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 This blog is no longer being updated, but you can continue to explore these issues on edweek.org by visiting our related topic pages: private schools.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
Making Teachers
Independent school teachers tend to exist within cultures that are highly immersive: in 21st-century independent schools it is hard for a new or newish teacher not to be constantly watched, engaged in conversations about practice and about kids, and otherwise offered a great deal of formal and informal on-the-job training from a number of experienced sources. Generally smaller classes and relatively small and intense school communities make it relatively easy for schools to monitor and offer essentially real-time feedback to early-career teachers.
Education
Opinion
Whatever Happened to 'Unanxious' Expectations?
"I won't threaten you, but I expect much of you." How many of our students and our teachers confidently feel that this expresses the culture of their schools? I only wish that all education, at every level, really were characterized by unanxious expectations--high expectations requiring vigorous and appropriately rigorous engagement accompanied by respect, compassion, and humanity.
Education
Opinion
Technology and Behavior: It's a 21st-Century Thing
As educators, we pit ourselves every day against the most savage of enemies: ignorance, anti-intellectualism, apathy, prejudice, meanness. We can no more unplug in our struggle against these foes than our forebears should have thrown away their slates and books because a few students scribbled profanities or a few authors wrote hate and lies.
Education
Opinion
Defining, Then Serving, the Whole Child
When I hear the term "whole child" these days that I'm not always sure that my understanding--and I'll make a claim to including everything from kids' very individual brains and hearts and bodies to their connections with family, community, and tradition--is quite what others have in mind. I hope it is, but somehow I can't equate an emphasis merely on the detailed enumerations of standards represented by the Common Core or multiple-choice tests (and teaching geared toward them) with any reasonably whole children I know.
Education
Opinion
Independent Schools and Sports
It was, and is, supposed to be all about values: teamwork, collaboration, self-sacrifice, hard work, creativity, humility in victory and grace in defeat. The health and "whole child" aspects are here, too: the venerable but hardly obsolete ideal of mens sana in corpore sano.
Education
Opinion
More Independent School Voices: A Blog Sampler (Part III)
I urge readers to build into their own PLNs any of these bloggers whose words resonate on a personal or professional level to reach out via comments or email--it's a great way to find new perspectives an all aspects of our practice. As an added bonus, experience a satisfying ripple effect by checking out these bloggers' blogrolls.
Education
Opinion
My School of the Future Begins to Come Into Focus
Couple great large-scale projects with the evolving efficacy of elective online coursework and strong communities built around collaborative learning, effective advising, explicit exploration of values and social issues, and ever-popular athletic or performing arts programs, and it seems to me that schools of the future could easily encompass all the compelling ideas of the present.
Education
Opinion
Saying No to Online Learning? Hardly
The biggest lesson for schools is that this train has pretty much left the station. By some means, on some scale, every school will soon need to figure out how it will help its students avail themselves of online learning where it offers a clear advantage over completely school-based courses.
Education
Opinion
Technology, Generational Power, and the Challenge of Change
Technology turned the tables on us. We are prisoners of our children's generation far more than they are prisoners of ours. Even if we sometimes smirk when we see kids struggle with technology, our students really are digital natives in ways that we can never be, even we who have been eager early adopters of anything subject to Moore's Law.
Reading & Literacy
Opinion
Perspective: Student Reads Her Poem on Recent Events in Boston
The points she makes and questions she asks in the poem are not rhetorical or abstract; she is writing, as we tell all student poets to do, about her life.
Education
Opinion
The K-12 MOOC: It's a Matter of Time
I'm not ready to suggest that we ought to replace high school with a succession of MOOCs, but I can see a place for them, thanks to my smart kid friends. By and large these are kids for whom school curricula are a baseline, hoops to be jumped through and milestones to be checked off on a transcript. Even so-called "college level" programs like AP and IB are more about putting sweat equity into transcripts than feeding their hungry intellects; more work doesn't always mean more thinking.
Education
Opinion
Term-Away Programs: A Sampler of Independent School Exotica
Anyone who has interacted with students from one of these programs knows the effect they can have. For one, they promote intense bonding that lead to lifetime friendships with fellow students and staff and amazing loyalty to the programs themselves. In my experience, too, students returning from semester programs are often refocused and energized academically, socially, and politically.
Education
Opinion
Posting in the Madness
It seems just a bit too weird for me to post right now, and so I think I'll let this endless, terrible week end here.