What’s Happening

Opportunity Culture® News and Views

Opportunity Culture® in the News: Edgecombe County Schools

By Sharon Kebschull Barrett, November 29, 2018

Today’s Hechinger Report highlights Opportunity Culture in Edgecombe County Public Schools, a rural North Carolina district. Noting these “major accomplishments” in Edgecombe County, reporter Tara Garcia Mathewson quotes Erin Swanson, Edgecombe’s director of innovation, saying that Opportunity Culture could be transformational. Read More…

Closing the Teacher Satisfaction Gap

By Sharon Kebschull Barrett, October 4, 2018

What can schools learn from Google? A lot, says Talia Milgrom-Elcott, who leads 100Kin10, a network to which we belong that is devoted to addressing the nation’s STEM teacher shortage. Don’t miss her great piece in eSchoolNews,  What Schools Can Learn from Google (Spoiler: It’s Not What You’d Expect) on the importance of leadership, empowered teachers, and time for collaboration and support. Read More…

The Risks and Rewards of Using Blended Learning to Reach More Students

By Elizabeth Annette Bartlett; first published by EducationNC, August 8, 2018

“In the end, it wasn’t quite that simple—but the lessons we learned will continue to benefit students.” Middle school Blended-Learning Teacher Elizabeth Annette Bartlett saw blended learning in an Opportunity Culture as a means to reach more students and give them more time for hands-on labs—but, she discovered, age mattered for student success. Read More…

Multi-School Leadership: Tools to Extend Excellent Principals’ Reach

By Sharon Kebschull Barrett, June 12, 2018

An Opportunity Culture extends the reach of excellent teaching—what about doing the same for excellent schoolwide leadership? Public Impact, which founded the national Opportunity Culture initiative, today releases a set of practical materials on Multi-School Leadership: How to extend the reach of excellent principals by having them lead a small group of schools, for more pay, funded within the budgets of their schools. Read More…

Fostering Teaching Efficiency Through Teacher Leadership

By Tu Willingham; first published by Georgia Public Broadcasting, May 23, 2018

“I have never been part of a more thoughtful, practical, and effective classroom model than this.” For Expanded-Impact Teacher Tu Willingham, leading an aspiring teacher throughout the year not only helped him effectively reach more students, but also increased classroom efficiency and allowed him to boost the school’s home-grown teacher pipeline. Read More…