of academic instruction, you’re likely to […]...
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When “Ship, Then Test” Fails
“It isn’t rocket science” seems to be a timeless trope, suitable for every occasion and at certain moments hilariously funny when the task actually IS rocket science. So far I haven’t heard it rolled out for the Healthcare.gov fiasco* or for the rolling catastrophe nearest and dearest […]...
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Back at the Old Stand!
We took a month or so at a new address, embedded in my personal business website, but I’m happy to say that Not Your Father’s School has been liberated to return to its old URL (actually two old URLs, as www.notyourfathersschool.org and http://notyourfathersschool.blogspot.com/ both bring you here) […]...
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Back Here Soon—Please Stay Tuned!
Just another quick update. If you’re a follower you see that the hosting for Not Your Father’s School has changed to my personal business website. I don’t plan to use the blog to push my business, other than in the ways that speculation can lead to ideas […]...
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Personal Update, Flag Day, and Rushmore
The months of my blogging at Education Week go on; yesterday I posted my 52nd entry, which has me two-thirds of the way through the current plan. But I miss spending time here. One thing about blogging at someone else’s place is that there is a certain […]...
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FY, Pump Up the Volume! A Movie Reflection
I’m pretty consumed by my Education Week blogging these days, but I wanted to come back here to reflect on a film my kids, home from college on spring break, had us watch last Friday, our traditional pizza and movie night. It was good to be all together again, with […]...
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EXCITING CHANGES IN MY BLOGGING WORLD
It’s apparent that the pace of my blogging here has slowed down considerably in 2013. But there’s a reason for this, a reason that has me pretty excited. Starting tomorrow (February 15), I will be blogging at Education Week thrice weekly under the title, Independent Schools, Common Perspectives. […]...
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BANTER AND SCHOOL CULTURE
A friend, knowing I’m an old maritime fiction (Patrick O’Brian, Richard Woodman, and Alexander Fullerton are among my favorite authors) as well as an admirer for the leadership of Captain Picard in the Star Trek: The Next Generation series, recently pointed me to a really interesting post in […]...
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CHOPPING WOOD AND INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER
Lucky me! In a week I start a half-year sabbatical, my first since 1996 and a real privilege for which I will be eternally grateful to my school. On the other side, I’ll be coming back to a new position—as yet to be fully defined—that will allow […]...
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HOLIDAY WISHES
It’s been a long slog through autumn, but the solstice is past and the days are indeed growing longer again. Light is vanquishing darkness in our hemisphere. There’s still a lot of darkness around, but I feel quite certain that regular readers of this blog are determined […]...
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ARMED GUARDIANS
While I may not have much to add to the chorus of scorn rightfully being heaped on the National Rifle Association’s shockingly inappropriate “armed security at every school” idea, I do have a couple of observations, one based on experience, the other common sense. I was raised […]...
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MY COUSINS’ SCHOOL
My cousins’ school in western Connecticut is in the news. The younger generation has grown and moved on, but their mother—a teacher and counselor, author of a book on grief—lives in town, a few blocks from the school. I haven’t heard from any of them, but their […]...
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“WE TEACH”—THE ELUSIVE LANGUAGE OF CHARACTER EDUCATION
While I was in the middle of thinking about my Six C’s for Learning, a hot conversation was taking place in one of the online college counseling communities about the ways in which schools report—or choose not to report—disciplinary infractions to colleges. At least one school stated that […]...
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MY SIX C’s FOR 21st-CENTURY LEARNING (OR FOR ALL TIME?)
At some point in the past couple of years we turned a corner into strange territory where secondary schools, apparently even “college prep” secondary schools, need to devote themselves to producing skilled workers for the 21st-century labor force. Luckily, we have been given multiple lists of these […]...
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BEST CLASS EVER; EVER AGAIN?
I recently ran across Australian educator and blogger Andrew Douch’s account of the “best school [he’s] ever seen.” North Beaches Christian School in Terrey Hills, near Sydney, sounds idyllic, right down to the acoustically clever ceilings that keep noise levels down. I’d like to see this place. […]...
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‘TIS THE SEASON–for Schedule Committees!
Ah, the season has rolled around again. The fall of 2012, with its too-early Thanksgiving and string of less-than-five-day weeks owing to some holidays and, in our neck of the woods, the weather, is drawing to a close, and people are thinking how miserable their schools’ schedules […]...
