Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

Mr. Stack writes occasionally for a national blog on competency education. Here is the latest article that he submitted to that blog: This past week, I had the pleasure of spending some time with school principals from Henry County, Georgia in an effort to help them get ready to start their own competency education and personalized learning journey. Henry County has committed to a redesign structure framed around five personalized learning tenets: Learner Profiles, Competency Based Learning, Project Based Learning, 21st Century Skills, and Technology Enabled Learning. Work is now underway in their schools to move their plan into action from just a few cohort schools to all of the schools in their county. As a high school principal from New Hampshire who underwent a similar school redesign just five years ago, I came to Georgia to offer these great principals some words of “wisdom” from a practical sense, using my own redesign journey as a guide. The experience for me pers...

Dear Sanborn Community, At the February 18, 2015 School Board meeting, Dr. Blake formally announced that a section of roof above the 8th grade wing has failed under the heavy weight of snow this past winter. The District will repair the roof, but the repair may take a couple of months. Until that time, SRMS 8th grade students would need to be relocated to SRHS. Mr. Stack, Mr. Rutherford, and their administrative teams developed a plan to relocate the 8th grade to the current World Language / Humanit ies classroom wing, rooms 101-111 on the first floor. High school teachers who currently occupy that classroom wing will be relocated to other classroom spaces in the building.  On Monday, March 2, all SRHS students will report to advisory at the beginning of the day to receive an updated copy of their schedule, which will contain any updated room numbers for classes that have moved. Other than some classroom changes, there will be no significant impact to high school ...

As I was walking down the hall the other day, I was struck by some recent student artwork that had been posted by one of our art teachers recently. I took a few pictures of them on my phone and quickly uploaded them to our Sanborn Regional High School Facebook page with a caption that read “check out some of the latest pieces of art by students in Ms. Ladd’s class!” I regularly post pictures and quick updates like this to our school’s Facebook several times a day. These updates, combined with posts of links to blog articles and our weekly newsletter help our families stay connected to our school community. Social Media, with sites like Twitter and Facebook specifically, have dramatically helped our school improve its public relations image with our community and provide our families with real-time communication on upcoming events and important issues. Our school might be a great example for what EdTech ’s Matt Renwick recently described in his article Is Facebook the New Sc...

This week, the web is trending with discussions on the Carnegie Unit, the century-old model used by both secondary and higher education systems to measure educational attainment by students in various courses. Also referred to as credit hours or student hours, the system has come under scrutiny by many in the educational community who believe that a major shortcoming with the model is its inability to link “seat time” with actual learning. Last month, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published a new study entitled The Carnegie Unit: A Century-Old Standard in a Changing Educational Landscape . Interestingly, the Foundation agreed that the time had come to redefine the credit hour. In its report, it opened by stating, “ The Carnegie Foundation is committed to making American education more effective, more equitable, and more efficient at this critical junction in the nation’s history. We share change advocates’ goals of bringing greater transparency and...