Members of our 6th grade teaching team recently had their proposal accepted to present at the at the PAMLE (Pennsylvania Association of Middle Level Educators) conference in February 2023. Teachers Melissa Savage, Ruth Kelemen, Laura Sahlin, Lisa Grieco, and Heather Warley will present: "Unlocking Empathy: How to Empower Students to Create Meaningful Change Using the Design Thinking Process." (Judi Clay and Kevin Canney, who also developed this work, will remain at Benchmark.)
Their presentation will share the exciting long-term project they developed during the 2021-2022 school year, combining design thinking with their science and language arts curriculum and exploring the effect of design thinking processes on executive function skills. The students' work was centered around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Dr. Heather Warley, Benchmark's Director of Institutional Research, found from that this intensive design thinking project not only helped the students gain executive functioning skills, but also provided students with a strong sense of personal satisfaction and a deeper sense of empathy.