Advance Praise for Courage to Grow
“Acton Academy is on the vanguard of change in education in our country. After reading Laura’s story, your first two questions will probably be, ‘Why couldn’t my school be like this?’ and ‘How can I send my kids to Acton?’ This is an important story about learning what matters.”
—Seth Godin, author of Stop Stealing Dreams
“Acton Academy is on the leading edge of what it means to give students agency of their own learning. What Laura has created is truly remarkable.”
—Sal Khan, Founder of Khan Academy
“Choosing an educational path for your children is the most important investment you will make as a parent. Laura’s vision, courage, and profound insights on learning changed our lives and inspire us daily—her story will inspire you as well.”
—Dani and Russ Foltz-Smith, founders and parents, Acton Academy Venice Beach
“Acton Academy is one of the most important education developments in the world. The story behind the ideas, the school, and the movement is a must-read.”
—Tom Vander Ark, CEO of Getting Smart, previously executive director of education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
“A remarkable book that captures the powerful journeys of Acton Academy’s founders, students, parent community, and—I hope—the future of education around the globe. Any school, whether traditional or innovative, will gain insights from this magical place.”
—Ted Dintersmith, education author, film producer, and philanthropist
“Acton Academy has transformed our family, inspiring each of us to find a calling and discover a Hero’s Journey. Laura’s book is a must-read for parents who long for a child to live up to his or her full potential.”
—Kimberly Watson-Hemphill, Acton Academy parent, author of Fast Innovation and founder and CEO, Firefly Consulting
“Even skeptics are soon converted by the hum of productive energy at Acton Academy; more high tech start up than school. Laura’s book has the same contagious hum, only a screenwriter away from being a major motion picture, more like Rocky or Hoosiers than Waiting on Superman.”
—Clark Aldrich, Global education thought leader; author of Unschooling Rules
“Why read this book and start an Acton Academy? Because, like me, you’ll build a magical place with so much joy and rigor your children will protest when summer arrives. Consider this a call to adventure that just might change your life, because it’s certainly changed mine.”
—Mike Olson, parent and founder of Talent Unbound, an Acton Academy affiliate, Houston, Texas
“When I visited Acton Academy, I asked the children to close their eyes and tell me what they saw. One child said, ‘A bus full of aliens.’ Everyone laughed. Laura’s story will make you happy, critical, sad, energized and above all else, optimistic about what young people can accomplish. So pick up this book and join us on that magical bus.”
—Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology, Newcastle University, UK
“If you think education in American is doing fine, ignore this book. If you believe something’s missing in America’s schools, buy the book AND read it. You may save the life of someone you love.”
—Daniel S. Peters, former chairman, the philanthropy roundtable; president, Lovett and Ruth Peters Foundation
“Is learning to make choices and take responsibility important to your family? If so, Acton Academy is the learning environment you have been dreaming of! Laura’s book will give you the courage to move beyond traditional schooling and give a priceless gift to your children. Will you join us?”
—Juan Bonifasi, cofounder and parent, Acton Academy Guatemala City
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher and author are not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Copyright ©2018 Acton Academy
All rights reserved.
Thank you for purchasing an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright law. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.
Cover design by Sheila Parr
Cover image © Shutterstock / Africa Studio
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
Print ISBN: 978-0-9995205-0-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9995205-1-2
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
17 18 19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
To the founding Eagles, who had the courage to grow
Saskia
Sam
Chris
Bodhi
Cash
Charlie
Ellie
and to Taite, who was with us in spirit every step of the way
Follow the child.
—Dr. Maria Montessori
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1:A Day in the Life of Acton Academy
Chapter 2:A Call to Action
Chapter 3:Becoming Real—First a Fair, Then a School
Chapter 4:Crossing the Threshold—Time to Start School
Chapter 5:Learn by Doing—Wrestling with Rebels and Rulers
Chapter 6:The Abyss of Assessment—How Do We Prove Learning?
Chapter 7:Middle School Monsters?
Chapter 8:Lost in the Darkness
Chapter 9:More Parents Pick Up the Torch
Chapter 10:Treasure Found
Epilogue:Homecoming
Acknowledgments
Appendix A:Acton Academy’s Mission, Promises, and Beliefs
Appendix B:Acton Academy Student Contract 2009–2010
Appendix C:The Hero’s Journey
Appendix D:Acton Academy Reading List for Parents
Appendix E:Thoughts on Guiding Math Socratically
Appendix F:Conversation with Steven Tomlinson, PhD, Master Socratic Teacher
Appendix G:Overview of the Acton Academy Middle School and Launchpad Badge System
Appendix H:List of Online Learning Programs
About the Author
Foreword
If for nothing else, Acton Academy deserves respect for its singular role in steepening a famous S curve.