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INTERLUDE—Further Reflections on Sport and Education
I’ve written here on a couple of other occasions about the culture of sports and athletics that has arisen, nourished (or malnourished) by the sports culture that permeates so much of North American society: stressed or at least occasionally oppressed kids, some bizarro moral warpiture around institutional […]...
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PLAYING IT FORWARD—INNOVATION AND ITS AUDIENCES (Part 3 of 3)
The challenge for the school embarking on innovative practice is to communicate clearly and concisely what it is they are doing that sets them—and that will set their students—apart from the crowd. In the first part of this series, back in early September when summer’s glow was […]...
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373 CRITICAL INNOVATIONS THAT NO COMPETENT TEACHER CAN AFFORD TO IGNORE—INNOVATION AND ITS AUDIENCES (Part 2 of 3)
Does the first part of this headline sound familiar? How many similar headlines have you read, or had tweeted to you? I see about a dozen a day, sometimes bouncing around my PLNosphere like an asteroid field. I admit that sometimes I bite—usually when the number is […]...
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WHAT’S WRONG WITH A LITTLE BOREDOM?
A while back I heard an interview with British rocker and cheesemaker(!) Alex James, late of the band The Blur (with which I am utterly unfamiliar, being a high culture man*). At one point in a discussion about cars, the host asked what kind of car Alex […]...
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LOOKS LIKE SCHOOL: INNOVATION AND ITS AUDIENCES (PART 1 of 3)
I had a personal revelation—I’ll get to it in a bit—the other day as I was trying to explain to someone my day job as a college counselor. Few positions in a school seem to be quite as clear in the purpose as college guidance, and to […]...
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LET THE DIALOGUE BEGIN: ANOTHER TAKE ON OUR PUBLIC PURPOSE
Briefly: For a while it has been on my mind that independent schools here and there are up to some pretty exciting things and that for various reasons this information tends to remain within our sector of the education world. Earlier this summer I put pen to […]...
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TAKING NOTES IN A DIGITAL AGE–SOMETHING FOR THE INTENTIONAL TEACHER TO
THINK ABOUT
The other day I heard a teacher wonder whether it was okay to ask students in a digital classroom—that is, a classroom in which every kid is packing a laptop—to keep notes in a paper notebook. That’s a heck of a good question, getting at the heart […]...
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NEW FACULTY ORIENTATION: ALWAYS TOO MUCH, NEVER ENOUGH
We’re halfway through our week-long new teacher program at my school, and it’s going well. They have their laptops and have had a whole lot of training on the way we utilize the Google suite of applications, they’ve had a thorough, stop-and-meet-the-office-folks tour of the school, and […]...
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UNCLE WIGGLY IN CONNECTIVISM: THE MOOC MOOC ENDS
The scene from The Wizard of Oz my subconscious most often references is when Dorothy & Co. awake as snow falls to counteract the effects of the Wicked Witch’s poisonous poppies. Like the travelers, I hear little voices singing, “You’re out of the woods, you’re out of […]...
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PREPARING K-12 STUDENTS FOR CONNECTIVIST LEARNING: SOME INITIALQUESTIONS
As part of today’s “homework” I’m opening this up to fellow participants in Hybrid Pedagogy‘s stimulating MOOC MOOC, hoping to capture some thoughts on the today’s MOOC MOOC “Questions at Hand,” from Jesse Stommel: How does the rise of hybrid pedagogy, open education, and massive open online […]...
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AN EDUCATION IN MESSINESS
When I was a kid at Southside Elementary School, my parents used to receive an extremely detailed report card—I’m guessing 20-plus categories in which I could be Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory, and a couple of other letters (I for Improving? Dunno). Southside was innovative(!) in a number of ways, […]...
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TEACHERS AND THE MORAL CONTRACT—THOUGHTS FOR TEACHERS NEW AND VETERAN
Last year I posted here “A Letter to New Teachers,” which I was pleased to learn seems to have been passed around and possibly to have done a bit of good in spots. It’s rather unlikely that a new teacher, or at least a teacher new to […]...
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A NEW AGE OF THE AUTODIDACT—AND WHY WE’RE LUCKY TO LIVE IN IT
One of the more entertaining bits of cognitive dissonance I have experienced this summer includes the disparate “ideas of the university”—and of learning platforms in general—that emerge, implicitly and explicitly, from my simultaneous indulgence in Christensen and Eyring’s The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education […]...
