T-R PHOTO BY LANA BRADSTREAM — Marshalltown Learning Academy instructors Dawon Rieenschneider and Katie Mummert tell the school board about new work-based learning they tried in the 2024-25 school year. The Marshalltown Community School Board held its regular meeting Monday night.

Students at Marshalltown Learning Academy had the opportunity for a brand new work-based learning venture during the recently-ended school year.

During the regular Monday meeting, MLA English teacher Katie Mummert and at-risk instructor Dawson Riemenschneider told the Marshalltown Community School District (MCSD) Board of Education about the combined iCEV Southwest Airlines professional communications course and branding and media literacy.

“The main purpose of it is to help the students understand different situations in a workplace versus social, how to interview, how to write a resume, all those different things,” Riemenschneider said. “That way they can go out and get a job. They understand if you’re disgruntled at work, if you’re having a problem, how can you navigate that professionally. That is something that a lot of our students struggle with. We found it becomes a problem when they are looking to get a job, they don’t even really know where to start with a resume, how the interview process may go.”

The two teachers built the course to be blended and offered students a full credit. Riemenschneider said it gave them elective and English credits, and students were expected to daily dedicate one and a half to two hours to the course outside of class. The reason for the extra time, he said, is they stuffed a semester-worth of material into eight weeks.

“It also showed they were able to be responsible and work outside of class and come together as a group,” Riemenschneider said.

He said the core themes were communication and collaboration in the workplace, customer service expectations, employee first culture and interview skills and workplace etiquette. Students had to complete a number of different assignments and projects, such as how to market a product or how to problem solve for customers.

“If someone sends you an email, regardless of how unruly or cruel they may be, you have to remain professional, and that was something that was interesting to hear,” Riemenschneider said.

In the latter example, he told the board some of the students, in the heat of the moment, would give an immediate response. Riemenschneider told them to think about what that response would do, and if it would help the situation.

Mummert said students engaged in argumentative and crisis response writing, such as press releases. The students went through the problem solving process by determining the cause, identifying and implementing solutions and then evaluating over time.

“Sometimes our students are quick to respond off the cuff,” she said. “They had to spend time looking at tone and audience awareness, persuasive techniques and what they actually might use in a workplace for customer service situations.”

Mummert customized the class, using Taylor Swift as a subject, after seeing how dry and boring the original material was for teenagers.

“If there’s one thing people know about me, if I can make it about Taylor Swift, I’m going to,” she said. “So, we took the class and started thinking, ‘Okay. What if we put the students in these workplace scenarios? Now you work for a PR [public relations] firm, or something like that.'”

Mummert said students began by researching Swift’s brand, not her music. That included aspects such as public image, fan engagement strategies and responsible online usage.

“They did really in-depth research on specific eras, specific albums and the aesthetic of the album, how did that make sense for that time period and how that went against her identity in the past,” she said. “They’re really looking at it from a marketing standpoint.”

They also learned to identify the importance of multiple information sources and whether or not those sources are biased.

Using all of the material, Mummert said students began writing in more meaningful ways such as memos and emails, and how to adopt proper responses to particular situations. For the final project, she said students created their own brand pitch for an artist’s album. Students had to determine what a promo and merchandising would look like, and create an identity for an established artist and an album which did not exist yet.

“There was a lot of analysis that way,” Mummert said.

Nine of the students who completed the iCEV course took a final test, which lasted two hours, earned Southwest Airlines Professional Communications Certification. Riemenschneider said the certificate is something they will be able to utilize for their own careers.

“They can put that on their resume, and it’s the same exact one all of the employees from that company get,” he said. “That’s something that shows they are very literate in professional communication, and they understand how to handle that. It’s interesting to see how Katie built a lot of these unique assignments and they were still able to pull away the main idea and pass those tests pretty easily. It showed creativity could [used] be able to navigate around dry material.”

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Contact Lana Bradstream

at 641-753-6611 ext. 210 or

lbradstream@timesrepublican.com.