FORT WORTH, November 30, 2018, – Colby Allen earned the prestigious Crescent Real Estate Chair for Teaching Excellence in Career and Technology Education presented at a Fort Worth Independent School District award luncheon November 12, 2018. Allen and 15 other Forth Worth ISD teachers selected were conferred with the title 2018-2019 Academic Chairs for Teaching Excellence and received a $5,000 honorarium.
This year the program recorded a record number of teacher applications, according to Fort Worth ISD. The Chairs for Teaching Excellence program was established in 1994. It is modeled after the university-level Chair program and is designed to recognize and reward exemplary teachers. This program is unique because of its role in a public K-12 setting and for its rigorous selection process.
For the 13th consecutive year, Crescent sponsored the career and technology education chair. Suzanne Stevens, Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer of Crescent presented the award to Colby Allen, chairman of the Graphic Design and Engineering Pathway department at Fort Worth Independent School District’s Young Women’s Leadership Academy.
“Every year I am impressed with how our Chairs for Teaching Excellence mentor, engage and inspire students,” said Stevens. “Colby epitomizes this spirit. He brings mentors from the graphic design industry into the classroom and arranges real-world experience through internships and school projects.”
“Since many of his students have not had access to technology or digital media, Colby arranges enrichment opportunities for his students, such as sending students to summer seminars at the Savannah College of Art and Design” Stevens added.
Allen is recognized inside and outside of the classroom as an accomplished teacher and member of the animation industry. Earlier this year he won the Young Women’s Preparatory Network Educator of Excellence award. He also has established partnerships with film and movie organizations, museums and festivals as an avenue to connect his students to the “real-world” through access to competitions, internships and participation in marketing campaigns.
“Mr. Allen has taken our Graphics Design program to new heights,” said Tamara V. Albury, principal of the Young Women’s Leadership Academy. “He has created a program that provides students opportunity to produce real products for actual clients. His students have been featured on NBC 5 and the Fort Worth ISD website.”
Additionally, his students have produced short documentary videos for Fort Worth Cable TV, as well as handled a marketing campaign for Fort Worth Vaqueros, creating logos, posters and other marketing materials for the local soccer team. The students also gain experience managing the campus social media platforms and acting as the school’s design studio to create campus marketing materials.
“Colby is an innovator in the classroom who is always applying different techniques to increase student engagement,” said Nathan Pena, a colleague of Allen at Young Women’s Leadership Academy.
Rather than teach from outdated textbooks or tutorials, Allen uses small group learning where students collaborate together. He will have one group act as the client and pitch their graphic and marketing needs to other students. Those students then must create logos for the fictional company, and later participate in designer-client consultations which lead to revised logos and marketing materials.
“The students learn technical skills as well as important professional standards, presentation skills, teamwork and problem-solving,” said Allen. Allen added that working with females makes it important to not only have them learn from competition, but to learn from collaboration and creativity of consulting with each other.
Allen is in his eighth year of teaching, all at Young Women’s Leadership Academy. He attended Weatherford College and University of Texas at Arlington where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film and Video. He is also a member of the Lone Star Film Society, Dallas Video Association and American Institute of Graphic Arts.
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