As the school year winds down, we look forward to relaxing and recharging over the summer, but it’s also a great time to reflect. This June provides an even greater opportunity for me to reflect before I move on to the role of Superintendent in another district. I have been at Pentucket for 8 years and early in my tenure we started addressing literacy instruction, systems, curriculum and assessment. The changes have been dramatic but they did not all come at once and nor was

Preparing our students to be college and career ready has been a focus of K-12 schools for some time now. The promise that technology would help us achieve that has also existed for an entire generation of learners. But what if too much technology actually had the opposite effect - and what we have done with all our apps, programs and devices - is lower the performance of students? How can we prepare students for a digital world, one they are already immersed in, without usin

For many years, schools and teachers sought to engage students by providing them with research backed approaches such as providing choice or providing autonomy over their learning. While there is considerable research to support the effectiveness of these approaches, the studies were almost always supportive when students already had acquired the skills needed or had a base of knowledge to understand new information. Novice learners need direct and explicit instruction before

With over 100 students involved in the DECA club at Pentucket regional Middle High School, the business club has become the most popular after school activity for our high school students but it wasn’t always like that. In fact DECA at Pentucket is still in its infancy and it was just in 2019 when students started participating with less than 10 students. Its growth and popularity with the students is no accident and it is a great story of how intentional alignment of course

Educators have been testing students for as long as they have been teaching them. It’s hard to separate testing and teaching. If we teach something, we want to know how well a student has learned it. But not all tests are the same. When it comes to literacy, specifically, which tests and assessments you use can differ based on the purpose and use of the information. We certainly don’t want to just test students for the sake of doing it. Pentucket has developed a pretty system

September 2025 Public schools are innately complex systems. Students arrive in the building with a myriad of needs and skills and come...

Introduction That’s right - first grade students around Pentucket are now using terms like “auditory drill” to describe their phonics...

Pentucket has demonstrated some impressive growth with math performance of our students since adopting a coherent and consistent math...

Ruth Beaton’s high school AP Psychology class is one of the most popular and highly enrolled elective classes that our students take....

With the Thanksgiving break upon us and the end of the fall athletic season, our Teaching and Learning Blog will take a bit of a...

Some of the youngest learners in Groveland, Merrimac and West Newbury have some of the most interesting and engaging learning experiences...

While Pentucket High School students engage in many traditional content classes and take on various AP classes and Dual Enrollment...

The New York Times bestselling author Jeanette Walls wrote “One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by.” Summer...

Higher Education Partnerships with the Social Studies and History Department Teaching and learning, as we often write about on this blog,...

As a student herself, Brooke Snow fell in love with theater and all that it gave her as a person, as a student and as a performer. While...

“Using innovative propulsion technologies, along with a light-censored camera system, the robot will autonomously move to a precise...

In the 2017-2018 school year several teachers across the elementary schools in the three towns of Pentucket began to use some common math...

The launch of the coffee cart program Friday mornings have become a little more exciting on the campus of Pentucket Regional Middle High...

In this November 2023 blog we have three of our district Occupational Therapists as guest authors! The digital age has made many things...

Each year, October is recognized worldwide as Dyslexia Awareness Month, a time to come together to raise awareness and share resources...