Inside Iron County's Reinvention of its Schools
In this interview, Michael Horn talks with Corey Henwood, the lead of innovation for Iron County School District in Cedar City, Utah, about the district’s multi‑year transformation toward personalized, competency‑based education. The district serves about 11,000 students across 16 schools, many in rural and high‑poverty areas. Corey explains how the district first defined a "Portrait of a Graduate" and a set of essential, transferable skills—communication, critical thinking, problem solving, resilience, growth mindset—and then built proficiency scales and standards‑based grading to make those skills explicit at each grade band. Human‑centered design and project‑based learning are used to integrate content with these competencies. The conversation covers several flagship initiatives: Launch High School, a mastery‑driven school where students demonstrate mastery through community‑based design‑thinking projects; Iron Online programs that expanded during the pandemic to serve both district students and homeschool families; district‑wide blended learning centers that give students agency over pace and path; and personalized professional development for teachers. Corey describes the change‑management process—piloting, community co‑design, iterative feedback, and leveraging state support—to overcome resistance, especially around moving away from traditional letter grades. He details how the district modified the existing gradebook to show standards mastery rather than a single letter, and how they communicated this to parents. Finally, they discuss staffing innovations, including co‑teaching models, classified staff mentors, and other supports to reduce teacher workload while maintaining personalized relationships. The interview highlights the pandemic as an accelerant, the importance of choice for families, and the district’s ongoing focus on scaling personalization while streamlining non‑essential tasks for educators.
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Welcome to the future of Education. I'm Michael Horne and really excited about today's conversation with Corey Henwood. He leads innovation at the Iron County School District in Utah. And it's an important conversation, I think, because as you'll see the breadth and depth of innovation that they are doing across the district, I think shines a light on what a lot of districts need to be thinking about as they create a portfolio of options for, for kids. But not just a portfolio of options, a thoughtful set of options that really helps children find their passions and sort of catapult into the future in which we're living right now. And so I'm going to bring Corey up in just a moment. But as always, if you like these videos, make sure to get on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, like them, let other people know about them so that they can find this content as well. And with that, I will bring up Corey first. Corey, welcome. Thanks for being with me today.
Hey, thanks so much for having me, Michael. I'm excited to chat with you today.
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. And before we go too deep, why don't you just tell folks about Iron county schools and sort of where you are in Utah, who you serve and some basic facts just to level set us.
Yeah. Well, Iron County School District sits in and around Cedar City, Utah, which is the southern part of Utah. We've got a school district that just has under 11,000 students. So it's a moderate sized school district for the state of Utah and we serve wide variety of students, but it's majority rural students as well as in a space that is high intergenerational poverty among the highest in Utah.
Gotcha. And when you say rural, so how many schools do you have over. I assume it's a relatively big geography if you've got 11,000 students, but it's rural. So how many schools do you have? How many students per school? What does that look like?
Yeah, so there are wide variety of school numbers. We have some schools as large as 1400 students and others as small as 100 students. And we have 16 schools in our district and those serve students from K through 12th grades.
Yeah, terrific. No, I think it's helpful just to give folks a picture of what you all are working with. And here's my favorite question because a few weeks ago when we were talking about this, you sent me a list of all of the innovations that you all have been pioneering, not just in Covid, but frankly for several years in many cases. Can you give folks sort of a rundown if you will, of all the innovations you're doing, the different levels of children you're working with, and a flavor of what they look like.
Yeah. And it really ties into our strategic plan and vision in Iron county in regards to how we want to personalize for our students and for their benefit, not only for our students, but with our educators as well. So this idea of personalization, focusing on mentoring relationships for both teachers and students, and then ultimately the idea of building on what we refer to in Iron county as essential skills. So those would be those transferable skills that are going to prepare students for their success in the future, no matter what, what path they take. Skills like communication skills, critical thinking and problem solving skills, being resilient, exhibiting and working on a growth mindset, these types of skills. So one of the places we started was really to define what those skills were and define our portrait of a graduate in our school and in our district and in our state. So we've had those conversations at all those levels and really operationalize that work through planning projects and assessments and opportunities for students to exhibit and develop those skills and gain feedback on those skills. So that's one of the places we started the other side of this with relationships and personalization. Where we began was recognizing that we need to design with our communities, including our community of educators and our community of parents and students, and not just for them. And so this has led us to a multitude, as you kind of mentioned earlier, Michael, of options for our students, personalized pathways for students, schools of choice, online programs, really personalized programs at all levels. And so that's. That's just a taste of where we're at. I could talk about any of those specifically, too, in a little more detail.
