Confident that understanding and employing new approaches to assessment is a top priority for admissions professionals, the Secondary School Admission Test Board (SSATB) recently launched a Think Tank on the Future of Admission Assessment, with a two-year timeline and a charge to educate its membership and inspire greater innovation in admissions…

Having addressed variations of the question--How can a school's success be "measured"?--with mixed results across a collective five decades of service to boards, John Gulla and Olaf Jorgenson endeavored to develop a more helpful answer. To this end, they queried 200-plus leaders of California Association of Independent Schools…

NAIS and the NAIS Commission on Accreditation recently launched a three-year pilot study on the use of the High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE) among independent schools. HSSSE, administered by Indiana University, is a survey designed to investigate the attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs of high school students about their work. This…

A recent survey by MetLife explores the opinions and experiences of principals and teachers at K-12 public schools regarding their responsibilities and challenges as leaders, the changing role of principals, faculty satisfaction, and Common Core Standards implementation. The findings of this study present independent schools with an opportunity to…

They are everywhere: young people who refuse the narrow label of "student." Of course, they take care of schoolwork, but they also look outside of themselves and see a world full of need--and they want to help. This article features short profiles of adolescents--students, athletes, musicians, community activists, inventors, scientists, and…

Faculty evaluation--arguably no other topic in independent education evokes as much passionate discourse--mostly negative, or at least freighted with anxiety. But, in the authors' experience, it does not have to be this way. At their school, Berkeley Preparatory School (Florida), they have recently developed a teacher evaluation model that is…

Many adults and students today think of themselves as excellent multitaskers--switching from task to task or from task to play in a nanosecond. Yet the pings and tweets their devices emit interrupt them in ways that are more problematic than they think. One of the powerful myths in the culture today is that multitasking is efficient for work or…

In this article, the author shares a story about Chris who publicly transitioned to Courtney during his eighth grade year. Working with a transgender student would require educators as a community to make many decisions for which they had no road map. They need time to educate the community while respecting Chris's need to express himself as…