The demos on this site are samples I built to show my range. This one actually happened. I wrote the grant, designed the program, and taught it. Middle schoolers at Elko ran a daily live news broadcast, a digital blog, and a student newspaper, and the school kept the program after the grant money ran out. That last part is the outcome I am proudest of.
The pitch was simple. Instead of teaching media literacy from a textbook, students would run actual media. A daily live video announcement broadcast the whole school watched, weekly news stories, a digital blog, and a printed newspaper. Real deadlines, real audience, real editorial decisions about what was worth covering and how to tell it fairly.
I designed the program so students held the jobs. Anchors, producers, reporters, editors. My role shifted from deliverer of content to editor-in-chief and coach, which is exactly the shift I now design into corporate learning. The person doing the work learns the work.
It outlived me, and that was the design. Standardized templates, workflow structures, and student leadership roles meant the program could run without its founder. Several students went on to apply to the communications specialty center at Varina High School.
Documented by the Henrico Education Foundation. Read their project page →
I put student work in front of the whole school every morning because an authentic audience does what no rubric can. Quality became a social fact. Nobody phones in a broadcast their friends are watching.
I organized the class as a newsroom with jobs instead of a course with tasks. Ownership of a role builds identity, and identity is what keeps a thirteen-year-old showing up early to run a soundboard.
I wrote the templates and workflows so the program would survive my departure, and it did. I apply the same test to corporate work now. A learning system that needs its designer forever is a prototype, not a program.
Learning happens inside a community of practice, not adjacent to one. Students were junior members of a real newsroom, moving from the margins toward full participation as their skills grew.
Autonomy, competence, and relatedness drive motivation from the inside. Students chose their stories, owned their roles, and answered to their team. The engagement problem mostly solved itself.
The performance was the assessment. A broadcast that airs, a paper that prints, a blog that publishes. No proxy measures were needed because the real thing happened in public, on a deadline.