Archive for the NotYourFathersSchool Category

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]