Vertigo: Transforming teaching and learning in public education
Vertigo tells the timely story of an Indiana school district’s dramatic transformation. Over ten years, district leader and superintendent Dena Cushenberry with her team navigated a turbulent policy environment to identify goals for student performance within a personalized learning environment and establish a clear moral purpose and set of core values to impact teaching and learning. Over her tenure leading Warren Township in Marion County, Dr. Cushenberry developed a culture of trust and respect, retained talented teachers and administrators, and built community engagement programs while securing the funding to pursue major goals.
Instructive, hopeful, critical, and prescient, Dr. Cushenberry documents her successes as well as failures in order to boost the next generation of American educators.
Book Highlights
The follow key points gathered from two reviewers:Vertigo tells a timely story of how one school district, Warren Township, one of ten districts surrounding Indianapolis, Indiana, under the leadership of a experienced and innovative superintendent, Dena Cushenberry. She and her district team navigated a turbulent policy environment to identify goals for student performance, establish clear moral purposes and core values underlying their actions, develop a culture of trust and respect, retain talented teachers and administrators, and built community engagement programs while securing the funding to pursue their goals.
- The vision, sensitivity, caring, and communication from a great leader who made preparing all students to high levels an urgent collective endeavor.
- The Warren Way story details a long and deliberate intent that did not happen overnight or change overnight. It prioritized personalizing learning for both students and teachers. Its core value makes learning constant and time-variable an important concept for others to consider.
- A leader cannot do it alone. It takes the care and nurturing of a team of people in a supportive and caring community to get it done.
- A set of issues that were confronted are common today – like finding resources to support teacher recruitment and retention while re-affirming a culture of collaboration and teacher development.
- Getting a school board to suspend teacher evaluation based upon state accountability by emphasizing internal accountability for student and teacher success by tracking district support to the classroom.