Yeah. Well, so let's start with the essential skills that you identified in the portrait of a graduate. Because I think that's so probably important.
Right.
For change management was to get agreement on that. There's a bit of a tug of war, as you know, in education of essential skills like problem solving and things of that nature being context specific. Right. Like, if I can think critically about education, you put me at Google, I'm probably pretty lost. So how do you think about the interweaving of knowledge with those essential skills? But also, I'm going to add one other fold in there that I'd love you to address. I've been making the argument that growth mindset and things like that, wonderful things to talk about, but unless we model them through true growth mindset in action, they're unlikely to be believed at some level. And so mastery based learning and competency based learning are sort of critical elements to actually make those part of a student's journey and sort of part of their consciousness, if you will. What's your take on both of those questions?
Yeah, I'll start with the latter part first. You know, we need to as educators, as leaders in education, exhibit the same type of skills and work to develop those type of competencies, including a growth mindset and looking to continue to grow in education and to develop as we teach those skills for students to be self directed and to have a growth mindset and to continue to seek to responsibly learn and own their own learning. These are skills that we need to also work on as educators. And part of it is at a systems level as we've taken this approach to design with our community. Where are the places that we need to work on so that we can have a successful implementation and education model for your student? So that's part of it. The second piece. When it comes to the interweaving of knowledge and education with those essential skills, there are places where those things clearly overlap. I think they often drive each other deeper. So instead of this focus has been purely in academics and a mile wide inch deep googleable curriculum. We're looking to develop these essential skills and drive learning deeper. Interesting findings that we've had in our early adoption of this is that as students go deeper, and this is validated by research done with project based learning and other things in essence, but as students go deeper into their learning, they're able to retain more of that knowledge, that academic knowledge and skill set as well. So these things can be done in tandem. It's not an either or. And I think people feel that tug of war happening as you alluded to. And it just needs to be a place where we come together knowing that we're designing for our students futures and not based on the nostalgia of our past in school.
I was muted. Sorry about that. It sounds like you guys have done the hard work of really defining what it means to be a critical thinker or what problem solving would look like so that as a student is working through say a project or a new domain of knowledge, it's clear to them what things they should be showing as opposed to making critical thinking sort of this amorphous, amorphous like oh, I should synthesize and evaluate, whatever the heck that means sort of thing. Am I catching that correctly? It sounds like you guys have been there. So what does that look like from Your perspective?
Yeah, yeah. So we've brought teams of educators and business leaders together to help us develop some of these. What we determine are proficiency scales for what this looks like at each grade band and to decide what, for example, the ambiguity around skills like creative thinking or critical thinking and problem solving is a barrier for educators to begin because they're like, well, I'm not sure if one, I can even teach or assess that, and two, how I'm going to do it. So laying out what that looks like at each grade band and at each grade level is part of the key to success in this, so that it becomes a little more concrete. The other piece that has been a support for educators is using a process that allows them to integrate their content and these essential skills together. We spent a lot of time in our district helping our educators utilize the human centered design thinking process. And as students move through that process, maybe starting with a frame challenge around their content, they go through and exercise, you know, some of these competencies, such as creative thinking and critical thinking and problem solving, being resilient when they gather feedback that maybe isn't always welcome. Right. As well as being able to communicate their ideas and effectively work together and collaborate. So these pieces are developed inside a process that is, again, fairly straightforward, although it can lead to all sorts of different and unique and creative solutions. And that makes it palatable for educators in their community.
Yeah, that makes sense. It sounds like it was a lot of work, though, to define that and get everyone on board and so forth. How long does a process like that take?
