AT A GLANCE
Headquarters
New York, New York
Social Entrepreneur
Elisabeth Stock, Cofounder & CEO
Year Founded
1999
Website
http://powermylearning.org/
Mission:
PowerMyLearning strengthens the learning relationships between students, teachers and families so every student succeeds. PowerMyLearning partners with schools and districts in under-resourced communities across the country to provide personalized learning services proven to improve student achievement, teacher practice, and family engagement. More than 40,000 schools nationwide use its digital learning platform, PowerMyLearning Connect.
Vision:
PowerMyLearning strives for all children to be able to power their learning through a combination of technology and the people who matter most to their success – teachers and parents.
Approach:
PowerMyLearning partners with schools serving low-income communities and provides professional development for educators and family engagement services. Underlying the work is PowerMyLearning Connect, an award-winning free digital platform that already has registered users in more than 40% of public school communities across the nation and is growing fast.
For students to power their learning, technology must support the learning relationships below.
- Teachers personalize instruction to meet the diverse needs of their students instead of “teaching to the middle”
- Teachers weave in student choice, self-reflection, and collaborative peer work as part of classroom instruction
- Teachers and parents help each other in supporting students’ learning
- Parents have confidence in helping their children learn, especially now that their children are learning differently than they did
- Families have access to quality educational resources to support learning and exploration at home
Impact
- Partner schools in four regions of the country outperformed comparison schools in math proficiency by an average of 7.0 percentage points each year.
- Students display increasing ownership over their learning throughout the school year with 87% agreeing that “I know how to find PowerMyLearning [Connect] digital learning activities to help me learn things in math class that I do not understand”.
- More than 84% of teachers say that our support was among the most valuable support they’ve experienced in their career.
- At a high-poverty partner school in Washington Heights, New York City, the percentage of sixth graders with learning disabilities who met the math standards in the 2012-2016 school year increased by 36% — nine times the city-wide increase of 4%.