Following more than a year’s worth of program development and research, we have been working hard to “draw down” our lessons learned and to put forth version 2.0 of our Power2 programming. It has been an intense year of work collaborating with the customers we serve to bring them products and services that are viable—meaning they will address challenges central to their core mission, and that they will be capable of utilizing the products and services given their limited time and money.
We continue to strive for the simplicity beyond complexity in all aspects of our work. They call it the “simplicity beyond complexity” perhaps because you must work through many iterations that are more complex and cumbersome than they need to be before you get down to something refined, efficient, and ultimately effective. We are striving to find the unique contribution that fully utilizes our talents, abilities and passions, all the while doing so through deliverables that are intuitive, useful, user-friendly, and cost-effective.
We are not saying that we’re done evolving our programming (that will hopefully never end); we are saying that we believe that this year’s programming offers a solution to our customers that solves many of the core challenges they face generally, and many of the specific challenges they faced in utilizing version 1.0 of programming (i.e., Power2Learn and Power2Teach).
We now have distilled our Power2 programming into a single brand, Power2Achieve. Within that we are offering three kinds of products, Power2Achieve Foundations, which is a student curricular resource, Power2Achieve Professional Development Toolkits, and our Culture of Excellence & Ethics Assessment (CEEA). These three main products and services are built around eight focus areas, which are broken into 10 unit topics, designed to develop specific competencies. P2A_2010-11_Competencies_Portrait
We have developed these as a way of distilling down into practical and replicable programming the theoretical vision of character and culture introduced in the Smart & Good Report. This research and development work was primarily underwritten by grants from the John Templeton and Sanford N. McDonnell Foundations, as well as through the sales of our products and services. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, our approach is to utilize foundation and donor support to underwrite the initial development of the products and services, then to utilize the ongoing sale of those products and services to create a self-sustaining organization.
We are continuing to seek partnerships with schools, foundations, funders, and local, state, and national education associations to further enhance our efforts. This will be an exciting and important year for those efforts. Today we’re excited to share with you Unit 1 of the Power2Achieve Foundations. We’re providing this unit for those interested to see and use in an open-source format, as we believe it will be an important opportunity for more people to see and experience this resource, which will hopefully lead to growth from others interested in using or supporting our work. Unit 1.1 Access
In this Power2Achieve Foundations Unit 1.1: Consider the Perspective of Others, you’ll find four lesson plans for classroom instruction, Power2Achieve Tools you can use in the classroom, on the field or court, in meetings with parents, in your professional community, and many other contexts. You’ll also find suggestions for adaptations and extensions that will continue to be added throughout the year from us here at IEE and from educators using the materials.
There are some simple things that we ask folks to agree to when accessing the materials. These are being shared open-source, 100% free for your use, but we still want to create an intentional community of users. If you like the materials from Unit 1, we’d love to bring you more of what we’ve got to help you shape the culture of your school in an intentional way with Power2Achieve programming. Email us at info@excellenceandethics.com or call us at 315-677-8114. If you like what we’ve got to offer, don’t forget to share the word with others.
Stay tuned to this blog for more resources, information, and ideas throughout the year. We’ve got more exciting announcements coming during the month of August. So subscribe to the blog now, if you haven’t already, in order to get announcements of new blog posts–and encourage your colleagues to do the same!