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A LETTER TO EXPERIENCED TEACHERS, 2012
Last year about this time I posted “A Letter to New Teachers.” I’m planning to update that soon, but I didn’t want to neglect those of us who have been at it for a while. So here goes: Dear Experienced Teacher: We know it’s important to pay […]...
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COLLEGE ACCREDITATION MAKES THE NEWS–and why this matters to schools
In the last week or so there has been some startling and potentially tragic news on the accreditation front at the university level. No fewer than three institutions, with nearly 100,000 students, have been notified that they are at immediate risk of losing their accreditation. The public […]...
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“SHOVING”: THE STUDENTS ARE STILL WATCHING—Part III of Three
(Informed consent: This is not a post about school bullying.) One of the later chapters in Ted and Nancy Sizer’s compelling 1999 The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract is called, and is about, “Shoving.” While, yes, the authors do discuss the term in the […]...
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“GRAPPLING”: THE STUDENTS ARE STILL WATCHING—Part II of Three
Since the economy started sputtering four years ago I have noted a particularly interesting trend. With businesses shedding jobs, prospects for college graduates looking generally dimmer than a decade ago, and a housing bubble largely inflated by the banking system pretty clearly at the bottom of our […]...
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THE STUDENTS ARE STILL WATCHING—Part I of Three
If there is a consistent subtext to much of my thinking here, it is that amid all the fervor of change and development taking place in independent schools, we as educators must never lose sight to the human, personal scale on which our every action is taken […]...
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INDEPENDENCE DAY, INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS, AND ME
Having just passed one of the more enjoyable Fourth of Julys in recent memory, with 360-degree fireworks—and I am a sucker for fireworks—and some fine reunions with summer neighbors, I got to thinking what it is that makes this holiday so special for me. Sure, there are […]...
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THE NEW NORMS? (or, Look Outward, Angel)
I have lately spent quite a lot of time delving into the world of specialized programming, what we might once have called “centers of excellence,” in independent schools. I’ve simultaneously been working my way through Kevin Kelly’s amazing What Technology Wants?, which contains among its opening chapters […]...
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It’s New, It’s Exciting—but Keep Expectations Proportional to Expertise
I spent some really hot days in the middle of the past week in Baltimore, Charm City, home to a number of independent schools and (apparently) a whole lot of cooks specializing in crab in various forms—and in making diners very, very happy. It was also the […]...
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From Idea to Initiative: It’s About Looking Hard, Not Just Looking Good
It’s been way too long since I last posted. A year has ended, my last kid has graduated from our school, and I have finished up an exciting project that NAIS should be rolling out at some point soon. Better still from my point of view, I […]...
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MAKING THE PART INTO THE WHOLE—Schools and Synecdoches
In the competitive marketplace of schools—where independent schools, religious schools, and a panoply of charter schools compete with traditional public schools for the attention of savvy parents—any point of differentiation can be a critical element of brand. Maintaining a strong, positive brand presence is especially important for […]...
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A Thank-You and a Cheer for My Readers
At some point in the last week Not Your Father’s School passed two milestones: the total number of page views passed the 30,000 mark and the number of visits as recorded by the little “Who’s Reading?” widget moved beyond 10,000 since I added it last summer. I […]...
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Entering the College Lists
Well, Thursday at 5:00pm EDT has come and gone. “Ivy Day,” as it was termed for me by a student at Yale—where the current students eagerly await the news, partly because they love to woo accepted students and perhaps in part because they too watch as admission […]...
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College Admissions–Agony, Ecstasy, Reality
In real life I’m a college counselor at an independent school, and if your school has a secondary division—that is, if there are seniors in your school—you know that this week is emotionally pretty intense. As I write this a bit more than half the news is […]...
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Real-World Issues and Our Lives as Educators
Educators and the gurus who egg us on make a lot of noise these days about making curriculum and pedagogy relevant to “real world issues.” Most effective teachers have figured out that real-world connections are a pretty powerful glue for making learning stick, and of course the […]...
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Sometimes I Have to Blog to Keep from Crying
Sometimes, to me at least, it feels as though the thinking I do about schools and education proceeds in a parallel universe relative to the real world issues relating to kids and schools—and not just the independent school universe—that catch my attention and often enough distract and […]...
