Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

All month, #growthmindset has been trending on Twitter, a topic that was highlighted in a general session talk at the 2016 ASCD Annual Conference and Exhibit Show in Atlanta by Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck. Education Week has made available a video of Dweck’s entire sixty minute talk, entitled “The Journey to a Growth Mindset,” on their website. “ A growth mindset is not a panacea, but it does empower kids and help them learn,” she explained to the Atlanta audience. Growth mindset is the understanding that you can develop your abilities, which in turn drives motivation, growth and performance. The concept dovetails well with education. Teachers have the power to promote a growth mindset in their students simply by how they offer them praise for a job well done. The difference between a statement like "you did a great job, you must be really smart" and "you did a great job, you must have really worked hard" may not be noticeable to ...

Sanborn Regional High School is excited to announce a new partnership with Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) that will significantly increase the number of college-credit opportunities available to its students.  For the 2016-2017 school year, Sanborn is participating in the SNHU In The High School Program , a dual enrollment program where Sanborn students can earn college credit while still in high school by taking Sanborn courses that have been approved by SNHU for both Sanborn and SNHU credit.  SNHU has approved seven current Sanborn courses and teachers for this program for next year: Since these courses are already part of Sanborn’s Program of Studies , registration will occur through the normal course selection process that Sanborn’s Counseling Department is currently working on with all students. Students who wish to enroll in the college credit option with SNHU will have the option to do so when the class starts in the fall. The cost ...

Over a decade ago, Google introduced the Pareto Principle to its company. The concept, first conceived by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, came from Parento’s observation that at the turn of the twentieth century, 80 percent of Italian land was owned by 20 percent of the population.   For Google, the 80/20 principle encouraged their engineers to take 20 percent of their time to work on company-related ideas that interested them personally.   The logic for this concept was simple: Productivity would improve when employees engaged in something that they were passionate about. While it is true that Google innovations like AdSense, Gmail, and Google Talk all got their start as a result of this personalized time, the program started fade away at Google in 2013 as managers looked to avoid having their teams fall behind on the company’s internal productivity rankings. According to this HRZone article , managers are judged on the productivity of their teams by these ra...