Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

This past October, the College Board announced that they will be overhauling more of their AP courses to better emphasize college-level critical thinking . The work will involve looking at all of its 36+ courses in order to cover fewer topics and aim to address charges that the old courses prized rote memorization over imaginative thinking. The announcement comes out just as the College Board introduced a revised AP US History course that is more closely aligned to the Common Core that has been described by some as “un-American .” It would be unfair to bring the Common Core debate into the new AP US History test. The reality is, the test was overhauled for some of the same reasons that other courses will be overhauled – the College Board has come to recognize, almost too late, that it needs to better support instruction that leads to higher-order critical thinking and problem solving, college readiness skills that are essential for all students to develop while they are still i...

Mr. S tack writes occasionally for the national blog www.CompetencyWorks.org. Here is the latest article he submitted to that blog on the importance of leadership when making a major system change like competency education: I work for the Sanborn Regional School District in New Hampshire, a District that was an early adopter of a K-12 competency education model, one that is now in its fifth year of implementation. My fellow administrative team members and I regularly receive questions from educators around the country who are looking to implement a similar model in their schools. One of the most popular questions that we receive is, what kind of leadership is necessary from district and school-based administrators in order to effectively implement a competency education model? When I am asked this question, I am reminded of a passage in Dufour and Fullan’s (2013) book on sustaining reform known as Resolute Leadership : “Ultimately, the most important factor in sustaini...