When Kentucky enacted new standards for public school assessment and accountability in 2009 and began discussing whether to retire its existing curricula for all teacher and principal preparatory programs by 2011, KET (Kentucky Educational Television) conceived a media-rich engagement effort designed to increase key stakeholders’ knowledge of and access to excellent school leadership practices and to broaden general public awareness of successful components of educational reform. To accompany nationwide PBS distribution of the documentary The Principal Story, KET created profiles of effective Kentucky school principals and administrators for distribution among educators; produced a televised panel discussion; developed a resource-rich Web site; produced Literacy Leadership: Stories of Schoolwide Success, an award-winning collection of on-demand videos that features Kentucky principals implementing systemic reform in literacy instruction; and developed Education Matters, a weekly public affairs program exploring educational issues facing Kentuckians.

In its Literacy Leadership project, KET (Kentucky Educational Television) collaborated with the state Department of Education to expand its CD-ROM and Internet-based professional development resources for literacy instruction, providing 50 sortable segments from interviews and other footage to show examples of effective literacy leadership in action. The project took cameras into nine Kentucky schools, where changes in literacy instruction resulted in measurable, dramatic improvements among all student demographic groups.

KET (Kentucky Educational Television) produced Art to Heart, a series of eight professional development modules that explores the importance of visual arts, music, dance, drama, and literature in the lives of infants, toddlers, and young children. KET’s informal training approach, which concentrates on participants sharing experiences in small groups, helps teachers overcome challenges and form lesson plans that will help integrate the arts into their daily curricula of science, mathematics, and reading.