Yeah, well, it's been a number of years that we've been moving in this direction. I think our state, luckily, is very welcoming to this type of innovation and is leading in a lot of ways the work of the portrait of a graduate at the state level, as well as personalized competency based education at the state level. So this also helps to reinforce the notion that, hey, we're not just the only ones out here doing this wild and crazy work. And although it seems empowering and engaging to design with everyone and take on these skills that we know are going to help our students be better prepared for not just something, not some career, but anything in their life. It feels great and everything. But if you're not, I guess, supported at the different levels of structure in education, then it becomes very complicated and there's a lot of questioning. So our state has been wonderful support. Our district has been a wonderful support in that we have model schools. One of those schools I mentioned to you, Michael, is launch High school. It's a personalized competency based learning environment where students progress and advance based on mastery. And the way they demonstrate that mastery is more than 50% of what they do. There is these design thinking projects where they take on a problem in the community, they try to apply what they've learned, they work with a local business partner or community leader and they attempt to make an impact and provide creative solutions and implement those with our community. So that's a unique approach to really showing that you've mastered content is to be able to apply it in that way and also develop those same competencies at the same time. So having all those pieces, the models, the support at the school and district level, and the support at the state level is part of the key ingredient, I think to this. As you design with your community, it's.
Super helpful just to think through. I'm curious, I'm going to list some of what you sent me just for folks so they get a sense of just how deep this work is and the breadth of it. So you had launch high school that you just talked about. You have iron online programs which we can talk about. You've talked about expanding in person personalized competency based education into the schools themselves, personalized professional development, which you mentioned as well the portrait of graduate work. You've talked about the explicit, you called it standards based grading in our emails, but basically making all of these requirements and standards and competencies very explicit and what success, what mastery looks like around them. And then you do blended learning district wide? I believe so. Every school has this online component where students are able to take some agency over their learning and learn at the right pace and path for them through digital tools to some degree. That's a huge expanse of things. Did I catch everything? Is I guess the first question, are there things that people ought to know about how you got started down this path for all of these different models?
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It has been a rather large undertaking. I think one of the things that has been most tricky is determining what pieces are we going to provide support for and expect district wide, what places are we going to provide opportunities for innovation? What places are we going to provide models for innovation? All those questions need to be asked and answered not just in a boardroom, but with your community. We've made attempts, we had made attempts initially to do some things district wide that were not welcome and we need to again design with your community on these things now. You know, the Pandemic has been a great accelerator for this work as well. So we've been assisted, I think, in some ways to provide more personalized supports for both educators and for our students and families to provide these opportunities for people to learn more about blended learning, personalized copy based learning through micro credentials. Other opportunities that maybe wouldn't have been as welcome had we not gone through this. You know, it's a silver lining to the pandemic that we've gone through in education. However, on top of that, we have set out some of these other pieces that have come about, have we have acted in some cases, and in others we've been acted upon and then decided to act. Right. So our online programs are very new in Iron County. We had not taken the approach of having the personalized competency based programs, had all been focused on in person learning and blended learning. And when the pandemic kind of stood up and smacked us, we decided we need to get on board with this online learning opportunity. Not only has it been a great benefit to our students who we've traditionally served in our schools, who have decided to go online, but also to our families who live in our local area who have traditionally been homeschooled. We've been able to work with partners like my tech high that I know you're connected with.
Yeah, wonderful program.
Yeah, yeah. So these are just great opportunities. You know, unfortunately, and I don't think this is the case in our district, but in other places where I've worked at an education, the work with homeschool families and those who have chosen to go that route is sometimes not all that smooth. And there's some friction there between families who homeschool, as I'm sure you're aware, Michael. And so we've really welcomed those folks into the. Into whatever support level they would like in the district, whether that's curriculum, special ed services, events, activities, opportunities to personalize and really allow them to use this cafeteria approach to education to select the things that are best for them. And whatever supports we can provide, we hope that it's helpful to families instead of saying, well, if you want to go that route, then our hands are tied, you know, and it's just a different approach, and I think it's been welcome in our community.
Yeah, it sounds like Covid was an accelerant to this. I'd love you just to go one step deeper because I think it's fascinating the number of choices, like you said, that you provide. There's not a one size fits all path. It also sounds like that was a bit of the change management realizing, hey, maybe the whole community isn't ready for this. We don't want to be doing innovation. These were your words, I think to them, we want to be doing it with them. And so what are the pockets where this would be welcome? Let's implement it there and then maybe it spreads, maybe it stays. You know, working with X number of families, that's okay. Why, you know, from the perspective of the parents and students with whom you work, why do you feel like they have been so. Having so many choices has been so important to them and that's been a key ingredient in the change management.
