In the News

This spring, we’ve found pockets of excellence in three dozen high school visits...where we’ve spotted evidence of deeper learning (i.e., engagement, critical thinking, excellent public products). It’s been work that matters to the learner and their community– it’s relevant, purposeful, and consequential work.

At this very moment, women across the United States are sitting on million-dollar ideas, like a product that fills a niche or a service that solves a unique challenge. And increasingly, women are turning those ideas into entrepreneurship opportunities. Women accounted for 49% of business startups in 2021, a 28% jump from two years earlier. 

Toward the end of the 2020-21 school year, I developed a plan. Come June, I’d walk out of The Colony High School near Lewisville, Texas, leaving behind a 14-year career in education, then return to corporate America. It wasn’t so much the stress of COVID-19 and remote instruction that did me in, but the monotony. I found myself teaching the same courses, serving on the same committees, feeling the same anxieties — year after year after year. Plus I realized I was becoming more flustered when the least little thing didn’t go as planned in my career education and training classes. I wanted my lessons to be perfect. I wanted to be perfect...

When I think about the future of postsecondary education, I am immediately drawn to the experiences of my middle-school boys, who want to know the ‘why’ behind everything they are learning in school. While I thought the repeated barrage of questions was initially no different than me asking my own parents ‘why’ I needed to learn algebra, I have learned that their ‘why’ questions are rooted in wanting to better understand the application of learning to something they are doing right now—not in the future. They want to know how what they are learning can be applied today to address a challenge or question.

Here’s something we’ve asked ourselves time and again over the years we’ve taught and mentored high school students:

Francis Tuttle Technology Center is launching a new Entrepreneurship Academy program that will be a central focus of the new Danforth Campus.  

Like most of the working world, students in our entrepreneurship courses made the overnight adjustment from in-person collaborative sessions to Zoom meetings, instant messaging, email, Google Classroom and the Google Cloud for Startup’s platform to build their businesses from a distance.