Teachers at Owen Elementary are able to collaborate and plan on how to best serve students thanks to the Empower program.

“Empower is a professional learning community where we meet every week in our grade level teams and we discuss strategies about how to improve our instruction and make our learning accessible for all our students,” explained Emily Carpenter, the 1^st and 2^nd Grade Team Lead.

This is Owen’s first year as an Empower school, and Emily said it has been going really well.

“We just got our winter test scores and we noticed a pretty remarkable improvement in what we’ve seen in previous winter tests. We don’t know if that can be attributed to Empower or not, but we feel like it is making an impact here,” she said. “In the past, there was really no time at all to meet as a team to discuss issues that we were running into with the curriculum. So, having 90 minutes every single week to talk with our team and discuss is huge.”

Each grade level team has a designated day of the week that they meet, and for that day, their students go to specials first thing in the morning so the teachers are free to get together.

“The through line of our discussion is equity, making sure that we’re providing instruction that is reaching all of our demographics, everybody, nobody is being excluded,” said Emily.

She said that all students are held to the same standards in the curriculum, but they all require different supports to get there. The Empower meetings allow the teachers to brainstorm the most effective way to teach each student.

“It’s maintaining high expectations for all my students because I believe that is what is going to give them a good future, and then tailoring the curriculum, tailoring my instruction, to make sure I am helping our special needs students, students who are learning English as a second language, and students who are coming to a school after being homeschooled,” she said. “They all have a very different set of skills that are bringing to the table and they all require very different ways of remediating them.”

Empower gives teachers the opportunity to share their expertise with their peers so that everyone can learn and grow. In addition to the weekly meetings, teachers also participate in district workshops and coaching through the year. For more information on Empower, click here.