Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

Being a school principal in America can be a thankless job, and one that is ever-evolving. What would happen if you brought together some of the best, most influential school principals in our country to talk about how they leverage their strengths and resources to stay focused on transformational leadership in their schools on behalf of their students? I had the opportunity to be part of such a group. As the 2017 New Hampshire award winner, I have been honored to have spent the last few days in Washington, DC with 52 other State Principal of the Year Award winners at the 2017 Principals Institute, a program sponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP). Speaking on behalf of my fellow state principals of the year, I can tell you that we are a very humble bunch. We don’t generally like the spotlight to be on us, although we enjoyed the opportunity to spend an evening this week at a spectacular awards ceremony hosted by NASSP where United States...

Part of the back to school preparation for many teenagers this fall was readjusting their sleep schedules to accommodate the early start times at many American middle and high schools. My son Brady, for example, gets up each day at 5:30 AM to catch a 6:45 AM bus to take him 3.5 miles across town to his school, which starts at 7:30 AM. Two weeks before school started, he began backing up his 7:30 AM summer wake up time by a few minutes each day so that his sleep patterns would be adjusted. Brady is not unlike many of his peers in schools from coast to coast who work through the logistics of an early morning schedule. A growing number of schools have responded to countless research that has concluded that later start times would benefit students. The debate over later start times for schools is not new. In a MultiBriefs Exclusive article in 2014, I wrote about pros and cons of later start times for high schools. Then, I referenced a research report entitled " School Start Tim...

Empty Sky Memorial in Jersey City, NJ Today marks the 16th anniversary of one of the largest international terrorist attacks in history, a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks against the United States that killed more than 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. On that date, life as we know it changed forever. The attacks ushered in a new era of war - the war on terrorism. In a statement the very next day, President George W. Bush stated, “Freedom and democracy are under attack.” In the days that followed, Bush addressed a joint session of Congress, talking about how America and the world would respond. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Since then, that war has impacted all fronts, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, law enforcement, and the military. On September 11, 2001, I was four days into my first year of teaching at a large...

This summer, my nine year old Cameron had a blast at Camp Carpenter in Manchester, NH where he participated in a week-long overnight Cub Scout program with some of his friends from our local Cub Scout Pack. Cameron’s positive experience did not come as a surprise to my wife Erica and I. What boy his age wouldn’t like a camp experience that prides itself on its ability to offer activities like archery, swimming and boating, arts and crafts, BB gun shooting sports, field sports, and nature, combined with the added bonus of sleeping in tents with your friends surrounded by a beautiful lake? What surprised us most was not that he had a good time, but at what he identified as the positive experiences from his time at the camp. Describing it in a way that you would expect from a nine year old boy, Cameron valued most the time he had to explore new ideas, new activities, and new experiences in a safe and supportive environment. As he put it, “we learned HOW to learn for ourselves, and...

If you are familiar with the competency-based grading practices that our school has used for the better part of the last decade, you know that one of the hallmarks of the school's philosophy is that grades represent what students LEARN, not what they EARN . Grades are an accurate representation of how deep a student understands a topic, and cannot be influenced by the behaviors that led (or didn't lead) to that grade. It sounds like a logical statement, but what does that mean, exactly?  Consider these statements:  It doesn't matter how many hours you study for the test, but it does matter how well you do on the test.  It doesn't matter how many times you raised your hand to contribute to a class discussion, but it matters how well you enhanced to the discussion when you did contribute. Most people can rally around these statements, but this one seems to create friction and controversy: It doesn't matter how long it takes you to complete an assignment...

As we embarked on the “back to school season” last fall, it was a 16 year old girl named Natalie Hampton from Sherman Oaks, California who was winning over the hearts of parents and educators alike for the launch of her free app “ Sit With Us .” According to this LA Daily News article , the app was designed to help teens and tweens find a place to sit at lunch with peers who designated themselves as “ambassadors” by posting “open lunch” events on the app to signal to others that they were looking for some company. Hampton told the LA Daily News that she developed the app as a way to use social media to combat bullying, a problem she knew all too well. She stated, “I want to use social media, which can be harmful, and use it for a change and to do something good.” Hampton reported spending much of her seventh grade year eating lunch alone in the cafeteria, feeling a strong sense of embarrassment and vulnerability knowing that her peers took note of the fact that she had no one to s...