When I arrived in Santa Ana Unified in July 2015 to be the Executive Director of School Renewal, I quickly assumed the role as the innovation guy.  Admittedly, that was by design, and I deliberately took up some habits and practices that I hoped would invite principals and teachers to consider new programs and instructional approaches in their schools and classrooms.  I encouraged school leaders to go visit schools using new approaches, and offered workshops to introduce staff to principles of design thinking and project based learning.  I started blogging and sharing stories about teachers and administrators who are innovating in order to provide more personalized learning environments and experiences for students.  I even started riding my bike to work every day – a la silicon valley startup (in my defense, I really did walk to work nearly every day as a high school principal in San Francisco, and biking was already a weekend hobby).  In other words, I tried to encourage new ideas and new practices by trying things out and reinventing myself.    

But, truth be told, I’m a bit of an institutionalist and a skeptic.  I graduated from Berkeley for goodness sakes, where they teach us to believe nothing until you have the cold hard data.  Question everything.  When I interviewed for the Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning position with the district executive cabinet, I tried to come clean.  When it comes to instructional practice, I’m more meat and potatoes than I sometimes let on.  I love a classroom where the teacher knows how to use her skill and authority with confidence and precision.  I like homework.  I like a teacher who pushes kids to work hard.  I like the word rigor.  I like a teacher who doesn’t put up with nonsense.  In other words, I love great teaching – and believe that it is skill, and not just enthusiasm, that gets kids to learn in powerful ways.  I’m a huge advocate for student ownership of learning, but not at the expense of adult mentoring.  In other words, I believe that great teaching is at the heart of powerful learning.  From project-based, competency-based and blended learning, to small group, workshop or direct-instruction, the conditions for learning are created by skilled and caring teachers who themselves model what it means to be a learner and deepen their skills and repertoire.

My time in Santa Ana has taught me how to bring these two parts of my professional identity into one place.  Yes, I’m a National Board Certified Teacher who can get a little snarky when the latest curriculum adoption or instructional craze gets presented as the cure-all for student learning.  But I also brought together an XQ super school team right here in Santa Ana with the rallying cry that we need to rethink the school experience for young people in our country.   We need both.  Tradition and innovation.  We leverage the tried and true instructional practices to push student learning, while simultaneously embracing the opportunity to learn, practice, and master new protocols and strategies that have the potential to engage students in even deeper and more authentic ways.

In my opinion, nothing blends this belief in both proven practices and innovative potential and possibility than our framework for teaching and learning.  I’ll be doing a few posts related to the framework, but simply note here the central role it will continue to play in my approach to the work.   The framework highlights four key areas of emphasis in our approach to instruction: 1) how are we valuing and building on students’ languages and experiences to promote deep understanding?, 2) how are we providing frequent opportunities to collaborate around complex tasks to promote deep thinking?, 3) how are we personalizing learning to meet the needs of diverse learners?, and 4) how are we sustaining academic rigor to prepare students for college and career?  These four areas – language and cultural context, collaboration, personalized learning, and academic rigor, are our collective aspiration.  Within SAUSD, we already possess a tremendous amount of knowledge and expertise around these four key areas, while simultaneously having much still to learn, and even more to share across classrooms and schools to ensure that every student receives an engaging, transformational education.

We don’t need a brand new vision for teaching and learning and Santa Ana.  Yes, we need to deepen and refine our instructional skills, including our ability to encourage rigorous academic discourse amongst our students and to provide personalized feedback on their progress.  Yes, we need to value and celebrate the diverse experiences, assets, languages, and gifts that our students and their families already bring to the table.  Above all, we need to strengthen and share our belief that the students of Santa Ana, every last one of them, has the potential to achieve great things – in college, in their careers, and in their lives.  We have to aspire for the students of Santa Ana, our kids,  the same things we desire and expect of our own children.

It is in that spirit of purpose and solidarity that we do this work together.

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to spend a day with the team at AltSchool in San Francisco.  If you aren’t familiar with their story, AltSchool is a B-corp educational enterprise, meaning it’s a private business with a double bottom-line.  Yes, they intend to make a profit.  But they also hold themselves accountable for their positive social impact.  The entire genesis of the B-corp financial structure is an interesting topic in and of itself (should all businesses aspire to do both?), but that’s a post for another day.

I’ve long been intrigued by what I’ve heard about AltSchool.  The basic overview has always been something to the effect of “AltSchool is trying to build the best digital platform in education, and they have Google engineers in their classrooms to help them build it.”  I’m a little embarassed to admit that it has taken me so long to get up to see what they are working on, and I am certainly glad that I did.

Here’s the basic overview.  AltSchool is about 4 years old.  They currently run 4 private micro-schools, 2 in San Francisco and 2 in New York.  Originally, their plan of action was to develop their digital platform and then scale up the number of micro schools that they run around the country.  Recently, they had a change of heart, and determined that they could have greater impact if they made their platform more widely available, including to public schools, and not focus exclusively on running schools themselves. That led them to shutter two of their schools in favor of focusing attention and resources on scaling out their learning platform.

So, what are they up to?  Here are a few of my big takeaways after visiting one of their schools and spending time at their home base.

Making Learning Visible

The AltSchool mission statement is similar to most schools’ statement of purpose – we help all students reach their potential.  It’s a good mission and I wholeheartedly agree, but it is not terribly different from the aspirations of most educational institutions.  There was a second statement espoused in AltSchool’s overview materials that caught my attention and proved much more compelling.  “Making learning visible for students, educators, and parents.”  That’s a powerful concept for education for a number of important reasons.

