Broadening the educational guidelines has Elizabethton taking the national spotlight this week.
Members of the Elizabethton High School faculty — including Dustin Hensley, Alex Campbell and Daniel Profitt — will be interviewed live on Wednesday, Sept. 14, on a national livestream by XQ Super School Project at 4 p.m.
The livestream, which will announced the winner of the XQ Super School Project grant, begins at 3 p.m. and can be viewed on the XQ Super School Project Facebook page online. The EHS teachers will take the air at 4 p.m.
“This was a national grant competition looking for the best ideas on how to recreate and modernize how high school is implemented in the United States,” Hensley, who serves as the EHS library media specialist and Betsy Scrivener adviser, said Monday. “Our application made it to the finals, but we were informed over the summer that we did not win.”
Hensley, Proffitt and Campbell, along with Campbell’s Sociology class, were the ones that came together to place the application. While it did not win, it left an impact on XQ.
“We received a phone call today that there will be a national livestream on Wednesday to announce the winner of the competition,” Hensley said. “They enjoyed our ideas so much that they are sending a production team here to EHS to interview us about our ideas for the broadcast and present us with an award.”
Laurene Powell Jobs created the $50 million project, known as the XQ Super School Project, in September 2015 as a way to “rethink” the way high school is approached by teachers and students.
According to the project’s website, “XQ: The Super School Project is an open call to America’s students, parents, educators, civic leaders, businesses, inventors, entrepreneurs, artists and designers to meet the challenge of preparing our students for the future by designing the next American high school. Our public high schools were built for a different era – when we were preparing our workforce for factory life in an industrial economy. Today, we need new skills – and an agile and flexible intelligence for a rapidly changing future – yet, our high schools have not changed. They remain frozen in time.”
It was those items utilized by the local teachers that has the school being recognized at a national level.
“We focused on experiential learning, community service and group based learning that was designed to force students to think critically and find ways to solve issues that benefit local needs,” Hensley said. “We wanted students to learn how to excel in their own community.”
And the city students also put their mark on the project.
“We had students conduct research into pedagogical and cognitive studies to find the best ways for learning to thrive,” Hensley added. “There are no textbooks and no grades. Students pass their classes solely upon their ability to prove the worth of their work.”