Yeah, I think choice is a key ingredient to change management because if again people are feeling like they're acted upon in any way and we see this with whether it's reality or perception in regards to political agendas in schools, whatever it is, if people feel like they're acted upon and they don't have decision making opportunities at the local level, then there's an uproar and it and it should be that way. The schools and our school districts are designed to serve the local public and in that way we need to design with them. And so this is a great opportunity. We know what in many cases through research and other means, what is best for education. So we try to implement those as best we can as wide as possible. And in regards to our implementation of the development of these transferable competencies and standards reference reporting and standards based grading, this is part of the thing that we knew we needed to approach as widely as possible. But the way we went about it the first time and lesson learned for me doing Innovation district and our team was that we knew this was going to be tough to grasp for people. Let's just put it all together in a nice package and here you go. Well, that wasn't the right way to go. We piloted that approach and within a quarter brought our community back in, our educators back in and said oh, let's take this apart. And we went through and to your point earlier, we exhibited the same mindsets and competencies that design thinking espouses as well as our competencies and our essential skills. We talked about say look, we need to be to take a step back, we need to look and communicate with our team, find out what's going to work and try another iteration. And so that's been really successful as well in our district. And so now we have these things that are district wide with blended learning centers based grading opportunities for all to engagement, whether that's micro credentials or online learning opportunities. And then we have these models of choice for folks like Launch High School. And our online programs, including we serve five different online programs now within a year, have pulled all this together and it's been a ton of work, but I think it's. Our community appreciates it and I'm happy to provide those options when people need them.
Fascinating on a bunch of fronts I want to pick. Not to go back to your nightmare, I guess, of introducing standards based grading the first time, go for it. It's fascinating to me because I was recently in a workshop with a principal, middle school principal in a district who'd gone to standards based grading and basically was getting pushback from a subset of parents in the district. Right. Saying get that out of here. And I talked about this openly as well, about how my mom once called me up in an airport, yelling at me about how the local school was getting rid of A through F grading and could you imagine how terrible and dumbing down of education they were being at this moment? And I guess my question is we hear that sort of rhetoric a fair bit when you're going to standards based grading and things of that nature. How did you all sort of work through that challenge? Right. Like people had this reaction of I don't want that for any number of reasons. Right. It doesn't look like what I'm used to. It's, it's, you know, there's many more standards than I want that I want to know. I just want to know where, where does my kid rank and sort of sum up, like all these different reasons, I suspect. How did you unpack that for folks and work to a place where the community got on board over time? How did you implement that?
Yeah, so we began with this opportunity to pick at, I guess, the places where there were clearly holes in our grading philosophy and systems that all people agreed with. We also focused on research and elements around teacher clarity, around student self efficacy and building student confidence and really being accurate about what we report. So we, we talked about these elements at length with our community and allowed them to help us design. Because what ends up being at the forefront of this is what do students, parents, teachers see on the front of the gradebook? Right. So all this philosophical change, many people were very much on board with, but when they start to see, as your mother alluded to, right. The letter grades are not there anymore, it's something else. That's the piece that needed some redesigning and some refocus. And I think that was good feedback for us to hear because people agreed, hey, we want our students to know clearly what the targets are and how to achieve them. That piece we totally agree with and that's been ambiguous before. We want our students to be able to reassess when needed and gain confidence to know that if they failed the first time, they're not done for, for the course quarter or for the term. Right. So these elements around reassessment and repurposing homework and coming up with these, the importance of our essential skills, all these we had large agreement on. The difference was how does it look? I can't read this. I don't know what I'm seeing here. Right. And so we made alterations to our traditional grade book to make it work within instead of adopting a new grading platform. And that was part of the key difference. How do we make our traditional system work within something that is legible and readable for people that fits with our philosophy. And so that was part of the redesign of what we took on and glad that we did it. At first there was some heartache, there were some nightmares. And we've gotten past that point and I'm happy to where we're at right now in our district.
I think it's a fascinating story. One more question on this, just because it's a topic I'm super interested in right now, which is you said you ended up modifying the existing grade book as opposed to bringing in a new thing. So what does it look like for parents and students now when they get those standards based grades, if you will, what does that look like? And how do you sort of peel back the onion, I guess of like, oh, it's not just a B in chemistry. Like, these are the standards you've mastered. This is what you're still working on. How do you negotiate that?
