News

Coaching the Hampton High School students who participated in our Future Readiness Lab last year helped Scott Stickney take a few new tools into the Career Explorations Class he’s teaching this year. The Consortium piloted the Lab last year in collaboration with The Heinz Endowments and eight school districts as a novel framework for supporting […]

When Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab invited the Consortium to become a lead partner in launching Hear Me! in 2011, we saw it as an opportunity to help schools harness the power of “student voice.” The Hear Me! project aimed to help kids understand that their thoughts, feelings, and ideas were important, and to encourage […]

With her last day as our Executive Director coming up Friday, Mary Kay Babyak offered this farewell reflection on her time here and the people with whom she worked.

In 2007, we launched the Middle High Forum, a network that brought together districts aiming to improve the transition students make between middle school and high school. At the same time, we jettisoned our old name—the Mon Valley Education Consortium—because new programming, like the Forum, was attracting participants from an expanded geographic footprint. When the […]

Lots of Professional Development opportunities for educators aim to illuminate ways to personalize learning or demystify concepts like competency-based assessment and Universal Design for Learning. Participants in our Future Ready Alliance had a chance this month to learn how all three are working together at California Area School District, where educators are piloting the innovations […]

Educators who would like to learn the basics of design thinking and Human-Centered Design (HCD) are invited to register for a free, hour-long webinar on Wednesday, April 21 at 3:30 pm. Our trainers will give an overview and provide tips, tricks, and design methods needed to get you started using HCD in your districts, schools, […]

When Cornell School District launched a program this year offering Professional Development pathways matched to teachers’ interests, the district’s Director of Technology & Instructional Innovation, Kris Hupp, wasn’t surprised to find Project-Based Learning on their wish lists. For some teachers, PBL “can be a really significant lift,” he said. “It’s really a rethinking of the […]

The Consortium began piloting Future Ready Leaders (FRL) this spring to bring student voice to the future readiness programming school districts have undertaken, while giving participating students leadership opportunities. For several years, districts have been refining their programming to fulfil career and work learning standards reflected in the “Future Ready Index” that Pennsylvania implemented in […]

By the early 2000s, the Consortium had become an ongoing source of support for its expanding network of schools and a launchpad for initiatives aimed at addressing some of their specific concerns. Among these, at the time, were early literacy and coping with a new federal law called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) that had […]

In Burrell School District, where educators are introducing competency-based learning with sixth grade students and planning to roll it out for seventh grade, the new approach necessitates a new understanding among parents. In Cornell School District, where a sharp demographic shift has swelled English Language Learners from a few students five years ago to 10% […]