I often refer to the classroom as the black box.  There is a tremendous amount of knowledge and understanding in teachers’ brains – about what students need to learn and about how well each student is learning it.  But there is an information bottleneck – it’s up to the teacher to try to get as much of that information out to students and parents as he or she possibly can.  In high quality classrooms, the teacher has developed all kinds of systems to share this information.  In my daughter’s former kindergarten classroom, for example, the data manifested itself as writing samples, coloring exercises, and art projects all over the walls.  I could literally see every student’s progress towards the basic academic outcomes of the class.  In fact, when I walked into the classroom on Open House night, I quickly realized that student seat assignments were determined by ability level, just by noticing the work quality of students whose desks were grouped together.   It was as data rich a classroom as I have ever seen.  But even with my wife standing next to me, she couldn’t necessarily see at first how I was drawing my conclusions around the teacher’s systems of organization and performance monitoring.  It was all over the walls.

Sometimes these systematic efforts to share information come in the form of parent newsletters, or intricate data systems on the wall with stickers and measuring sticks.  Indeed, anyone on my Twitter feed knows that data bulletin boards in elementary classrooms are some of my favorite pictures.  In the secondary classroom, these efforts to make learning visible sometimes look like daily or weekly grade summaries on the wall.  Getting students enough useful information about what they are learning and how well they are learning it is requires a tremendous amount of thought and dedication, and it many classrooms, it simply doesn’t happen that well.

We talk about student ownership of their learning quite a bit these days in education.  But it is genuinely difficult to provide students with ongoing data and information about what we expect them to learn and where they stand.  Yes, most classrooms have traditional grading systems.  But we all know that in many cases, grades reflect a broader capacity to “do school,” and do not necessarily reflect an objective assessment of student skills as they are developing.

This is the genius of the AltSchool platform.  It’s trying to democratize information about how students are progressing.  Yes, it is a work in progress.  As with any good software product and user experience, the platform is constantly being improved.  The team of engineers and designers at the enterprise are open about the need to provide more robust tools to facilitate students’ ability to navigate within the system and provide goal setting streams and pathways that make sense.  Yet on the whole, the system is out there setting the standard for what it can look like to marry content delivery, assessment, and learning trajectories in a common system – and making that process as transparent to users as possible.

Aesthetics and User Experience Matter

I have often had a practice of taking my public school teachers and staff into sought-after private schools.  There is a design aesthetic and attention to detail in the way such places look and feel that we often miss in public school settings.  Yes, I’m aware that funding is different.  But my message is often that there is much, much more we can do in our public education spaces to embrace good design and curate welcoming, student-centered learning environments.  Quality private schools have to pay careful attention to the curation of their physical space, and that was certainly the case at AltSchool.  When I walked in the front doors of their Yerba Gardens campus on Folsum Street in San Francisco, I immediately noticed the television screen directly in front of me, scrolling through unique enrichment opportunities and other after school experiences students and families could sign up for.  Capoeira classes, a seminar for parents on safe internet use, etc.  To my right was a frosted glass door – opaque at eye level but then clear above.  The two-toned glass construction was eye-catching and allowed for students to have direct site lines to the sky and surrounding buildings from the classroom, while blocking passers-by from being able to see students directly.  There was an access keypad next to the door – a Kinder/1^st grade classroom.  A young African American boy walked in as we waited for the elevator nearby.  He quietly punched in his access code and walked into the classroom.  Students are welcome to arrive anytime between 8 – 9 am, with instruction formally getting a start at 9.  Attention to detail is probably the best way to describe the campus.  It wasn’t grand or sprawling, just thoughtful.

The AltSchool Platform has a similar dedication to aesthetics and an enjoyable user experience.  From basic design elements like a soft color palette and intuitive user controls, you get a clear sense that the engineers behind the software are constantly channeling their inner design-conscious user.  A number of team members I spoke with referred to a deliberate effort to maintain a sense of simplicity within a system that supports a rather complex set of content, assessments, and goal-setting tools.  Content is organized into what AltSchool calls content “cards.”  These cards represent mini-lessons or mini-units, and can either be used in supplemental ways to what is happening in the classroom, or as the primary delivery method of instruction.  I spent some time building some “cards” myself, and the process was quick and easy.  Within 30 minutes, I had converted one of my thematic units into a short series of cards.  I already had my own playlist.  For a project-based learning teacher like I was, this was the system I wish I had access to when I was in the classroom.

Teacher-centric

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of my visit was the central nature of the teacher in both the AltSchool platform and in their micro-school classrooms.   I think I was expecting the AltSchool instructional model to be primarily tech-driven and more openly skeptical of the the importance of the teacher.  Certainly, some of the accusations that are made about an enterprise like AltSchool is that they are trying to use technology to replace teachers.  The opposite was true.  In fact, AltSchool has two teachers in every classroom.  I didn’t necessarily expect that I’d be greeted by robots or have to wear a virtual reality headset, but I certainly thought I would see kids looking at screens in every classroom.

That wasn’t what I saw.

What I did see was nurturing learning spaces, small group instruction, center-rotation (yes, with some teacherless centers using software to drive student learning), and reading and writing workshop.  As the students got older in age, I definitely saw more screens.  When asked explicitly about screen time, AltSchool said that in the early grades, it is no more than 5-10%, maxing out around 25-30% by the time students are in the middle grades.  This makes sense too.  Most of the middle to upper class families that can afford a private school education have serious concerns about over-exposure to screen time during the course of their children’s school day.  The AltSchool platform reflects this attempt at a blended balance.  Yes, a student could theoretically spend all day on the software, but it isn’t designed as a replacement for the classroom experience.  It’s designed to help organize curriculum, pace and monitor student learning and progress, provide tools for goal-setting, and allow for more feedback to both students and parents.