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Through client-connected projects and real-world learning, Guadalupe Centers High School practices the Agility of Developing Others every day. By using The Foundation’s Career Literacy resources, GCHS has created an environment where students are not only developing themselves but learning how to support, collaborate with, and inspire others.
Developing Skills Through Real-World Projects
At the heart of their curriculum is GCHS’s Impact Academy, a program designed to immerse students in real-world, client-connected projects. Impact Academy is where students actively practice communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and proactivity, while solving problems for real organizations.
At the start of each trimester, GCHS hosts Selection Day, a reverse-pitch experience in which community partner organizations present real challenges and invite students to apply. Typically, 10–15 projects are available, and 35 students apply for the opportunities they feel best align with their strengths and interests.
Projects span a wide range of industries, including banking, food services, healthcare, conservation, social media, graphic design, and more, exposing students to diverse career pathways while reinforcing the value of working across different strengths
This process immediately shifts ownership to students, asking them to think critically about where they can contribute most and how they can grow alongside others.
Using Agilities to Identify Strengths and Collaboration
Before students ever step into a client project, they engage deeply with the Agilities framework by taking the Agile Work Profiler©. This early reflection helps students understand how they approach challenges, teamwork, and problem-solving.
Students are asked to identify their top Agilities, explain why those Agilities represent their strengths, and justify how they make them a strong fit for specific projects. In doing so, students build critical thinking and proactivity while learning how to advocate for themselves.
The Agilities also guide how students think about teamwork. If a student wants to work with a specific classmate, they must explain how their Agilities complement one another and why they would function effectively as a team. Rather than assigning groups, GCHS empowers students to make intentional, real-world decisions about collaboration, mirroring how teams are formed in the workplace.
Essential Skills as an Evaluation Tool
Once selected, students move through a structured process that begins with redefining and understanding the client’s challenge before transitioning into ideation and execution. Throughout the project, students meet weekly with their clients for 30 minutes to an hour.
Keith Schoen, Academics Coordinator at GCHS, says, “We’ve seen pretty significant growth from beginning to end, not just in the data, but in students’ confidence interacting with adults and managing their own projects.”
A defining feature of Impact Academy is how client partners evaluate students. Clients assess student growth in Essential Skills at the beginning, middle, and end of each project, reinforcing that success is not just about the final deliverable, but about how students communicate ideas, collaborate with others, think critically through challenges, and take initiative.
Keith says the goal is to give students authentic experiences that mirror the real world. By embedding Essential Skills into meaningful work, students learn how their actions impact not only their own outcomes, but the success of their teams and clients.
Reversing the Engagement Cliff by Centering Student Voice
The Impact Academy’s approach also addresses a challenge in education: declining student engagement. Referencing Gallup’s research on the “engagement cliff,” Keith emphasizes that when schools take time to systematically listen to students, understanding their interests, anxieties, and aspirations, engagement begins to rise.
By centering student voice and connecting coursework to real-world impact, the Impact Academy helps students develop a sense of purpose and direction. While the course fulfills an English credit, it opens doors to career paths students may never have considered, showing them how academic skills translate across industries.
As Keith explains, when students make these connections, the impact extends beyond academics. Students become more motivated, socially and emotionally engaged, and confident in their ability to contribute meaningfully.
Preparing Students to Lead and Lift Others
Through the intentional integration of Agilities, Essential Skills, and client-connected learning, Guadalupe Centers High School is preparing students for the future of work, equipping them not only to succeed individually but to develop others along the way.
