SOUTH SIDE PRINCIPAL HONORED WITH LEADERSHIP AWARD FOR IMPLEMENTING PERSONALIZED LEARNING
South Side Principal Honored With Leadership Award For Implementing Personalized Learning
BY KATHERINE NEWMAN
Principal Miyoshi Knox from Stagg School of Excellence in Englewood was recently honored with the 2019 LEAP Leader Award at the annual LEAP InnovatED Summit hosted by LEAP Innovations. The LEAP Leader Award is given to an educator who has been recognized as a catalyst for change in their school and taken a leadership role in incorporating personalized learning.
LEAP Innovations is a national nonprofit organization headquartered in Chicago that connects innovation and education to transform how students learn. LEAP works with educators and innovators to discover, pilot, and scale innovative personalized learning practices and technologies, according to information provided by LEAP Innovations.
For the last eight years, Knox has been the principal of Stagg School of Excellence. During that time, she adopted the LEAP Learning Framework and lead her team as they transformed the school into a personalized learning environment.
“For us here at Stagg, [personalized learning] is a way for students to have an opportunity to engage in their own learning in a meaningful and productive way. It is a way to increase student engagement, both cognitively and emotionally. We use personalized learning as an avenue,” said Knox.
Personalized learning helps the faculty at Stagg School of Excellence get to know the students and create a meaningful learning experience for them.
“Personalized learning to me is expanding our thinking about ways of new learning for our students,” said Knox.
Personalizing education creates learning experiences that are tailored to each student’s individual needs, strengths, and interests. This approach offers students the independence to guide their learning and develops leadership skills and critical thinking as they master new concepts. Since implementing personalized learning, Stagg School of Excellence has risen from a level 2+ school to a level 1 school, according to information provided by LEAP Innovations.
Stagg School of Excellence is located in Englewood at 7424 S. Morgan St. and is made up of 388 students from grades pre-K through eighth. Of the 388 students, 94.6 percent are African American and 91.8 percent are low-income, according to information provided by Chicago Public Schools.
“We know, because we are here in this community, there’s a lot of trauma that’s happening and students are going through a lot,” said Knox who is also from Englewood.
To build student-teacher relationships and give students an outlet for their stress and trauma, the teachers pass out feeling cards every day where they can share what they are going through with their teacher and indicate if they need help.
“If the teacher is alerted that the student needs help right now, that teacher allows the students to take a cool down pass to go see the counselor or to work on some other kind of a social-emotional assignment, something where they are able to deal with their social and emotional needs first,” said Knox.
Building the strong student-teacher relationship is part of what has made personalized learning so successful at Stagg School of Excellence.
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