Ready to Blend

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Latest Episodes:

11. School at the Atomic Level, featuring Prenda School Aug 15, 2019

Show notes

Prenda School is becoming the largest network of America's tiniest micro-schools.

According to Kelly Smith, founder of Prenda School, sometimes tiny things can cause outsized effects. A former student of nuclear engineering at MIT, Kelly says that operating a micro-school reminds him of splitting an atom, a process that releases incredible amounts of energy.

Kelly sees a similar phenomenon at his schools. Students don't learn the standards one course or lecture at a time. Instead, they conquer core academic skills in the morning and then spend the rest of the day in collaborative and creative projects with their peers. The result, says Kelly, is pure energy.

Prenda School makes it possible for people to open a micro-school for up to 10 students, grades k-8, in their home. It provides all the training, software, and funding that they need to be able to do that.

In this episode, Kelly and Heather talk about why Y Combinator wanted Prenda School in its portfolio of fast-track startups, why adults want to be Prenda guides, and why students are surprised by how hard learning can be when they have agency and when their progress is entirely mastery based.

Large school systems can learn from Kelly's small-sized model. Listen in for this last episode in the summer series exploring "what schools can be" and how all schools can benefit from the innovations that are bubbling up in the super-agile micro-school movement.

10. Opening a School, featuring Slope School Aug 08, 2019

Show notes

Imagine you're in charge of building a new school from the ground up. You've worked on it all year and now it's time to open the doors to your first class of 4-13 year olds. What is your life like right now? In this podcast, we'll hear from Matthew Clayton as he faces this exact scenario.

Matt is founder of Slope School, opening this month in Provo, Utah. It's part of the Acton Academy network, a fast-growing micro-school model that began in Austin, Texas and now has over 200 offshoots.

Matt was the chief operating officer for Acton Academy for four years and has answers for why its model is growing so fast. “When I first saw Acton Academy, it changed my life,” Matt tells us in the podcast. He explains how Acton reframed his brain about what is possible.

So why did Matt leave Acton to start his own school? Matt shares how why he and his wife, Maria, decided to take the leap.

"K-12 education is roughly 16,000 hours of a child’s life," Matt says. "Big picture, what should all that time accomplish?"

Matt explains the seeming paradox that technology is not the heart of Slope School, but that tech frees up the learning community to have even more human interactions with each other.

Slope School, like other Acton Academies, has several key elements—Socratic discussion, Core Skills, Public Exhibitions, Learning Quests. Which of those elements does Matt believe he absolutely has to get right? Matt says if he had to prioritize, he'd choose team building and helping students learn to drive their own learning through goal setting and follow through.

Matt describes a few of the key elements in detail:

Socratic discussion
The Hero’s Journey
The first Quest: “Pitch a Playground”

At the end of the show, Matt suggests two strategies that every educator can adopt to empower their learners:

Give Respect—Always give learners the respect that you’d give to a trusted friend or coworker. Avoid the words “student,” “child,” or “kids.” The goal is to avoid hierarchical language. We are fellow travelers on a journey together. A metric to measure is how many times learners need to come to you to ask for help. What systems can you equip learners with so that they can solve problems themselves and with each other without requiring your instruction? Empowering your learner is a sign of respect.
Give choice—Invite learners to set their own ground rules. You could start by saying: “Here is our mission and purpose. We need some ground rules to get there.” Then discuss and arrive at those commitments together. Also, get out of the mindset of teaching students and into the mindset of equipping learners to learn. Look for tools that give more choice around content, direction, pace, and timing.

Listen in for more details about how Matthew Clayton is opening the most talked-about school in Utah this year.

https://www.slope.school/

Accompanying Ready to Blend blog: Opening a School like Slope School

9. Shorter School Days, featuring Tesla Academy Aug 01, 2019

Show notes

How much time should teenagers spend in school? Is your teen over-served by the nonstop schedule at your local comprehensive high school?

This podcast features guest Brad Barber, founder of Tesla Academy, who takes us on a tour of his program in Orange County, Calif. Tesla Academy is a low-cost microschool that serves professional surfers, elite soccer teams, T.V. actors, and dozens of formerly average students who have now become exceptional learners.

Heather begins with an overview of how disruptive innovation begins in circumstances where people are over-served by the existing set of options. Many of the emerging microschools in America follow this pattern, using shorter school days, new staffing models, and online learning to offer a simpler version of school at a lower cost than traditional private schools.

Heather then joins Brad Barber on-site at Tesla Academy to discuss how his program works, why families like the 8 a.m.-to-noon model, the indispensable value of learning coaches, and how Tesla Academy has redefined high school.

The episode ends with Brad Barber talking to Tate Staker, age 15, about what his life would be like if he transferred to Tesla Academy.

For the hot-off-the-press Bellwether Education Report about the growing microschool phenomenon, go to this week's Ready to Blend blog: The Rise of Microschools.

8. What School Could Be, with guest Ted Dintersmith Jul 17, 2019

Show notes

What could schools be? Best-selling author and film producer Ted Dintersmith contends that the 20th-century school design does a disservice to children today. Schools should be retooled, starting by de-emphasizing testing.

“Low-level tests prepare children to be good at exactly what artificial intelligence excels at,” according to Dintersmith. “What if our measures of success actually impair children for their future?”

In this podcast, Heather Clayton Staker and Ted Dintersmith discuss whether the “will-this-be-on-the-test? mentality” embeds a values system in today’s learners that systematically erodes their larger sense of purpose.

