Peter Gow, Trying to Further Education and Educators

Archive for the NotYourFathersSchool Category

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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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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ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF TRADITIONAL LANDS

I here affirm that the offices from which I work are situated on lands that have a very long and continuing history as a locus of residence, livelihood, traditional expression, and exchange by the Massachusett, Wampanoag, Abenaki, Mohawk, Wabanaki, Hohokam, O’odam, Salt River Pima, and Maricopa people. The servers for this website are situated on Ute and Goshute land. We make this acknowledgment to remind ourselves, our educational partners, and our friends of our shared obligation to acknowledge and work toward righting the inequities and injustices that have alienated indigenous peoples from the full occupation and utilization of these spaces.