Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

Last night, our staff welcomed an auditorium filled with 8th grade students and their families, our future Class of 2019. Thank you to the teachers and the students who gave presentations on the Freshman Learning Community, and thank you to Assistant Principal Ann Hadwen for planning and facilitating the entire evening. If you were not able to attend the event, we did record a video of the presentation and we will be uploading it to our website once our Modern Media students can dig out from this storm and get back to school. Meanwhile, I wanted to share some initial thoughts and reflections with you from the evening. In my brief remarks to the audience, I reminded everyone that being a student at Sanborn Regional High school looks very different today from the traditional high school model that we as parents remember from 1980 or 1990-something.  I was hired five years ago as principal under the premise that our school needed to make some major changes - changes that would all...

Personalized learning has perhaps been one of the hottest trends in education, especially in the past two to three years. In an article earlier this school year, Education Week developed a good working definition for personalized learning . In it, they talked about the need for a system with a competency-based progression, one where each student’s progress toward clearly-defined learning targets is assessed on a regular basis. The system must include flexible learning environments that allow the system to adapt to the individual needs of each learner on an ongoing basis, one with personalized learning paths. It also talked about the need for such a system to maintain accurate individual learner profiles, ones for which students can view their strengths, needs, motivations, and goals. On New Year’s Day, the blog Personalize Learning: Transform Learning for All Learners challenged educators to make 2015 the year of the learner by posting an infographic on the 10 Trends to Per...

Dear Parents/Guardians of Sanborn Regional High School Students, Thank you for your continued support of our school, and most importantly, of your child’s education. Each year, we continue to work to improve our practices in the never-ending journey to help all of our students reach their potential. Our school district is becoming nationally recognized for the work we are doing with competencies. Simply put, we have developed clear expectations on what our students need to learn and we have developed methods to assess their learning and then respond with the appropriate instruction. Many other districts from across the country look to our District to see how we are making this work. It has been an exciting and remarkable journey over these past several years. To help us continue along our journey of becoming a premiere school, today I am asking for your help. Every year the fate of our budget depends on who takes the time to vote. Only a handful of high school parents usua...

Last month, my school hosted a regional conference for student councils from other neighboring high schools. The focus of the day was on compassion, and the importance of this character trait in the development of effective student leaders. At lunch I had an opportunity to speak with John Dube, one of the facilitators for the day. He and his group of volunteers came to our school that day representing Evan’s Gift: Sharing Compassion , an organization that pays homage to John’s late son Evan who was a true champion for kindness and compassion with everything he did. Evan believed that it wasn’t possible for one person to change the entire world by themselves, but if each person could just use kindness and compassion to change their small part of the world, they would inspire others to do that same and that would start a chain reaction that would lead us all to a better world. John was thankful that our schools had invited him to work with our students that day. He told me tha...