In their book Disrupting Class, Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School and his colleagues Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson claimed that online learning is a disruptive innovation that will transform the way the world learns. To illustrate this prediction, they drew an S-curve diagram, like the one that follows. Disruptive innovations follow an S-curve pattern, they said. The new technology creeps into the market slowly at first, as messy prototypes emerge. But then the substitution of the new technology for the old rises dramatically, until, finally, it approaches 100 percent of the market.
S curves are sometimes gradual, sometimes steep. When Disrupting Class was published in 2008, its authors were uncertain as to the slope of the curve that they expected. But one thing they knew: Online learning was following the pattern of a disruptive innovation. One day it would replace traditional classroom instruction.
That prediction was radical. Up until then, online learning was mostly a fringe alternative in K–12
education, embraced by homeschooling families who were okay with being “distance learners,” remote from campus.
By the time I joined the Clayton Christensen Institute a few years later, however, the S curve was beginning to veer up, thanks to the arrival of blended learning—the combination of online learning and brick-and-mortar schooling. By 2011, we counted forty school districts, charter school networks, independent schools, and virtual schools in the United States that were delivering blended learning rather than traditional instruction. One of the forty was an unusual micro-school in Austin, Texas, called Acton Academy.
At first my interest in Acton Academy was entirely academic. Along with the thirty-nine other pioneering organizations, Acton Academy was steepening the slope on the S curve right before our eyes. Distance learning had reached a plateau. For online learning to get any bigger, it would need to take on some of the jobs that brick-and-mortar schools do—jobs like providing custodial care, face-to-face mentoring, social experiences, and sports. By combining the disruptive innovation of online learning with select elements of the incumbent system, these forty organizations were following the disruptive innovation playbook to the letter. A few, including Acton Academy, had business models that were primed to scale well. That was important. It meant that the trajectory for the disruption was on path. What was once a radical prediction now had forty live examples to manifest that the heralded transformation of brick-and-mortar schools had begun—and was poised for growth.
What’s more, Acton Academy stood out from the others. It had a “Flex” blended-learning model, in which online learning is the backbone of much of the core instruction and the primary role of the face-to-face teacher is to guide, encourage, and activate learning, not to deliver instruction. Several other schools among the forty had Flex models, but Acton Academy was the only one that figured out how to do a Flex model with elementary-aged children. Finding Acton Academy was like spotting Bigfoot.
Leading the disruption
Fast-forward several years and Acton Academy continues to be a decade ahead of the rest. Although thousands of schools today have disruptive, blended models, Jeff and Laura Sandefer’s school—which has become a global network—stands apart for its unusually successful and counterintuitive approach to doing school.
According to Christensen, one benefit of disruptive innovations is that they distribute access to people at the margins. Imagine a series of concentric circles, like in the diagram that follows. Each circle represents a population of people who can access a product or service. Only people with the most wealth and expertise have access at the center. The larger circles represent people with less wealth and expertise; most everyday folks live out here. Disruptive innovations push access to this outer rim. Think TurboTax and Amazon Prime, for example—two disruptions that push access out to the average Joes.
From their tiny original schoolhouse, the Sandefers intuited that the disruptive innovation of online learning has similar power to push out access to the people with the very least wealth and expertise of all—children. That insight allowed them to pioneer several breakthrough school design choices. Most importantly, Acton Academy empowers children with the habits, mentors, online lessons, and tracking system that they need to be able to manage their own learning. That delegation of control helps the children develop agency—the ability to make choices. Observe Acton Academy for a scant minute and the first thing you’ll notice is the stunning sense of student buy-in and self-efficacy. It’s because of all that agency.
Giving students ownership, in turn, frees up adults to serve as guides and mentors. It flips the mentor-to-student ratio from 1-to-many to 1-to-1. Children don’t get lost at Acton Academy. Human connection overflows from the system as the entire community works together to decide on the rules, sign off on each other’s badges, peer-critique projects, and build cool things.
From academic to personal
A few months after finishing that early blended-learning report, I scheduled a visit to Acton Academy and brought along my husband, Allan. That’s when things became personal.
It’s one thing to understand Acton Academy in theory. It’s another thing entirely to step inside its walls and feel with one’s heart what sound design, true principles, and lovely execution do for the well-being and joyfulness of children. That’s when my own family’s lives changed forever.
