It’s a Friday afternoon. Normally, students are abuzz, packing up at the end of the day, chatting about weekend plans, waiting impatiently for the clock to hit 3:00. Not this Friday, though. About 40 middle and high school students are sitting in a circle, quietly and calmly discussing what’s happening in their school, a process […]

This is the second of a two-part set of articles on Teacher Evaluation. See the first entry here. Contact Greg Fisher at schoolempowerment@gmail.com. Is there more than one way to design and run a Teacher Evaluation program? Of course there is. But why does the vast majority of schools’ deploy anachronistic and obsolete systems that are […]

Peer observation and collaboration succeed where top-down reforms fail. This is the first of a two-part set of articles on Teacher Evaluation. Contact Greg Fisher at schoolempowerment@gmail.com. Teacher Evaluation is at an inflection point. There is a growing realization that the mandated process is perfunctory, flawed, and meaningless. If the purpose is that teacher evaluation is […]

Cultivating creative, curious learners outdoors at a teacher-powered school Sometimes, people give up on kids. I have twenty of them in my little school, Class ACT. We call it a forest school because the school forest is our home base. “These are the tough kids,” some say. They are, but they deserve a free, high-quality […]

A student meets with their teacher-advisor at Avalon. “How’s that working out for you?” Any time I explain to anyone in traditional public schools how Avalon School — where I’ve worked since 2002 — has no principal, no director, that is the response. “How’s that working out for you?” It means in the middle of […]

Photo by Allison Shelley for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action. Fighting isolation in 2020 has become a dilemma in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, educators are absolutely overwhelmed with the overnight shift in expectations of their job descriptions. In case you didn’t already know, 2020 is an especially hard […]