SUMMIT

Continued from Page 04

“A foundation for our pillars is meeting [the] diverse needs of our students with a multicultural approach to instruction,” he said.

Last year’s keynote speaker for the Academic Leadership Summit was Geoffrey Canada, president of Harlem’s Children’s Zone. Canada was “one of the first,” according to Kwiatkowski, to embed many community groups with schools, a cornerstone of the Ball State-MCS partnership.

Reynolds called Canada’s keynote presentation “truly outstanding,” noting how Canada “really took advantage of his educational opportunities to change his trajectory on his life.”

Kwiatkowski said MCS teachers enjoyed being able to collaborate together and work across different schools in the corporation during the summit. One of these teachers who shared a positive view of the summit is Tori Johnson.

Johnson, a fourth-grade teacher at Grissom Elementary School, is in her first year at Muncie Community Schools; she said she saw positive development with MCS and decided to “take the leap.”

Before coming to MCS, Johnson worked in Richmond where students were let out at 1:20 p.m. every Tuesday for professional development. These development sessions were led by internal figures.

She noted how different MCS’ summit was to what she experienced working in Richmond; she liked how she was able to “pick and choose” what types of sessions she could go to.

This academic year, Johnson uses i-Ready, a collection of online educational materials, to help her students. She didn’t use i-Ready during her time at Richmond Community Schools, making an i-Ready session headed by experts at the MCS summit helpful to teachers like Johnson.

“It was a really good time to build a positive culture within our building,” Johnson said.

Johnson was also inspired by Canada’s keynote speech; she described the culture of Grissom as “very diverse,” so bringing in someone who could understand the culture of not only Grissom but the entirety of MCS was important to her.

“I really appreciated the fact that we had someone that I felt like understood us,” she said.

Johnson also pointed out after the summit, she came back to her classroom with a different outlook on the behaviors happening in her classroom. She is working on building more empathic and caring relationships with her students and to “add more tools in her toolbox.”

There is more professional development even after the summit; Johnson said there has been “extended learning” where people come into the schools and continue further development on topics presented at the summit.

“I truly did not feel like that summit wasted my time,” Johnson said. “I felt like we were there for a purpose. We had an agenda.”

Kwiatkowski said one of the biggest problems facing MCS is student achievement, partly due to COVID-19. She hopes the Academic Innovation Summits will continue in the future.

“Part of what the legislation wanted us to do was to become innovative, and so we’re trying to find ways that we may try to do some things that others haven’t thought of yet,” Kwiatkowski said.

Reynolds said he would be willing to show other school corporations how MCS set up the summit, so other schools could do something similar.

Johnson is looking forward to the next summit later this year, and she too hopes other schools will implement this concept for their professional development.

“I think it’d be more beneficial to implement something like this,” she said. “It was a great experience. It’s always nice when all educators [are] there for the same purpose and [have] the same goal in mind.”

Contact Grayson Joslin with comments at Grayson.joslin@bsu.edu or on Twitter @ GraysonMJoslin.

CONNECT THE DOTS & FIND YOUR FAVORITE SPOTS.

SEE ALL ROUTES AT MITSBUS.ORG

Abigail Denault Reporter

Ball State University professors and Muncie Community Schools (MCS) administration are seeking to change what civics means to students throughout Muncie and beyond.

In 2022, Ball State was one of six grantees that received the American History and Civics-National Activities Grants, according to the United States Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. The university received a little more than $1.3 million to be funded over the course of three years for their Civic Renewal through Education for Agency, Tolerance and Engagement (CREATE) project. The grant is one of two Indiana-related grants with the other belonging to Purdue University’s PROJECT RISE.

According to the abstract of the project submitted to the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, “CREATE will impact roughly 5,215 students and 335 teachers…We selected MCS as the target population to engage underserved populations with a scalable model for civic renewal and exposure to opportunities for public service.”

The project is also meant to assist MCS to create a curriculum in order to fulfill the new requirements of Indiana Code Title 20, Article 30, Chapter 5 on a required one-semester civics class for students in sixth-eighth grade starting in the 2023-24 school year. The creation of the law places Indiana alongside six other states that have a middle school course solely devoted to civics education.

David Roof, co-principal investigator of the project and associate professor of educational studies, shared how the law was part of a national effort.

“A lot of students around the country right now only get one civics-related class, and it’s often the last year, often the last semester of high school before people graduate,” Roof said. “Civics has been really lacking in schools. There’s a wide, bipartisan agreement that there’s a need to reinstitute civics.”

Roof is not alone in working on the project. He is joined by his co-principal investigator Anand