You’re in for a treat as you read Laura Sandefer’s story of how Acton Academy came to be. Her campuses share the grace, wisdom, and whole-heartedness that Laura embodies herself. Be forewarned, however, that if you’re anything like hundreds of parents and me, once you discover how much children can do in an environment that dignifies, magnifies, and inspires their minds to learn, there’s no going back to traditional classrooms again.
—Heather Staker
Introduction
“I can’t draw,” I said to my husband, Jeff.
“Yes, you can,” he said. “Turn the image you are trying to draw upside down. Now draw exactly what you see. Your left brain quiets down. Its rational language and organizing directives will allow your right brain to take over, releasing you from your judging, analytical self. No longer will you feel bound by ‘it’s a chair’ and feel the stress to draw the perfect chair. Try it!”
This exercise, developed in the late 1970s by Betty Edwards and written up in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, changed everything about my understanding of learning to draw. I discovered a new part of myself by turning the image of my subject matter upside down.
This change of perspective reminded me of Maria Montessori’s insistence on having “fresh eyes” each day when working with children—the ability to strip one’s own judgment and to observe clearly and freshly, so the person being observed remains free from your prejudices, opinions, and moods.
It is with this spirit of embracing new perspectives that Jeff and I entered the world of education in 2008: upside down and with fresh eyes.
We are products of America’s public school system. We each have memories of that “magical teacher” who changed our lives. We each received graduate degrees from traditional, private universities. And we each pursued education as a part of our own professional paths.
Despite our backgrounds in education, we never set out to start our own school or design something brand new in the K–12 realm. It was only when we had children of our own that things changed. We understood the world our children would face would be vastly different—unimaginably so—from the world we encountered as young adults. We knew they’d need to be armed to know how to learn, respond, innovate, and create in their own way rather than become skilled at taking tests and following instructions like we had. We believed our children would need the light of curiosity burning brightly in their eyes—not just when they were young learners, but throughout their childhood, teen years, and far beyond.
A small, quiet voice started creeping into our hearts as we looked for school options that would equip them for this wide-open, futuristic territory for which we had no compass. What had worked for us as children looked desperately outdated, impractical, and simply wrong, even with good, smart people working hard to make the traditional schools adaptive to today’s opportunities.
With no map or long-term strategic plan, we set out in the way artists and scientists do—disciplining ourselves to let go of preconceived ideas, experimenting without demanding outcomes, and using clear principles with standards of excellence to constrain us at every turn. Our goal? To create and bring to life a vision of “school” that worked for our own children and anyone who would join us. We didn’t want to disrupt or compete with traditional public or private schools. We wanted to run parallel to them.
While we sought data and results, our journey was fueled by a power not mentioned in academic spheres as part of the education equation.
Like all parents, we were driven by love. Love of the human spirit, of freedom, of le
arning, of risky adventure, and of responsibility. Love for our own children and the light in their eyes.
We wondered: Can a vision of school rationally encounter the power of love and claim it?
We found: only when the vision of school is turned upside down.
Acton Academy is the outcome of our dreaming and scheming. It is a new vision of what a learning community can be. It is gritty and dreamy. It is not for the faint of heart, because it inspires growth and transformation—neither of which are achieved without some suffering, which is the Latin root of the word passion.
With almost a decade under our belts, we can claim that Acton’s method of learning works. We have proof, which I will reveal in the pages ahead.
This book is the story of Acton Academy’s origin. Although it began as an ambitious extension of homeschooling, Acton has now grown into a worldwide community of over 800 students in more than sixty locations in eight countries, and it’s growing every week. Many communities are small—not more than 7 to 10 students—because they have only recently opened. The more mature locations are nearing a maximum size of 120 young people and are already spawning new communities. We currently have 5,300 applications in our pipeline from parents around the world wanting to open one for their own children. Our small school is set up as a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization driven by efficiency and accountability in operations so that the focus remains on our mission.
Our school model includes Socratic questions to hone deep thinking; peer teaching; apprenticeships for real-world learning; and state-of-the-art online learning for mastering the basics of reading, grammar, and math. Hands-on projects designed with game-theory incentives deliver opportunities for young people to dig into the arts, sciences, world history, and economics. Although we can translate the achievements of our students into a traditional transcript that proves mastery, the end goal of learning at Acton isn’t to get a good score on a test or an A from a teacher. It is something quite different and includes solving real problems, analyzing moral dilemmas, making difficult decisions, persuading audiences to action, creating innovative opportunities for the world, resolving personal conflicts, and even making and managing money.
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