Last updated: November 19, 2019
This is an ongoing list I'm updating of schools (at any level) who are approaching education in innovative ways. Please add any suggestions to this list in the comments.
Innovative schools (links below jump you down to more detailed descriptions - I'm adding notes as I go)
KIPP - school culture
Summit Public Schools - personalized learning platform, project-based learning, mentors, focus on habits and cognitive skill development
AltSchool - incentives, class composition, microschool, personalized learning platform, teachers as leaders
Prenda
Success Academy
Workspace Education
Basis
Khan Lab School
Acton Academy
Quest to Learn
Yes Prep
Green Dot
Lindsay Unified School District
Minerva
Singularity University
National University
Harlem Children's Zone
Roland Fryer's work at Houston public schools
Walton Rural Life Center
Powderhouse Studios
Blyth Templeton
The Place Network
Thales Academy
Center of Applied Technology in Edgewater, MD
Wayfinding Academy
Digital Pioneers Academy
Academy of Thought and Industry
KIPP
I went on a tour of a KIPP DC school, which I found very impressive. From what I can tell, their primary innovation is in school culture. The teaching approach, classrooms, etc, seemed to function in a fairly traditional way. Their success seems to be related to this idea of demanding high expectations of their students and having a work culture to deliver on that.
Results?
They've had impressive results in low-income areas. I'd put them in the group of schools who have proved they can come into an area where students are far below average and move them up to average.
Summit Public Schools
I've had some discussions with Summit on building economics curriculum and I had a chance to get familiar with their approach and technology. They're one of the most impressive schools I've seen. They are both building a learning platform, which they provide to schools for free, and run their own schools. They're funded by Chan Zuckerberg and the Gates Foundations.
They focus on the following three types of student skill development.
Here's how they approach each of these buckets:
1) Habits of success
Students setup their goals in the platform - see screenshot below.
Each student has a mentor and every week they have a 10 minute meeting to review progress.
2) Cognitive Skills
They structure their curriculum around hands-on, project-based learning. A typical class consists of around six large projects (I believe this was for a year-long class, but I need to verify). 70% of their grade is based on their development of the following cognitive skills:
3) Content knowledge
Only 30% of the students grade covers the stuff that I feel like is 100% of the grade in most schools. Content knowledge is achieved through students interacting directly with a playlist of content from the learning platform in their blocks of "personalized learning time". During this time teachers are roaming and delivering 1-1 or small-group help based on data they're seeing in their teacher dashboard. Here's a bit of description from their website:
As part of the personalized learning model, we give students the freedom to move at their own pace and experience both success and failure. In the Summit Learning platform, students first learn by interacting with content in the Playlist and then prove their knowledge in the Content Assessment.
The Playlist is essentially content arranged in a certain order. Content includes videos, articles and other information. Students make their own decisions about how they want to interact with the content.
Once a student feels they are ready to show what they know, they will request to take an on-demand, proctored Content Assessment. Students must achieve an 80% proficiency on Summit Learning Content Assessments to move forward. If they score below 80%, they return to the same Playlist and continue to learn until they're ready to try a Content Assessment again. (Content Assessments are different each time a student takes them, even when they cover the same content area.)
Putting students in the driver's seat in this way enables teachers to move away from a lecture-oriented classroom environment, and spend more time as a mentor and facilitator, creating small groups to support struggling students, for example, but also letting them be the primary decision-makers in their own learning. Some of our teachers say this approach fundamentally changed they way they approach their day-to-day work-for the better!
A typical week for a student looks as follows:
Results?
I haven't seen any data yet on student outcomes. However, they are rapidly growing the number of schools who are adopting their platform - it's at 330 last I checked.
AltSchool
I had a chance to tour an AltSchool in San Francisco, and it was watershed event for me - it opened my eyes to the possibilities of school design and how blinded I was by the status quo. Since then, AltSchool has seemingly hit some rough patches, as they’ve closed a lot of schools and have pivoted towards more of an education platform rather than a school provider. I’m curious to hear what happened as they seemed to have a lot of parent interest and potential from my vantage point.
Regardless, a few observations jumped out at me from the school design (see their description here):
1) Incentives! Students had a set amount of work to get through and once they were done, they had the freedom to pursue their own interests. They said that most students’ whole afternoon was spent on their passion projects as they were motivated to get through their “core” work. They brought in a variety of other people to enable these projects - sports, robotics, art, dance, etc.
2) They built their own personalized learning platform and had engineers and teachers working hand-in-hand to quickly iterate on it. Each student had a personalized playlist of material that was crafted by the teacher. The teachers’ dashboard allowed them to see where each student was struggling. More details here.
3) The building they housed was previously a small office space. They transformed it into two classroom spaces with a kitchen, etc. Felt more like a cool startup than a school. They used local parks as playgrounds, etc.
4) Mixed age grouping - kids could be grouped with kids a year older or younger.
5) Classroom environment - I didn’t get to see a class in action, so I’m going off what I was told. It sounds like a typical class had some kids working solo through their playlists while other kids were working on group projects.
6) There were no principals or administrators - teachers picked up those duties.
Results? This is from their website.
