By Amy Stewart
From July 10-14, 2023, Midland Trail High School and Calhoun Middle High School’s 6th-8th grade faculty met at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards Stadium to continue developing as West Virginia’s model Empowerment Schools.
These schools have been identified by the West Virginia Department of Education as two of the schools implementing the Empowerment Collaborative model for middle schools that are supported to become places where the model is demonstrated, studied, and shared.
Pictured: Matt Harper, Angie Walkup, Kiera Lesher, and Kennedy Moore
On Monday, teachers and administrators enjoyed an immersion into Intuit’s Design for Delight process for design thinking to solve a real problem: one student’s desire to find summer or teen jobs that are relevant and useful to his future. Using Design for Delight, or D4D, participants spent the day gaining empathy for the customer and his problem, brainstorming and prototyping potential solutions, and testing those solutions on the customer. Intuit and Marshall’s iCenter have partnered with the Empowerment Collaborative to provide opportunities and support to schools that are interested in using this industry approach to brainstorming and innovative design to help facilitate students’ design process through projects.
On Tuesday, each team developed an ambitious goal and scorecard for their week. Their goals included planning cross-curricular, industry- and/or community-rooted projects that engage students from the beginning of the school year. They also planned to align standards for potential connections through the year, study potential innovative approaches to assess students authentically, and considered ways students could demonstrate mastery and growth across their middle school experience.
Pictured: Matt Harper, Candace Young, Donald Shane Shockey, and Tina Chapman
Through the week, the school teams worked diligently, reporting each day on their goal progress based on a “scoreboard”. On Thursday morning, the teams gave each other deep feedback on their project plans and teams had time to revise before presentations to each other and school leaders on Friday.
The teams finished their week by setting wildly important goals for the next six months of their implementation of the Empowerment Collaborative model. They will create visible scoreboards for their school teams and hold weekly meetings to determine whether they are “winning” on their goal progress. These goals have created an exciting energy rooted in the potential to empower students and teachers to innovate and create as change agents in their schools and communities while they learn and master content!
Pictured: Richard Petitt, Angie Walkup, Kiera Lesher, Kennedy Moore, Tovah Atha, Melinda Burdette, Kate Miller, Deanna Gill, Matt Harper, Joe Paxton, Emily Lively, Holly Wilson, Debby Toppings, Josh Johnson, Gina Cano-Stump, Dan Cosgrove, Sallie Stewart, Candace Young, and Donald Shane Shockey