Yeah. So some of these give and take points included. We were adamant, we wanted to list the standards that were expected and were going to be assessed and what the clear expectations were for each of those. We didn't want there to be some form of, hey, you've got a blanket B in chemistry. We want to know that you understand this portion of it around atoms and the periodic table. And you don't understand certain chemical formulas. Like, you need to know what, where you are at and what things you're missing so that you can address those head on, both as a parent and as a student and for a teacher to be able to intervene. So all those pieces were key to us. The piece that we were flexible on was what does it look like at the end of the day when there is a letter grade that goes on the transcript, what is that going to look like? Is it going to be a letter that you're familiar with or is it going to be a series of symbols you're unfamiliar with? And frankly, the choice of whether to use a letter grade 7 symbol at the end of the day to represent that body of learning or to use another set of symbols is kind of. It really doesn't matter. As long as you have these categories listed out and clear expectations for what is expected, then that's the real key piece. And I think what propels things like standards based grading towards our eventual goal, which is more personalized competency based systems where they're more self directed students advance based on mastery of those listed standards.
So I think where you came out makes a ton of sense and I love it. And it's super instructive, I think, to a lot of folks who are wrestling with this right now. Last question as we wrap up our time together, which is you talked already about how the pandemic accelerated some of these efforts. The move to all online learning, embracing certain populations that maybe had opted out before but now can find a place in the district. The pandemic is obviously still with us. Delta variant is wreaking havoc on a lot of plans and playing with the anxieties of a lot of parents. I'm curious, what do you see as we look for more silver linings out of this? What else are you all looking to do or maybe stop doing as you continue to work your way through this strange moment in American history of schooling?
Yeah, well, one of the things we've learned is over the course of this past year and a half that our teachers are tired, that they have a lot going on and they are. But human. Right. Despite the labels of superhuman and superhero and things.
I was gonna say despite waiting for Superman and so forth.
Right. Yeah, you know, so, so very much so. We need to streamline what are the things that are essential for our educators to take on. And that includes some ads that I think are warranted that we've learned through this pandemic. A higher degree of focus on relationships, a higher degree of focus on personalization and blended learning. Clearly those types of things, and I think the development of these essential skills, those are ads, but with that there needs to be some subtraction. There needs to be some things that we say, hey, this is no longer what you must do as part of your day to day work. These are not things that you're responsible for any longer as a teacher providing additional supports in the schools. They may be in the form of social workers or counselors or other elements of this that can support that work without having again, all of it be weighed on the backs of our of our teachers. As willing as they are sometimes they know no balance and they need to be provided supports and structures in which they can be flourished really in their work. So that's part of what I think we see going forward. I know as our district has talked now about what are those essential elements we need our focus on? That's one piece. I don't think as a system that we move away from this opportunity to continue to personalize, to expand opportunities to personalize for students. I see that accelerating and not decelerating. I think that's a great thing for our community and it does add extra work to our team. But I think it's the work that we're asked to do. And so there'll be different moves in different directions, some in the plus column and some in the minus. But I think overall things are moving in the right direction and it's an exciting time to be an educator.
I lied quick other quick follow up on that. Just because your answer and teaching was I think spot on and so fascinating. Are you guys playing with alternative staffing models or co teaching or things like that to try to distribute the load at all or create peers for teachers or things like that?
Yeah, we certainly are. So at launch high school we have a different model for educators and as we expand that model, it'll look more like we have folks who are primarily responsible for things like the curriculum and the oversight of the curriculum. And this also occurs in our online programs and we have others, many classified staff folks who maybe are not credentialed in education but are wonderful mentors, wonderful coaches, tutors. So we increase the amount of face to face and personalized interactions that students have with folks who care for them. We know that relationship piece is important. We know that our personalized piece is important and that the educators work cannot be dwindled by having hundreds of students to care for in that same way. And so working together with classified staff as a support and increasing that level of support is part of how we will likely shift much of our education model, I think as we move forward.
Corey, fascinating, thoughtful, and I think a lot of folks are gonna learn from this and I certainly did today. So I super appreciate you being on with us today and appreciate everyone who watches this for tuning in to what's been a fascinating conversation. And we'll see you next time on the future of education yeah.
Thank you, Michael.
