Independent Schools, Common Perspectives
Peter Gow was an administrator and teacher in independent schools for nearly 40 years. As the Executive Director of the Independent Curriculum Group, he wrote about the relationship between private and public education and how the two sectors might draw upon each other’s strengths. This blog is no longer being updated, but you can continue to explore these issues on edweek.org by visiting our related topic pages: private schools.
Education
Opinion
Butchers, Bakers, Makers, and Opposable Thumbs
The Maker Movement, it strikes me, is a kind of glorified acknowledgment, often without the actual acknowledgment, that human children--and adults--need to be handling things and actually doing things physically every bit as much as they need to be thinking about them, talking about them, exploring them on the internet, or figuring out ways to sell them via social media.
Education
Opinion
Collaboration, Cooperation, and Just Plain Sharing
We don't want to be in competition with one another, but we do want to be our best, each in our own way. As much as we have traditionally valued our autonomy, we know that we will grow the most in professional communities characterized by collaboration, cooperation, and just plain sharing. Excelling is not competing; it's doing the very best by our students in the fullest expression of the aims and values of our schools.
Education
Opinion
School Starts Again; Complicated Feelings and High Hopes
Perhaps in schools of the future, with experiential learning and creative problem-solving at the heart of the curriculum, kids will await the end of summer as a time to return to an experience that will so honor their needs and nature as to make the prospect of school actually seem better than vacation.
Education
Opinion
Single-Sex Schools: The Persistence of an Idea
I think many of my generation of male teachers, with varying experiences navigating the waters of what the news magazines assured us was a Feminist Revolution, had been chastened more than a little on the meaning of masculinity and manhood, and so we tried to help our male students exchange bluster and boisterousness for an occasional listen and maybe even the occasional tear. I don't know how well it worked, but we felt we were doing our small part to win obscure battles in the most remote fields of that revolution.
Education
Opinion
EdCamp Cape Cod: What Public and Non-Public Schools Have to Learn From One Another
We sometimes forget, and the media and our politicians tend to forget even more quickly, that "schools are for kids;" my school head's maxim for teachers is the essential truth of our work. This type of school or that type of school isn't better, although it might serve one kind of kid more effectively. But it's not about competition, not about winning, for God's sake--it's about diversity of opportunity for a diversity of learners.
Education
Opinion
School Change, Resistance, Futility, and Not Being Borg
Schools that have truly transformed faculties and practice have been really good at reaching out, at engaging even skeptics in the collaborative work of understanding where the school must go and why. This work is about conversation, exploration, even debate and occasional dispute.
Education
Opinion
Public Purpose: Environmentalism in Independent Schools--and Others!
It may be that independent schools are just beginning to find their real voice for expressing their public purpose--the real work, as partners and working exemplars, of turning their resources and their ideas to aims beyond the education of their own students. I'd like to believe that the best of schools' environmental work may just be the sound of the voice of public purpose clearing its throat.
Education
Opinion
Diversity and Multiculturalism: The Independent School Story (Part 4 of 4)
I suspect we will all start school in a somewhat chastened state of mind after the Trayvon Martin verdict; Trayvon could have been our President thirty-five years ago, yes, but he could have been any of our African American students this morning. However utopian we might wish our schools to be, our streets are not.
Education
Opinion
Diversity and Multiculturalism: The Independent School Story (Part 3)
You would be somewhat hard-pressed to find more than a handful of independent schools whose mission and values statements do not contain at least one word like "diverse," "multicultural," "global," "inclusive"--words that, as mission statements are intended to, commit the school to preparing students to live in a world in which everyone is not going to be just like themselves.
Education
Opinion
Diversity and Multiculturalism: The Independent School Story (Part 2 of 3)
Sexual orientation and gender identity were always present as issues of diversity, as were religion, cultural heritage, and even just plain gender--many of these varieties of "invisible minority" status. From the perspective of "the work," though, most schools tended to focus on race, the mantra being "If you can talk about race, you can talk about anything."
Education
Opinion
More Answers From John Chubb, New Independent Schools Association President
In Part 2 of this two-part interview with new National Association of Independent Schools president John Chubb, he addresses the role that independent schools might play as model "schools of the future," what he looks for in a school, and some of his personal experience as an independent school parent.
Education
Opinion
Q&A With John Chubb, New Independent Schools Association President (Part 1 of 2)
In Part 1 of this two-part interview, new National Association of Independent Schools president John Chubb discusses the role NAIS might play in developing new educational approaches and shaping the national conversation on education. He also addresses some of the challenges NAIS schools face--and share with other sectors--going forward.
Education
Opinion
Diversity and Multiculturalism: The Independent School Story (Part 1 of 3)
It fairly quickly sank in that a more diverse school photo might be a good thing in a highly abstract way, but that diversity alone--especially if largely confined to the student body--was not going to ensure that a school was going to become the "multicultural community" that its viewbook promised. The mere presence of students of color might change a few things--many of them out of sight of the adults in the school--but it did not a community make.
Education
Opinion
Celebrating the Human Factor in Our Work
We don't need automata in our classrooms, meting out learning in doses prescribed and prepackaged by giant publishers and testing companies. We need teachers who are confident being fully and energetically themselves, expert in designing for their students demanding, exciting curriculum that inspires and challenges and in developing assessments that measure in-depth understanding, not just rote knowledge or received interpretations.
