FROM THE CEO: New energy for a new year

There’s an energy I know families and educators alike feel about each new school year. This month, I’d like to capitalize upon this theme to bring you news about our organization.

First, our staff and the PDK board have been involved in a monthslong strategic planning process. Thinking about what the future holds for our organization and the impact we can have always energizes me. This plan will be complete before year’s end, and we will have an updated set of core values and major goals. The core values of our organization provide a moral compass by which we make decisions — especially the tough ones. These values reflect the heritage of our organization while embracing the possibilities for expanding our Educators Rising program into even more high schools across the country.

One of the most exciting parts of my year as CEO was attending my first Educators Rising National Conference. This year’s event, in Washington, D.C., was filled with a profound surplus of emotions. Our PDK team works remotely, so it’s one of the only times during the year we all come together. And we spend that time putting on an awesome experience for students and their teachers. My son volunteered to be Eddy, our conference mascot, appearing in a large teddy bear costume. We had 3,300 attendees from across the nation, making this our largest conference yet.

My favorite competition is the Educators Rising Moment, where students speak about what inspired them to consider a career in teaching. Their stories speak to the impact teachers have on students. We all know the bonds we form with students are powerful, but hearing repeatedly about that one educator who sparked a student’s interest in teaching is profound.

We’re thankful, too, to have a new partner, Teaching Channel, which captured video interviews with staff, teachers, and students. We look forward to sharing these later in the year.

Finally, on the Educators Rising front, our team completed work after several years on a new product: Educators Rising Lesson Assessments. This digital resource allows teachers to assign two types of assessment questions for every lesson in the Educators Rising Curriculum. This will save teachers time while enabling them to provide a high-quality assessment of student learning. My heartfelt congratulations to our programs team for completing this milestone in the Educators Rising evolution.

Having completed my first year as CEO, I remain so thankful and honored to be leading this organization and being entrusted with its amazing legacy. As we work on our strategic plan, I encourage you to reach out to me and share any thoughts on the future of our organization.

Additionally, we’ve looked at our data, and our online Kappan readership is almost 50 times as large as our print magazine readership each month. For this reason, we are considering digital-only editions of our magazine and would love to hear from you, our readers, about any thoughts or concerns you may have about the possibility of digital-only releases in the future.

We are here to make your experience in PDK and Educators Rising as strong as possible and look forward to a bright future for our organization together.

This article appears in the September 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 106, No. 1, p. 61..