When Teachers Need More than Inspiration
When Mitchell Community Schools set aside a Professional Development Day for its certified staff in the middle of a year of district leadership transition, the wellness team didn't want a motivational talk. They wanted their teachers and counselors to walk out with tools they could actually use the next morning. Lead at Any Level® delivered the keynote — Moving from Panic to Purpose: Surviving & Thriving during Unrelenting Change — as a Youth Worker Café in partnership with the Indiana Youth Institute.
Client Snapshot
Mitchell Community Schools is a rural K–12 public district in Mitchell, Indiana, serving the Lawrence County community. Mitchell partners with neighboring small districts through the regional COSMOS consortium to broaden professional development and program offerings that no single district could sustain alone.
The Challenge
Teachers and school staff have absorbed a decade of relentless change — curriculum overhauls, pandemic disruptions, shifting state mandates, staffing instability, and evolving community expectations. For Mitchell's staff, those pressures were compounded by simultaneous transitions at both the superintendent and high school principal levels during the same school year.
The district's wellness coordinators — Assistant Superintendent Meagan Shipley and School Social Worker Krista Kirk — recognized that their staff needed more than inspiration. They needed a shared framework, practical tools, and permission to name what they were feeling. Their bar for success was concrete: if staff walked out feeling like the day had been worth their time and gave them something usable, the session worked.
Coordinating the day added its own pressure. The engagement was funded as a Youth Worker Café through a partnership with the Indiana Youth Institute, scheduled for a district-wide Professional Development Day — a date that remained uncertain until days before the event due to potential weather makeup days following a week of e-learning closures.
Our Approach
Lead at Any Level® delivered a one-hour in-person keynote — Moving from Panic to Purpose: Surviving & Thriving during Unrelenting Change — for approximately 110 certified staff in the Mitchell High School auditorium.
Because the session was in a traditional auditorium with no tables, Amy C. Waninger designed the experience for that format from the start. Each participant received a curated organza bag of session materials waiting on their seat, a deliberate choice that signaled this would be interactive, not passive, before Amy said a word.
Within the keynote, Amy moved the audience through five connected segments:
- Why change is hard, with neuroscience and emotional frameworks for both thinkers and feelers
- The Balloon Activity — participants named a current change, drew it on a balloon, and worked through what they were meant to learn from it and when they could let it go
- Self-care strategies for navigating change
- The Crystal Ball Activity — a structured postcard exercise to identify what's on the horizon, how it might affect them, and one immediate step they could take to prepar
- A personal action plan participants left holding in their hands
Amy grounded delivery in the realities of rural Indiana — drawing on her upbringing in Santa Claus, Indiana — to build credibility with an audience that, as Meagan and Krista put it, can quickly tell when a speaker doesn't understand their world.
The Results
Participant feedback was strong across every dimension that Mitchell cared about. The wellness coordinators rated the session a 9 out of 10 and named two outcomes that mattered most: staff left with concrete tools for self-regulating their response to change, and the personal stories Amy told — including navigating career disruption — landed especially deeply with the predominantly female staff.
Counselors and social-emotional learning leads in the room described the session as aligned with the SEL frameworks the district already values. One school counselor — unprompted — asked whether the content could be adapted for students.
In Their Words
“You make things as easy as possible. I like the prep work beforehand, so that you understand what — and who — you're walking into. A lot of times when people come to rural areas, they don't connect to their audience. They don't understand who they're speaking to. The fact that you take the time to get that information is helpful.”
— Dr. Meagan Shipley
School Health Coordinator
Lawrence County Community Health
“You're very relatable to a lot of people. They need those examples to build the trust — but also to connect, and make it something they can relate to. If they don't feel like they can relate, they're not going to engage. Sharing your examples and being real with everybody is very important.”
— Krista Kirk
School Social Worker
Mitchell Community Schools
A Closer Look: Delivered as a Youth Worker Café
Mitchell's session was delivered as a Youth Worker Café in partnership with the Indiana Youth Institute. The Youth Worker Café framework — IYI's program for bringing learning to youth-serving professionals across Indiana — let Mitchell access keynote-grade professional development at a fraction of the cost a single rural district could absorb on its own. The model puts that caliber of professional development within reach of small districts that couldn't independently afford it.
Ready to Help Your Team Move from Panic to Purpose?
Whether you're supporting teachers through district transitions, equipping nonprofit staff with sustainable tools, or planning a Professional Development Day that has to earn its keep, Lead at Any Level® can help your team walk out with practical, usable strategies.