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About Us

Who We Are

Instructional Empowerment is a national organization led by founder and CEO Michael D. Toth. Our headquarters is a 10,000-square-foot office located outside of Pittsburgh at 175 Cornell Road, Blairsville, PA 15717.

We Believe in the Power of Schools to Change Students’ Lives

Instructional Empowerment’s social mission is to end generational poverty and eliminate racial achievement gaps through transformed core instruction.

We partner with school and district leaders to build your school’s capacity and instructional systems. Our goal is for schools to achieve rapid, measurable, long-term outcomes for their students by focusing on rigorous classroom instruction and school advancement.

Learn more about why our founder, Michael Toth, is passionate about breaking generational poverty.

Our Applied Research Center Invests in Your Success

We are so serious about our social mission that we founded our own independent Applied Research Center.

Our research center verifies every project using the most exacting federal research standards. We ensure our methods work in every school and every classroom in all the different communities that our partner schools serve.

Our Applied Research Center’s Commitment to You:

Rigorous methodologies
Hypothesis testing
Replicable results
Continuous improvement

Our Founder and CEO

Michael D. Toth is founder and CEO of Instructional Empowerment and leads IE’s Applied Research Center. He is the multi-award-winning author of The Power of Student Teams with David Sousa; author of Who Moved My Standards; and co-author with Robert Marzano of several books. Michael also speaks at national conferences and serves as an executive coach for superintendents and district cabinets.

IE’s social mission is personal to Michael, as he experienced poverty as a child.

Read more about Michael’s story on the Founder’s Page

Our Executive Team

Lina Toth
Chief Operating Officer

James Voyer
Chief Financial Officer

Lauren Sheomber
Chief Information Officer

Our National Expert Educators
and Highly Skilled Faculty

Our national expert educators are passionate about helping you reach your goals by applying their deep knowledge of IE’s instructional systems and methodologies and their experience from years of practical work in schools and districts across the country.

Instructional Empowerment goes to great lengths to provide the best school leadership coaches to our partner schools. We are honored to have an amazing faculty of former highly successful district leaders, school leaders, and teacher leaders. Every one of our leadership coaches has served as successful school or district leaders and is trained extensively in our metrics and methods.

Explore Our Partnered Solutions

Talk to an Expert Educator

Michelle Fitzgerald, Ed.D.

Executive Director, School Advancement
Emerge and Elevate Pathways

Penny Sell, M.Ed.

Executive Director, School Advancement
Enhance Pathway

Kimberly Harris, M.Ed.

Field Director, School Advancement
Enhance Pathway

Deana Senn, M.S.S.E.

Executive Director, Model of Instruction
Model of Instruction

Jody Honaker, B.S.E.

Field Director, Model of Instruction
Model of Instruction

Marguerite “Meg” Bowen, M.Ed.

Executive Director, Customer Experience
and Growth

Our Mission for All Students, Teachers, and Leaders to Thrive

To us, “Instructional Empowerment” means that all students, teachers, and leaders thrive in a rigorous learning environment that builds agency. We believe schools can become true learning organizations with a flourishing learning culture for the adults and the students. We are determined to bring the instructional systems of empowerment and the empowered learning culture of the Empowerment Destination to every school that wants to achieve it, for every student.

If you believe what we believe, we hope you will join us to make the teaching and learning process more empowering for every child and educator.

A Sample of Our Strategic Partners

We work with a wide range of school districts, from some of the largest to smaller districts, and our partner schools include those with persistently low achievement scores to schools with higher performance that want to become even better. Our comprehensive school advancement services are tailored solutions that match the need of our partner schools and the communities they serve, centered around rigorous Tier 1 core instruction.