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Rating Our Teachers
“Teacher quality” is approaching the status of one of my least favorite phrases. I’m all for effective teaching, teaching that reaches every student in a classroom—teaching that inspires as well as educates in some defined skill or content area. Great teaching, we know, teaches students lessons about […]...
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Now, About Those Men in Their Gray Flannel Suits…
Well, my 2012 NAIS Annual Conference is over, and I’ve come to a few conclusions. I’ve had Bill Gates tell me that technology is changing schools, and that in 10 years schools and education will change in ways we can’t imagine. I’ve heard some memorable one-liners, tweeted […]...
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Assessing assessment
This afternoon I attended the annual meeting of the Independent Curriculum Group, and for a pretty mellow group of educators we got ourselves kind of stirred up, in a good way. As an organization we aim to get schools talking about curriculum, and about why it’s a […]...
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Looking At Student Work–A Fine Idea for Our Time
In the past couple of weeks I’ve had occasion to participate in a couple of Looking At Student Work exercises, and it’s been a treat. Based on protocols developed at Project Zero and elsewhere in the 1990s, these exercises today—amid all the cries (including those heard here) […]...
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Schools, Sports, and Character
Mens sana in corpore sano – muscular Christianity – “There is no ‘I’ in team” These and other verbal pieties have a long history in independent schools, words and phrases that justify and exalt the ideal of sport as a crucible of character. That’s as may be, […]...
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Reality Check: Schools Can’t Always Do Everything We Tell Them To
A few years back, in the summer after the 2008 Crash, I wrote a Financially Sustainable Schools advisory for the National Association of Independent Schools titled “Alive and Well: What It Takes to Thrive in Hard Times,” reviewing some survival strategies practiced by schools that had been […]...
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Buzzwords, Beehives, and School Leadership
Global – Interdisciplinary – Green – Technology-mediated – Multicultural – Design-thinkingWhat do these have in common? They’re all buzzwords that have been hovering and swooping around independent schools like a persistent swarm of bees for the past couple of decades. Some are older, comfortably familiar, while others […]...
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The Last Post for My Father
We’ve become accustomed to the moving spectacle of funerals of firefighters and police officers, where comrades from many jurisdictions show the colors, ride in formation, and remind us by their solidarity of the perilous and valuable work they do. Since September 11 of 2001 those events are […]...
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In Memoriam–David W. Gow
My father’s school is a bit subdued today, as the former head, my father, died this morning. It’s a lovely, green campus, with some imposing brick edifices and a couple of the original converted farm buildings that still do good service. Despite its location in prime Snow […]...
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What Our Schools Must Be: Behind the Manifesto
Other than being a kind of sideways tribute to my heritage, then, what is Not Your Father’s School supposed to accomplish? And where does this self-styled “Manifesto” come from, and where do I think it should take us? Since I was a kid reading the Rover Boys […]...
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A Not Your Father’s School Manifesto
Previously I have told the story of how I came to be here, and perhaps at a later date I will write more on this, but since I have stated that Not Your Father’s School is “a kind of idealized place,” I think I am obligated to […]...
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School–It’s a Family Thing for Me
I’m feeling a bit staggered by the last month, having taken on far too many tasks, and family events have me thinking it’s time to tell a story that might also involve coming clean about the title of this blog. You see, there was, and in fact […]...
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Don’t Let "Innovative" Become the New "Excellent"–please!
It seems I can hardly get through a day lately without doing being innovative. Just this morning I tried putting the handle of the pan on the left instead of the right when I was boiling water for tea, and in a related discovery a few days […]...
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The Age of Digital Liberation! (But, oh, there’s this thing…)
“Read the directions to yourself as I read them aloud.” “Open your test booklets to Section Three, read the directions, and begin work.” In my day job I am a college counselor, but what I am increasingly finding is that what I do for a living is […]...
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Things You MUST Think About: Being Green
This is the final gloss on the 11 THINGS INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS MUST BE THINKING ABOUT featured in an earlier post. (I recap the entire list below the body of this post.) #11. Being Green Most schools have gotten this message and are beginning to live it. But […]...
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Things You MUST Think About: Shortening Your Horizon on StrategicThinking
This is the tenth (and penultimate) in a promised gloss on each of the 11 THINGS INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS MUST BE THINKING ABOUT featured in an earlier post. (I recap the entire list below the body of this post.) #10. Shortening your horizon on strategic thinking In the […]...
