Merion Mercy Educator Selected for Innovation Fellowship

Philip Vinogradov, Merion Mercy Academy’s Director of Innovation, Teaching and Learning, has been selected for Horn Entrepreneurship’s Accelerating Innovation in Education Fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year. Interim Assistant Director for Youth Programs, Felicia Harrington, writes that Vinogradov was chosen “because of the unique perspective you will bring to the group and your capacity to build a culture of innovation within your school.”

Designed for school leaders, th​​is one-year program through the University of Delaware is aimed at promoting a culture of innovation and experimentation in K-12 education. As a small, diverse cohort, fellows focus on how to utilize foundational building blocks to establish a school culture that encourages persistent challenges to the status quo and enables experimentation to discover increasingly better ways to serve the needs of students. 

Candidates were required to submit an application and participate in a phone interview. The fellowship begins in July and includes two full-day professional development sessions, as well as quarterly, two-hour virtual sessions. The program concludes with a May celebration in which fellows share their progress and learnings.

The fellowship provides a tie-in with Merion Mercy’s participation in Horn Entrepreneurship’s EntreX Lab program. The goal of EntreX is to equip high school students to thrive amidst rapid change by cultivating agile thinking and developing creative problem solving skill sets. The EntreX curriculum will be embedded in Merion Mercy's dual enrollment course option titled Economics and Entrepreneurship, beginning Fall 2023.