About 14 months ago, a good friend and fellow Christian school leader posed a great question: “How’d you like to join a few other schools in California who are doing a legal audit of their school documents?” “Legal audit” was a new concept to me. At that point, I was finishing up a Head of School (HOS) position in the … Read More
The Hook: What’s in a Name?
The language we use has a real power to influence how we understand our world—and act in it. –Kristin Lin, Editor, The On Being Project My wife Joanna and I just finished facilitating two wonder-full institutes on Deeper Learning in Christian Schools and are planning a third in the Dominican Republic. David Smith has been with us (in spirit–see his … Read More
Good Tired
The blog post below is a beautiful devotional given by Dr. Jay Ferguson, Head of School at Grace Community School in Tyler, TX. This message was recently shared at Baylor University’s Academy for Transformational Leadership. We hope that it is an encouragement for school leaders as you exhale from the 2019-20 school year and continue preparations for the 2020-2021 school … Read More
What Story Is at the Heart of Our Schools?
What if (Christian) education was primarily concerned with shaping our hopes and passions—our visions of the “good life”? What if the primary work of (Christian) education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? What if we began by appreciating how education not only gets into our head but also (and more fundamentally) grabs us … Read More
Friends Who Wrote Books You Might Enjoy
Writing a book is a labor of love. Publishing one in the education sector, and to go a step further, publishing in the Christian education sector, is an even greater labor of love with little hope of any financial return. Recently a number of my friends have done some really good work authoring books, and it is my joy to … Read More
Is There Such a Thing as Teaching Christianly?
There is power in the naming of things. I imagine that when God gave Adam the task of naming the animals, Adam didn’t just think up sounds for what to call them. He connected with the genius of what God made each creature to be, and out of Adam’s discernment of “Christ in all things,” each name came forth from … Read More
Caught Versus Taught: The Spelling Conundrum
It is one thing to be a Christian educator. It’s another to be an excellent Christian educator. As teachers and administrators, we are called to be responsible stewards of the time and resources invested in young lives. Every day we make decisions about how to use that contact time and how to use financial resources. On what basis do we … Read More
Beyond Compliance: The HeartSmart High Five
We make thousands of choices every day. Children do too. How do we help children choose well? The goal is to build character, the ability to make a good choice in any given moment. Sometimes we think that we’re building character in our schools when we’re actually building compliance. Do children choose the same thing when we’re not in the … Read More
Chasing “likes”
“Comparison is the thief of joy.” This quotation is attributed to Teddy Roosevelt as he often demonstrated a joy-filled life in the leadership positions he was called to serve. Given that his life journey was not an easy one, it would have made sense for him to stop and compare, allowing joy to be stolen. He lost his first wife … Read More
What Is Education For? A Conversation About the Impact of Religious Schools
Over the past decade, many of us have been delving into, reading voraciously, and discovering insights from the Cardus Education Survey. This research was first conducted in 2011 in Canada, but then was expanded to the U.S. shortly after. The research is focused on discovering the unique outcomes of Christian and non-religious independent school sector graduates on academic, social, political, … Read More