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Things You MUST Think About: Strategic Professional Learning
This is the ninth in a promised gloss on each of the 11 THINGS INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS MUST BE THINKING ABOUT featured in an earlier post. (I recap the entire list below the body of this post.) #9. Strategic professional development learning If you are planning to move […]...
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Things You MUST Think About: Online Learning
This is the eighth in a promised gloss on each of the 11 THINGS INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS MUST BE THINKING ABOUT featured in an earlier post. (I recap the entire list below the body of this post.) #8. Online learning You don’t have to be creating your own […]...
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Things You MUST Think About: New Directions for Your Library
This is the seventh in a promised gloss on each of the 11 THINGS INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS MUST BE THINKING ABOUT featured in an earlier post. (I recap the entire list below the body of this post.) #7. New directions for your library I don’t think physical books […]...
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Things You MUST Think About: Social Media—in the Classroom
This is the sixth in a promised gloss on each of the 11 THINGS INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS MUST BE THINKING ABOUT featured in an earlier post. (I recap the entire list below the body of this post.) #6. Social media—in the classroom If you are still blocking such […]...
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Things You MUST Think About: Social Media—for Advancement
This is the fifth in a promised gloss on each of the 11 THINGS INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS MUST BE THINKING ABOUT featured in an earlier post. (I recap the entire list below the body of this post.) #5. Social media—for advancement You may disapprove of Twitter, or as […]...
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Things You MUST Think About: Smart Assessment of Student Learning
This is the fourth in a promised gloss on each of the 11 THINGS INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS MUST BE THINKING ABOUT featured in my previous post. (I recap the entire list below the body of this post.) #4. Smart assessment of student learning Each student is different, and […]...
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Things You MUST Think About: Collaborative Learning and (related issue)
Project Design
This is the third in a promised gloss on each of the 11 THINGS INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS MUST BE THINKING ABOUT featured in my previous post. (I recap the entire list below the body of this post.) #3. Collaborative learning and (related issue) project design Kids work in […]...
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Things You MUST Think About: Data-Informed Decision-Making
This is the second in a promised gloss on each of the 11 THINGS INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS MUST BE THINKING ABOUT featured in my previous post. (I recap the entire list below the body of this post.) #2. Data-informed decision-making It’s something schools will all have to do, […]...
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Things You MUST Think About: Design-Thinking
This is the first in a promised gloss on each of the 11 THINGS INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS MUST BE THINKING ABOUT featured in my previous post. (I recap the entire list below the body of this post.) #1. Design Thinking. What-ing? Creativity. People keep talking about this, but […]...
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11 Things Independent Schools MUST Be Thinking About
I keep yammering away in favor of innovation, mission-driven strategic development, and a bunch of other things, all in the interest of urging schools to pull up their socks and get ready for the new times that are upon us. It’s time, then, to be specific. Here, […]...
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Be True to Your School
I guess it should be easy to create the perfect school. All you need is a great team of set designers and builders, and a call to central casting. Better toss in a hefty line of credit at Brooks Brothers and L.L. Bean. Because lots of people […]...
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Kids, Curiosity, and Credentials—Part II (Alternatives)
I ended my previous post by asking how we can truly engage all students. This isn’t a new question, nor is the obvious answer—find their interests, and nourish them—anything new. Ninety years ago Eugene Randolph Smith, founder of my school and a leading figure in the Progressive […]...
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Kids, Curiosity, and Credentials (the fifth C?)–Part I: The Challenge
One of the challenges of 21st-century education is that educators have failed to put together a set of standardized assessments that assess all of the kinds of things that we believe are essential to success as a learner in our time. The “Four C’s”—creativity, critical thinking, communication, […]...
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Sir Ken Robinson, TEDxLondon, and the Independent School Response
Back in 2008 Sir Ken Robinson was a featured speaker at the National Association of Independent Schools Annual Conference (when the hashtag #NAISAC08 wasn’t even a glimmer in some tweeter’s eye). He got a huge round of applause, and he generated buzz that lasted for hours, at […]...
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Your Father’s (and Grandparents’) Teachers—A Measured Appreciation
I’ve preached hard on the need for schools to embrace change and innovation as they adapt their work to the requirements of a new age and new markets. The schools of tomorrow can’t be like the schools of yesterday or even today, not in the way they […]...
