Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

This past month, movie enthusiasts rejoiced at the arrival of October 21, 2015, the actual date that a young Marty McFly traveled back in time to fictitious Hill Valley, CA to save his children in the hit 1989 movie Back to the Future II . Back in 1989, director Robert Zemeckis introduced us to a world in 2015 that looked very different from the one we knew. Although we don’t have flying cars and food hydrators, we do have drones, video conferencing, hands-free video games, and video glasses. Sadly, however, Marty McFly would find almost no differences in the Hill Valley High School from 1989 to 2015. In fact, he may not see many differences from the Hill Valley of 1955, the year he traveled to later in that same movie. Why have we made so much progress as a society, yet our schools continue to operate in much the same way as they have for decades? In a recent Ed Week article, William Tolley asked Why the Factory Model of Schools Persists, and How We Can Change It? He talk...

Late afternoon on a school day means only one thing in my house – it is time to put on your game face and prepare for the inevitable: The bus is about to drop off my three elementary aged children and my wife Erica will transform into an after school teacher and tutor. In our house, homework must be completed before anyone gets to go outside to play with friends. Through the years Erica has found that some homework assignments, such as practicing their music instruments, reading silently, or writing in their journals are appropriate and effective. Some assignments, however, amount to little more than “busy work” for our children that do not challenge them with deeper understanding nor do they seem to have a clear meaning or purpose. At dinnertime Erica and I will often debate the purpose of homework. Is it to reinforce skills from the classroom? Is it to provide additional practice? Is it to develop appropriate work study practices? Edutopia blogger Clare Roach , a former Sp...

This week, Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida is playing host to 3,100 of the country’s most promising innovators in education. The annual Blended and Online Learning Symposium , sponsored by the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL), advertises this event as “the industry’s leading event for K-12 online, blended and competency-based learning” adding that it is a place where “experts, practitioners, educators, policymakers, and researchers gather and work to transform education.” The symposium was kicked off yesterday with an inspiring speech from iNACOL President Susan Patrick . She asked those in attendance what it would take to change the face of education, urging schools to put students at the center and arguing that doing so would shift the way we think about what is possible for student learning. Patrick went on to applaud the work of iNACOL member schools that, through different entry points of personalized, online, blended, or competency-bas...

Like many Generation X’ers and Millennials, my high school English classroom memories stem from my experiences reading popular required readings such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, and Catcher in the Rye. I can honestly tell you that to this day, I remember very little about these classics because at the time, they were not books that spoke to me as a reader. As a self-proclaimed “math guy” who was only taking English because it was a graduation requirement, my teachers were unable to use these texts to convert me into a frequent reader, a characteristic that should have set me up for a lifelong love for reading. I don’t blame my teachers in any way for this gaffe. In fact, I believe the English teachers I had at Timberlane Regional High School were some of the best that I have ever worked with, but they were limited in their ability to increase student motivation for reading by the philosophy of required reading texts. In a...