Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

I’m sure this is a story we can all relate to: Mom and Dad have packed up the gear and the kids into the family minivan (or station wagon, depending on your frame of reference) for a long trip. In less than an hour, one of the kids asks, “Are We There Yet?” The trip continues with at least one kid asking this same question every half hour. With five kids under the age of ten and countless road trips, my wife Erica and I know this story all too well. We try to patiently answer them the first time they ask, but as the hours pass and the question keeps coming up, our patience begins to wear thin. We can’t fault them because they don’t know where we are going. This past summer on a ten hour car ride from Boston to Washington DC we finally found out how to appease the oldest of our children and silence the question once and for all – we gave them each a road map so they could chart our journey. As the principal of a high school that started on a journey to transition from tra...

Our world is changing at such a rapid rate that our schools need educators with very specific skills and experiences. Gone are the days when schools could supplement an educator’s “general education degree” with a one-size fits all professional development model. Today’s educators need access to professional develop that is highly personalized, competency-based, and targeted to specific knowledge and skills. From this need, the national non-profit Digital Promise has partnered with other organizations to develop a new model to deliver that kind of personalized professional development known as micro-credentials. According to Digital Promise, micro-credentials are a digital form of certification. Each one f ocuses on a single competency with a key method that is backed by research. In order to demonstrate mastery, an educator must submit evidence through an online platform as indicated on the associated rubric or scoring guide for that micro-credential. That evidence may inclu...

Each time this image appears in my social media news feed it makes me angry. The image compares and contrasts a parent teacher conference in 1961 with one from 2011. It suggests that fifty years ago, the conference was an opportunity for parents and teachers to “gang up” on students while today, the pendulum has shifted with parents and students “ganging up” on the teachers.   If you believe the 2011 image is an accurate depiction of how things are at your school then you need to take a serious look at how you involve students and their families in the learning process. The flaw with these images is that in both cases, the stakeholders are not all on the same page working towards the same goal. No one should be “ganging up” on anyone during a parent teacher conference. It didn’t work fifty years ago, and it certainly won’t work today. One powerful way to promote a collaborative relationship between parents, teachers, and students is with a student-led conference model, a tre...