Category: Weekly Updates

In lieu of a regular weekly blog post, this week you can check out the ANCS “Principles in Practice” monthly newsletter.  This month focuses on connecting our work at ANCS with the Coalition of Essential Schools common principles with collaborative work with the schools in the Jackson cluster and beyond.

Right now I am starting to re-read the book The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch, the former U.S. assistant secretary of education.  It is the next book in the ongoing book discussion series organized by Atlanta Communities for Excellent Schools.  I was invited to speak on a panel to…

If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the past year, you’ve likely heard about the “Common Core”.  There seems to be a good bit of misinformation out there about it, so, I thought I’d spend some time in this week’s blog post focused on some explanation and my take on the Common Core.…

Yesterday I took my soon-to-be five year-old son with me to ANCS as I helped supervise students during a block of time we’d opened up for parents as some relief from this unexpected stretch of snow/ice days.  He loved every minute of it—playing “Battleship” with other kids, eating lunch at a table of new friends,…

This month’s ANCS “Principles in Practice” newsletter focuses on how ANCS helps students learn to use their minds well by teaching the “whole child” through the arts, physical education, Spanish, and technology.

Chances are you’re probably at least vaguely familiar with the ideas in the picture above.  It’s a graphic explaining the different personality types that make up the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI (the image was taken from the Wikipedia page for the MBTI).  The MBTI provides an assessment of where a person falls along a…

A group here in Atlanta called “Atlanta Communities for Excellent Schools” (ACES) has been organizing regular discussions about books centered on educational issues.  It’s a great idea that brings together parents, educators, and community members from across the city to engage in substantive conversations about teaching, learning, and schools.  For the most recent discussion, ACES…

Over the past few years, increasing attention has been given to “value-added” measures in schools, districts, and states around the United States.  Georgia’s new school accountability system and teacher and leader evaluation processes all use a variation of a value-added measure (for efficiency, I’ll refer to them from here on out as VAM).  And for…

This month’s “Principles in Practice” newsletter looks at how the use of “critical friends groups” helps ANCS to live out the CES common principles.  You can read it here.

A couple of months back I devoted a blog post to the way in which we “grade” students at ANCS.  In the post I wrote about why ANCS does not try to boil student performance down to a single number or letter grade because doing so does not capture the nuances of student learning and…