S01E08 -- Helping Educators find Higher Quality Professional Learning, An Interview with Annie Morrison and Litsy Witkowski

Edspective Podcast

Interview with Annie Morrison and Litsy Witkowski In this episode, Jared and Jared are joined by Litsy and Annie from Rivet Education. They share how Rivet’s Professional Learning Partner Guide is helping educators find higher quality professional learning that effectively supports the implementation of high-quality instructional materials. Annie Morrison is a public relations professional with more than 16 years of experience in the education, retail, broadcasting, and nonprofit sectors. As co-founder and principal consultant at Rivet Education, she works with state education agencies to develop and execute cohesive academic strategies to scale the use of high-quality instructional materials with a specific focus on the communications needed to execute those strategies well. Before founding Rivet, Annie served as the Director of Communications for the Louisiana Department of Education where she managed and led educator relations for the agency. During her seven years with the agency, she developed and executed state-wide and national public relation strategies related to the state’s academic plan, impacting over 100 school systems and 50,000 educators state-wide. Litsy Witkowski specializes in working with states to establish the conditions for strong instruction in every classroom. Her work is grounded in the belief that teachers deserve both high-quality instructional materials that get students excited to learn and job-embedded support that allows them to use those materials in a way that maximizes student outcomes. Before founding Rivet, Litsy served as Rebecca Kockler’s Chief of Staff on the Academic Content team at the Louisiana Department of Education. In this role, Litsy helped develop and lead a multi-pronged strategy for scaling the adoption and implementation of HQIM across the state. This included overseeing the PL that LDOE provides directly to educators (e.g. Teacher Leader Summit and Supervisor Collaborations); developing and leveraging a strong vendor marketplace (e.g. LDOE’s PD Vendor Guide); harnessing the power and expertise of local educators to provide content- and curriculum-specific professional development to thousands of teachers across Louisiana (e.g. Teacher Leaders and Content Leaders); and aligning incentives to these strategies (e.g. school system planning process).