Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education . To My Fellow Educational Leaders: I hope you all had the opportunity to celebrate, in some small way, the Thanksgiving holiday this past week. As we enter the season of giving this month, we will all need to make some adjustments and concessions to our “normal” celebration routines during the holiday season as a result of the challenges brought to us by the pandemic. You may have already experienced some of these this past week. Our Thanksgiving gathering was certainly smaller with family. We didn’t travel as far and wide as we would have to visit family and friends. Lastly, our annual Black Friday holiday shopping experience kicked off virtually, with no trips to the stores for my wife Erica and I. Yet, with all the changes, Thanksgiving is still a time for being thankful. This fall, as an educational leader, there is no shortage of things to be thankful about. Here are the top two things that made my list this year, ...

This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education .   In a recent article , Edutopia’s Stephen Merrill asked a pivotal question that every educator needs to ask themselves right now: “In schools, are we measuring what matters?” Merrill reports out on a recent interview he conducted with educator Angela Duckworth, a champion for the push to include non academic skills and dispositions in assessment, grading, and reporting plans. Duckworth is best known for her 2016 bestselling book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance . The book raised questions and concerns from fans and critics on whether or not the concept of grit was a skill that should be measured by schools. According to Merrill, Duckworth had this to say: “Any assessment practice that is ‘narrower, more myopic, and more insensitive to equity’ is headed the wrong way. ‘We want to go in the direction of more holistic, better information and evening the playing field’—so that we can broaden our understanding...

  This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education . I try to be an eternal optimist, even when times are tough. I’m the person looking for the silver lining in every bad story. Some days it drives my wife crazy because she tells me I don’t have to find a lesson in every situation, but that is a story for another day. The pandemic has offered all of us a series of lessons, whether we like it or not. I’ve been struggling lately to be the instructional leader that I want to be for my New Hampshire high school staff. They look to me for advice as they navigate the tricky waters of teaching in a pandemic, and yet I cannot offer them first-hand advice from experience, because I’ve never been in this situation before. The problem is, none of us have. Some days we feel as educators that we are simply making it up as we go along. We never seem to have finalized plans, because we always see ourselves at the mercy of the virus, not knowing what direction it will take in our ...