Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

It’s 8:00PM on a Sunday evening. Dinner is finished and the dishes have been put away. It’s time to get ready for another busy week at school. For many teachers, this is also a great time to engage in much-needed professional development with their peers. At this hour, social media sites like Twitter begin to light up with teachers from all over the world participating in all sorts of professional dialog on topics that are of interest to them. Welcome to the next generation of professional development for teachers. In a recent article, teacher and blogger Kristen Swanson writes about how Social Media Gives Professional Development a Long Tail . She goes on to explain that Facebook groups and Twitter chats like #edchat and #sbchat have gained popularity with teachers and school administrators all over the country and the world. The reason for this, she explains, is due to a low barrier for entry and tremendous potential for collaboration for teachers. The collaboration c

In the middle of a classroom wing at a bustling high school sits a large room full of books and computers just waiting to help students on their next research paper. There is a sign on the door that reads “Quiet Zone!” with a picture of a librarian with a raised finger on her lips. Nestled snugly between the stacks of non-fiction books, organized by an obsolete Dewey Decimal numbering system, the remnants of what used to be a card catalog and a microfiche reader sit idle, collecting dust. On the top shelf in the corner of the room rests a row of overhead projectors that are longer being checked out to classrooms. The room looks more like a museum featuring relics of the past and less like a twenty-first century student-centered classroom space. With the increased access to technology by teachers and students, the school is now contemplating whether or not it is time to close the library doors for good and find a better way to use the space that was once the information hub of th

Author's Note: On Friday, June 27, Mr. Stack was flown to San Diego to be a part of the Bainbridge Education Summit. There, he was asked to share his experience as a practitioner implementing a competency education model at Sanborn Regional High School. The following is a blog article that Mr. Stack wrote after his experience in San Diego for www.competencyworks.org , a national resource for school administrators on competency education.  At a summit hosted by the Bainbridge Consulting firm in San Diego last week, research fellow Thomas Arnett of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation talked about the power of disruptors in shaping our future world. Borrowing an example from the auto industry, Arnett talked about the rise to power of the Korean-born Kia Corporation. Introduced to the American market in the 1970’s, Kia cars quickly developed an undesirable reputation as being cheap and poorly fabricated.   Fast forward some twenty five years la