JosieHolford

How to Read a Report Card

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PDS student reports are not just a list of untethered numbers and letters  but rather in-depth narratives that convey detailed and helpful information about emerging  strengths, accomplishments, challenges, growth and progress. They are part of the on-going conversation between school and home with the student as  participant, contributor, planner and goal-setter. Nevertheless – here is … Read more

NPR and Me

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Just before the break there was a message on the head’s listserve from Myra McGovern of NAIS. NPR journalist Tovia Smith was working on a story about what schools are doing to relieve the growing pressures and stresses on students and was looking for input. This happens to be a topic close to my heart. … Read more

Lasting gifts: “The house will remember you.”

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Sometimes you are awed by the company you keep. Poughkeepsie Day School is honored and inspired by its partnerships with two remarkable local organizations – The Queens Galley and Heart Street , both in Kingston. In Stone Soup and a New Partnership in November 2007 I wrote Becoming a global citizen has to begin close … Read more

Tweet your Lunch

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I check my Twitter feed first thing.  It’s an early morning routine that helps give me a quick scan of the world and of the edusphere in particular. Today, President Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-free  Kids Act into  law. Child nutrition and school lunch are hot topics and the PBS NewsHour has taken notice.  I … Read more

“Three Cheers” for the Fall Festival team

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I like these words about our Fall Festival Reimagined:  Three Cheers – from the Poughkeepsie Journal today: To Poughkeepsie Day School’s First Fall Festival Reimagined, an ambitious new festival designed to celebrate the local and the global community. Visitors were given festival passports to mark the places and things they learned about during the day … Read more

Social Media and School Leadership

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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 … Read more

The Price

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Thanks to my Twitter feed I saw this short BBC news piece about recently discover aerial photographs of the battlefields of the western front. Watch it if you can. Taken from an airship in 1919, the scale of the devastation is revealed in new and astonishing ways: Shattered towns and villages, the shell-holes and the … Read more

The Five-Step Solution

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So here – as promised – the Ned Hallowell five-step solution for happiness and all that ails us including schools and schooling. And as presented at Mohonk on Friday it was a welcome antidote to the one-size-fits-all formula of more of the same that has failed us for decades. It is always good to be … Read more