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News! "WHAT IS A SCHOOL?" released as an e-book
Last winter I began this blog with a series of posts under the heading “What Is A School?” I am excited to announce that the series is now available—updated and with an introduction—as a e-book. Subtitled, “A Philosophical and Practical Guide for Independent School Leaders, Trustees, and […]...
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Standards for Effective Teaching—Got Some?
511 followers. 82 views. 1 response. This was the outcome of a Twtpoll I posted (on Twitter, naturally) a couple of weeks back. I had been chatting with a colleague at another school on the topic of standards for effective teaching, and it occurred to me to […]...
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The Independent School Value Proposition
As the economy stalls and some schools look at empty desks, there is quite a lot of talk about the “value proposition” of independent schools. This is simply the bottom line in the calculation based on the question: Is sending my kid to this independent school worth […]...
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Change: Why Independent Schools Must Be FOR It!
The 1932 Marx Brothers farce Horse Feathers opens with a presidential installation involving the gown-clad faculty and the more casually attired student body of Huxley College (whose rival, incidentally, is Darwin). The new president is inexplicably Groucho, holding nothing back just because his character wears a doctoral […]...
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When Are We?
For some of us it’s an itch, for others a royal pain, and for others a non-issue: Should we be talking about “21st-century skills” when we’re already a tenth of the way into the century? As we talk about the future of education, doesn’t using the term […]...
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Independent School Value: A 50-Year Perspective
Opening day chapel, and the distinguished-looking man at the pulpit wasn’t the Headmaster, and he wasn’t anyone else known to ninth-grade me. Tanned, with silver hair and a dark suit, he had to be important. “Your parents are spending nine dollars a day on your education here. […]...
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The Year of the School As Think Tank?
Educators are feeling about like everyone else after the economic paroxysms of the past week. Five weeks after the annual fund has been put to bed (and the ones I know about seem to have come through okay) and just a couple of weeks before the curtain […]...
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…AND SOME REMINDERS TO SCHOOLS ABOUT THEIR “NEW” TEACHERS
I’ve offered up a pep talk to new teachers, but the experience of each new hire is as much a responsibility of the school as it is of the teacher. Assuming that the school handled its recruiting and hiring process well, the odds are already well in […]...
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A Letter to New Teachers
In a very few weeks school will be starting, and you will be starting a wonderful new career. You are probably excited, and probably scared. A dozen large questions loom in your consciousness, trading places with one another in the Anxiety Gavotte that troubles the dreams (and […]...
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An Excellent Idea, from Fred Bartels
For those of you who are not members of the ISED-L listserv for independent school folks (mostly), this morning the estimable Fred Bartels set forth a pretty convincing case as to why independent schools and their faculties could and even should become the go-to source for digital […]...
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A Larger Public Purpose?
It’s the hot news story of the week, that quite a few of the reformers out to fix public education have themselves been educated in independent schools: “In Public School Efforts, a Common Background: Private Education.” At least the political–or is it ideological?–spectrum is covered. From Obama […]...
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It’s been a very long time
…but it’s not that I haven’t been thinking about schools and how they could be. A couple of weeks ago I had occasion to present at a large and well-known boarding school, an experience that was delightful and fascinating and that made me ponder the role of […]...
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A school is… (Verse 14: The Finale)
A school must always be a set of undiscovered possibilities in the realm of the human spirit and a community devoted to their exploration and realization. We’ve come to the end of the exercise here, perhaps fittingly as I watch the Rhode Island shoreline rush by en […]...
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A school is… (Verse 13)
A school is a laboratory for the human experience in the context of a distinct, intentional, and internally consistent mission and set of values. I’ve probably worked over the concepts of mission, values, and intentionality to the point of saturation, but it has occurred to me—especially during […]...
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A school is… (Verse 12)
A school is a place whose environments must practically and aesthetically serve students and staff. When I was a kid I wanted to be an architect, but the profession fortunately dodged that bullet. It’s more than just as well, because every year the whole idea of designing […]...
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A School is… (Verse 11)
A school is a legal and corporate entity whose structure, operations, and management must conform to legal and ethical standards of multiple jurisdictions. More nuts and bolts, but strangely the requirements that these jurisdictions place upon schools will necessarily have more than a small effect upon their […]...
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A school is… (Verse 10)
A school is an economic entity whose operations must be prudent and ethical. Okay, this should be short and sweet. It’s about governance and money. Historically governing bodies have a simple role—to determine the course the school is to take (i.e., “set the mission”) and then make […]...
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A school is… (Verse 9)
A school is a community resource to the extent that it is willing to share. There’s a good deal of buzz these days (even here) about payments and services in lieu of taxes (the infamous PILOTs and SILOTs), charges and demands for services that communities are attempting […]...
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A school is… (Verse 8)
A school is a workplace whose product is personal experience and growth. Widget factories make widgets, and insurance companies sell and service policies. While the business wisdom of the moment would focus on the “people” aspect of these enterprises, in point of fact you can hold their […]...
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What is a school? Intermission
With seven “verses” down and seven more to go, this seems like a good time to stop and reflect on where I’ve been so far in the current project. I’ve had a couple of revelations and probably should have had a few more getting to this point, […]...
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A school is… (Verse 7)
A school is a set of intentional and unintentional learning experiences for students. We have come almost half way through this exercise before getting around to academics, you might say. But I am not even thinking specifically about academic learnoing here, although I am thinking very much […]...
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A school is… (Verse 7)
A school is a set of intentional and unintentional learning experiences for students. We have come almost half way through this exercise before getting around to academics, you might say. But I am not even thinking specifically about academic learnoing here, although I am thinking very much […]...
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A school is… (Verse 6)
A school is the incarnation of ideals to which some people will want to dedicate themselves and their resources. I’ve already written at length on these ideals and their importance, but not to be underestimated is the degree to which some people will want to dedicate their […]...
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A school is… (Verse 6)
A school is the incarnation of ideals to which some people will want to dedicate themselves and their resources. I’ve already written at length on these ideals and their importance, but not to be underestimated is the degree to which some people will want to dedicate their […]...
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A school is… (Verse 5)
A school is a key locus for social interaction—among students, parents, alums, staff. This almost seems to obvious to mention. Whether the school is day or boarding, in some ways it is a society unto itself. The school is the scene of a million little stories—dramas, romances, […]...
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A school is… (Verse 5)
A school is a key locus for social interaction—among students, parents, alums, staff. This almost seems to obvious to mention. Whether the school is day or boarding, in some ways it is a society unto itself. The school is the scene of a million little stories—dramas, romances, […]...
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A school is… (Verse 4)
A school is a social enterprise, with obligations to the society that supports it. (And I will admit freely to cribbing this line from the teaser from this article by Lawrence Bacow, Shamsh Kassim-Lakha, and Saran Kaur Gill in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 January 2011) […]...
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A school is… (Verse 4)
A school is a social enterprise, with obligations to the society that supports it. (And I will admit freely to cribbing this line from the teaser from this article by Lawrence Bacow, Shamsh Kassim-Lakha, and Saran Kaur Gill in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 January 2011) […]...
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A school is… (Verse 3)
A school is an aspiring utopia: an intentional community driven by ideals. As a community an independent school sets its own standards of behavior based on its own deep principles and values. Students and staff are subject to these standards, which may range from small things like […]...
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A school is… (Verse 3)
A school is an aspiring utopia: an intentional community driven by ideals. As a community an independent school sets its own standards of behavior based on its own deep principles and values. Students and staff are subject to these standards, which may range from small things like […]...
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A school is… (Verse 2)
A school’s name is shorthand for a set of shared experiences—lived, hoped for—deeply understood across generational and other boundaries. To those who have attended or who have been associated with any independent school, its very name will evoke that experience. To those who hope to be associated […]...
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A school is … (Verse 1)
A school is an idea representing an ideal or aspiration. On one level, this is like brand—a set of expectations built around experience—but on a deeper level, this is of course a combination of the ideas and beliefs behind the school’s founding and its current stated mission. […]...
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What is a school?
I’ve set myself a little exercise lately, to come up with very short lists of things that independent schools need to get over and that they need to be doing in order to insure their own sustainability. It’s fun to think about (especially if you sort of […]...
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What this is all about
The other night I watched the original 1947 Miracle on 34th Street, and it pushed me over an edge on which I have been teetering for a while. No, I did not give up my belief in Santa Claus, but one little phrase–a phrase I’ve heard again […]...
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