Dintersmith believes that schools can move beyond flashcards, test prep, and learning irrelevant skills. During this interview, he questions what the purpose of school is and then points to schools around the U.S. that are replacing test prep with four “PEAK” principles:

Purpose—Students believe in the importance of their work.

Essential Skills and Mindsets—Learning experiences foster competencies that are essential to adults (e.g., creative problem solving, critical analysis, communication, collaboration, citizenship, character).

Agency—Students create their learning experiences, set their goals, manage their progress, and evaluate their work.

Knowledge: Students develop real mastery of the topics they study. They can apply it, ask thoughtful questions about it, and teach others.

To learn more from Ted Dintersmith, visit https://teddintersmith.com/. His Innovation Playlist is available for free at https://teddintersmith.com/innovation-playlist/.

Ready to Blend is sharing the link to his “Most Likely to Succeed” video at this week’s blog, What School Could Be.

7. Competency-Based Learning Jul 04, 2019

Show notes

Time. It's so valuable. Often we feel we don't have enough of it. How can schools make the most of their learners' time? This podcast focuses on competency-based learning, an idea whose time has come.

In a competency-based system, learners move from one level to the next based on their own choices and timing, not based on the school calendar. Over 360 studies show that competency-based learning significantly helps children.

To understand the idea, Heather takes you on a journey through five time periods in education:

1776 - Education in colonial America
1837 - Horace Mann and the Prussian system
1913 - Henry Ford and Industrial America
1984 - Benjamin Bloom's research on mastery learning
2020 - What the future can be

Looking to the past, you'll get an overview of why schools operate as they do today and hopefully some new ideas for how to make them even better for tomorrow.

6. Summer Phone RAPS Jun 26, 2019

Show notes

Summertime can mean more cellphone time for kids, and that can mean more anxiety, depression, and emotional distress.

In this episode, Heather shares four strategies for how to set up kids for success with their phones during the summer. She shares the four-part RAPS system:

Relationships — Discover your teens' love language and speak it to them.
Awareness — Create an open dialogue about cellphone use.
Protection — Set up guardrails to make it not so hard.
Sustaining — Keep this process alive by modeling it yourself and repeating it.

Be sure to view the accompanying Summer Phone Strategy blog for a video on how to set up the Screen Time settings on iPhones and Android phones to protect your kids.

Will you join the movement to give children a better summer by properly strategizing their cellphone use? Take the Summer Phone Challenge for Parents.

Imagine if every caregiver committed to helping their kids use their phones in a pro-social, positive way this summer. The rising generation needs our help. Let's make the summer of 2019 a season they won't forget.

5. Personalized Learning with Shawn Rubin Jun 18, 2019

Show notes

"But plain old classrooms worked for me!" That's one of the common objections adults raise to the idea of replacing the factory-based classroom with a personalized model. In this episode, you'll hear a discussion between Heather Clayton Staker and Shawn Rubin, Chief Education Officer of the Highlander Institute, on the topic of personalizing learning.

Heather and Shawn talk about Shawn's idea that a personalized strategy has three legs: pacing, agency, and differentiation. Then they look at a few levels of personalization, starting with Traditional Instruction, and then becoming more personalized with Macro Differentiation, Micro Differentiation, Individual Mastery, and Fully Personalized. How personalized is your school relative to Shawn's continuum?

Shawn Rubin is the co-author with Cathy Sanford of Pathways to Personalization: A Framework for School Change. He has helped dozens of schools and thousands of teachers in Rhode Island seriously upgrade teaching and learning for their students.

Accompanying commentary and notes for this podcast are at https://www.readytoblend.com/post/personalized-learning.

4. Digitizing Classrooms Jun 05, 2019

Show notes

The effort to digitize classrooms is often fraught with expense and disappointment. Schools have spent well over $100 billion on computers, but often find their investment does not pay off.

The good news is that it's possible to use technology to create school designs that were completely unimaginable a few decades ago. But it takes the right model and the right leader, both at school and home.

This episode focuses on the problem of "cramming" technology into children's lives and suggests an alternative, more successful way of thinking about deploying disruptive innovations.

In the show, we discuss:

Slope School
Acton Academy
Kitchen appliances
Katherine Mackey's "Cramming" blog
The history of the blackboard
The legislative process
How to avoid cramming
The learning model: What's the experience for students?
The leader: Is he or she entrepreneurial?
Starting one lesson at a time
Relevance for parents

You can view the accompanying materials at https://www.readytoblend.com/post/digitizing-classrooms.

3. Disruptive Innovation May 25, 2019

Show notes

What's the future of schools? Is online learning a fad or will it transform teaching and learning? What essentials do schools and individuals need to know?

This podcast introduces the Theory of Disruptive Innovation, a brilliant theory that Professor Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School developed to help us be able to predict the future of innovations with greater reliability.

This theory shines a light on why online learning is changing the way the world learns. During the podcast, Heather discusses the implications for teachers, school leaders, families, and adult learners.

You can view the accompanying materials at https://www.readytoblend.com/blog.

2. Plan before you Purchase May 21, 2019

Show notes

This episode focuses on the single most important question to ask as you consider whether to purchase technology (computers, tablets, phones...) for your school or family.

In The Blended Workbook, Michael B. Horn and I provide a 20-question "Interest and Readiness Assessment" that you can use to analyze whether a tech investment is right for you.

But, ultimately, those 20 questions do not matter as much as one specific question about your readiness for technology. Let's look at that question up close and then decide what the answer is for you. Is purchasing more devices the right move for you to make for the children in your care?

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