Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Social Media and School Leadership

Lorrie Jackson recently interviewed me via email on the topic of heads of school and their use of social media. Her questions and my answers (slightly tidied up) are below. You can read her interviews with several heads of school here. 1.    Why should heads of school be involved in social media? As the institution’s leader, school heads need to…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

The Spreadsheet Solution

The NYSAIS heads conference is always valuable and 2010 was no exception. I usually hear NAIS president Pat Bassett in a mega ballroom with all the flashing lights and hoopla of the annual conference. It was good to hear him in the more intimate setting of the dining room at Mohonk.  His talk – top trends to look out for…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

High School Climate Report: More grim than glee

Bullying, violence, discrimination and the ethical climate of high school. Charles Blow wrote about what he termed the Private School Civility Gap in the OpEd pages of the NYTimes last Friday. He was drawing on the study issued last month by the Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics. It surveyed over 43,000 students on a whole range of issues concerning…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Childhood Is Another Country: Children Are Not Miniature Adults

Childhood is another country: they do things differently there.* Great researchers and thinkers about education (think Froebel, Piaget, Vygotsky and so many others) have always known that children are not miniature adults. Their work demonstrates basic truths about childhood development: While growth can be encouraged, supported and enriched, the essential developmental milestones and timetable for growth remain fairly constant. What’s…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Break out of the Box

Prior to the industrialization of education, the education model was centered around a single-room school house consisting of one teacher with many students throughout many grades. The teacher was a facilitator of an instructional design that had students teaching each other. The younger students benefited from the knowledge of the older students and the older students benefited by reinforcing what…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

HSSSE 2: “The shape of these bubbles is oppressive.”

This is the second post reporting on the results of the survey we administered at PDS  last spring: The High School Survey of Student Engagement. The HSSSE has 34 main questions across key dimensions of school life and many are broken out in subsets making for many scores of questions in total. Number 35 allows a few lines and asks:…

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RattleBag and Rhubarb

Tests that matter: Measuring the PDS Difference

We asked….They told. The High School Survey of Student Engagement (known as the Hessie) is a highly regarded survey measuring the academic, social, and emotional engagement of high school students across the United States. It is administered annually by the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University. Since the survey’s inception, over 500,000 students nationally have participated in…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

High Stakes Testing New York City Style

A colleague from a neighboring school has sent the following link from the  New York Times. It’s a cautionary tale of just how much can go wrong when the political focus is test scores and not learning. On New York School Tests, Warning Signs Ignored. When New York State made its standardized English and math tests tougher to pass this…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

A Path to Success: Talents. Challenges. Problems

A PATH TO COLLEGE, CAREER AND CIVIC SUCCESS Talents, when revealed, need to be celebrated. Challenges, when discovered, need to be addressed. Problems, when they arise, need to be solved. This is never so true as when we are talking about our children — their health, their growth, their education and their development. It is not enough to alert people…

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RattleBag and Rhubarb

I love my job

Some days just stand out. And this was one of them. First there was breakfast in the new dining room and conversations with high school athletes (there were two games from yesterday) and parents. Then the always weekly standout lower school assembly. Since last year we have taken away the 1960’s era sunken pit. Interesting to begin to see what…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Connections: How good ideas happen to good minds

The coffee houses of the Enlightenment; the  Paris salons of Modernism  – two examples of the spaces conducive to innovation and new ideas. Here’s Steven Johnson on how good ideas happen to good minds and how they are incubated over time  and in spaces where  intellectual diversity thrives and connection happens. Could classrooms be like that? Faculty meetings? Admin meetings?…

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Books, RattleBag and Rhubarb

The Welcome Back Assembly

Ever wonder what happens in an all-school assembly when all students and faculty pre-k through 12th grade gather in the James Earl Jones Theater? Along with all-school activities we we have these regularly scheduled throughout the year including Thanksgiving and the annual Peacemakers Assembly every winter. The welcome back assembly last week did not include our very youngest children in…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

PDS faculty take The Marshmallow Challenge

The PDS faculty took The Marshmallow Challenge this morning. Using 20 pieces of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and a marshmallow: Build the highest freestanding structure with the marshmallow on top. Time allowed: 18 minutes Here’s a glimpse of what happened: Here’s the background to the project: