Courage to Grow

by Laura Sandefer

  The ultimate goal, though, is to learn how to learn, learn how to do, and learn how to be, so that each person who enters our doors will find a calling and change the world. Each person who graduates from an Acton Academy will be equipped to master the next step in their life plan with gusto—whether it be attending a fine university, taking a gap year to travel, or starting a business.

  As I take you through our story, you’ll experience the physical environment of Acton, which is designed like a one-room schoolhouse, with ages mixed so that peers can learn from and teach one other. You’ll also experience the emotional engagement of our young people and taste how freedom feels for children. Because there are mountains of stories and experiences I could share from these years, I’ve had to condense the pieces, moving some of the projects and discussions out of chronological order. But the tale is true and yours for the taking.

  Some people say what we are doing isn’t really all that different. True, there are excellent school models in the public and private sectors emerging around the country that use similar approaches, including teachers who are fueled by love for children and learning.

  But there are a few distinguishing aspects of Acton that separate us from any other school model, and they are the reason for our strong outcomes. They also cause consternation in those who witness Acton in action. It’s hard to believe it’s real until you see it.

  Our biggest point of separation is the upside-down power structure that pushes control and decision making to the children. We have few adults serving as bureaucratic authority figures around our learning environments. We believe adults in such capacity can stymie learning and that peers have more power. Because of this, we are free from the traditional trappings that have come to be known as “school.” Acton Academy has no teachers, only guides. No report cards, only student-earned badges and portfolios to prove mastery of skills. No classrooms, only creative work spaces called studios. No assigned homework, only what a child chooses to continue doing at home. No attendance requirements. No bureaucracy, only a lean machine that drives the cost of private schooling down to lower costs than any model we’ve seen.

  Read on; you’ll be surprised.

  Visit an Acton Academy and you won’t hear an announcement over an intercom by a principal, nor will you see a teacher managing behavior at recess. You won’t hear buzzers marking the end of math work time or science class.

  This radical power shift does not mean children are running wild with no accountability or discipline, although there are days when chaos reigns. The Acton story is most surprising in that this power shift unleashes children to care so deeply about their learning that they choose to work hard, hold tight boundaries for each other, and rise to excellence in ways we never imagined. Self-imposed rigor is integral to our daily life.

  Acton Academy is grounded in trusting children and believing they can handle big responsibilities. “It’s always opposite day at Acton,” an eight-year-old named Ian told me one day.

  Through the ambiguity and messiness of life and learning, which we adults tend to abhor, we see children rise up and embrace the mindset of heroes—people who take responsibility for their choices, get back up after falling down, and refuse to quit even when it’s hard. We see children learning how to learn and loving it.

  A second distinguishing characteristic of our school brings vibrancy to the upside-down canvas we’ve painted. It’s the landscape on which our curriculum is grounded and is our “why” behind everything that happens in a day, week, or year. It is the Hero’s Journey.

  This grand mythological narrative of an ordinary person leaving a place of comfort to meet a challenge describes what all humans since the beginning of time have yearned for in life. We crave a life that means something to the world. We crave being known for our uniqueness, not what others expect or hope us to be. The Hero’s Journey beckons each of us to answer the questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Will I step forward to answer the call to adventure—knowing there will be monsters to battle, dark valleys to cross, and mountains to climb? Will I be passive or active about the direction of my life? Can I find the treasure of my potential, the holy grail, and return home with it to help others? Disney uses this narrative well to draw young hearts in, as do all great writers and storytellers. The Hero’s Journey crosses cultures and binds us as a tribe.

  Children at Acton Academy know why they are being challenged to learn, to master, to solve, to forgive, to apologize, to discuss. They are doing so because it is part of their personal quest—their Hero’s Journey—to find their greatest treasures, their inner gifts, and hone them in order to solve a burning need in their community, city, or world.

  At Acton, we talk about this magnificent journey often. Whether it’s learning multiplication or engaging in a heated match of GaGa ball, there is a clear and important reason that urges us forward. People in our community—from six-year-olds to sixty-year-olds—embrace the challenge to learn and grow, knowing there will be suffering along the way because it’s part of the journey. For this reason, we arm ourselves with courage each day. The courage to grow.

  This is just the beginning of our story in many ways. Part of the magic of the Acton journey is its ever-changing, ever-evolving nature—and the awakening it inspires not just in children of all creeds and backgrounds but also in their parents.

  The pages that follow will take you along on our quest to create a unique learning community. You’ll get a firsthand tour, and then we’ll drop back in time to reveal how our story truly unfolded—in an unglamorous, plodding fashion with stumbles, failures, joys, tears, and victories. As we strove to create a school that was free to look at learning from a different viewpoint, we met friends, heroes, guides, and foes—all in very unlikely places. It may feel messy at times because it was and still is.

  This is not a how-to book. Nor is it a book about educational theory. It’s simply our tale of surprise and discovery, of our growing pains through trial and error to the point where our fundamental beliefs about education were transformed and our creation, Acton Academy, was poised for expansive growth. And like all good tales, there is a surprise ending—a bit of magic about parenting and living that has changed our family and countless others forever.

  I’ve learned much along the way. One of my favorite lessons grew from answering a question posed to me by Socratic master teacher Steven Tomlinson, who asked, “Would you rather be right or surprised?”

  I began this journey wanting to be right. I wanted formulas, answers, evidence. I even wanted report cards, test scores, and grades—some authority figure to tell me how I was doing.

  I now am grateful to be surprised. With surprise comes a sense of wonder, a sense of risk and flying off into the unknown, ready to self-correct when needed. Embracing school as an experiment has meant we are all learners at Acton; there are no experts among us. There is a playful and fun yet deeply serious ethos that surrounds us each day, because we are bound by principles and purpose. We can be free to explore with a sense of stability in our questioning and questing.

  Can you free yourself enough from your own past school experiences to see things upside down? Are you one of the people who will claim a grand adventure for your family or, if necessary, start your own Acton Academy? At the very least, this story may inspire you to be still and listen to that small, quiet voice in your heart. It’s quite possible the fate of a free society—and your children’s future—depends on your answer to the question: Will you join us?

  Let me draw a new picture for you.

  Chapter 1

  A Day in the Life of Acton Academy

  “The Acton community and life experience provide our son the best possible environment in which to develop. You empower kids to an unparalleled degree. We truly believe this, relative to all other educational options. Every Acton parent goes to sleep each night thankful for the opportunity to be in this moment.”

  �
��Charlie and Pam Madere, Acton Academy parents

  It was the spring of 2011. Acton Academy’s second year was in full swing. The Staker family had never stepped foot in Texas. “We just had to see Acton Academy for ourselves,” Allan Staker said as he described his memory of that day when he and his wife, Heather, flew to Austin for one day and one reason.

  They wanted to see if what they had heard about our school was true. Heather, a leading expert in innovative schools, had been visiting hundreds of classrooms across the nation, meeting with teachers, administrators, and thought leaders to collect evidence of best practices.

  “We pulled down the narrow downtown street and paid for parking. It was very close to downtown, but still felt like a quiet little side street. There was not a lot of traffic. The house was so cute! Tiny, in fact, with a beautiful Acton Academy sign out front. Beautiful trees lined the street and there was lots of shade on the property. A bridge from the street’s sidewalk led to the front door. Heather had toured many schools before, but this was a first for me. But I’ve been a student and a parent, and I knew what schools were supposed to look like and how kids were supposed to act. I had no idea what I was in for.

  “Laura, you met us at the door and guided us into the main room to the round green rug, where the students were having a morning discussion. We quietly sat in chairs at the back. The students sat in a neat circle, all looking at each other. No one was goofing off or causing trouble—they were all engaged.

  “It’s easy to forget this now, but the students were all very young—there was no middle school or high school yet. They fit the size of the tiny, adorable building. I think there were fifteen to twenty of them.

  “The kids were having a Socratic discussion about which games should or shouldn’t be played at recess. Raised hands, well-organized thoughts, and a surprising, quiet intensity—all about something as trivial as Four-Square,” continued Allan. He went on to describe what they saw, which remains etched in his memory.

  “This went on for several minutes. It was fascinating—I didn’t know kids in groups were capable of that. I noticed right away that there was very little input from the guides—only suggestions and concessions among the students, and then the business was concluded.

  “After the discussion, the guides dismissed the students for project time. I’m not sure what I expected here, but what happened next was fascinating. The students quietly stood up, and then two by two, and without the slightest bit of grown-up guidance (or coercion!), the pairs each moved to a different station. It couldn’t have been choreographed better: One pair sat down at tiny desks to go to work on their potato clock. Another pair moved to the Lego Mindstorms set and resumed work on the robot they were programming. Another pair sat next to each other, opened their laptops, and began scanning YouTube videos about something related to a project they were working on. Another set logged in to Khan Academy and got started on math. Each pair was doing a completely different activity! And they did it in a quiet, happy, self-guided way.

  “And the guides? They acted like all of this was completely normal. They just stood and watched the show. I remember the students had lab coats. They were all hanging on hooks in the kitchen. I think that was one of the details that sealed it for us. These children were engaged in a simulation of Thomas Edison’s lab!

  “Every room of that little house was full of light and beautifully stocked with educational goodness—but neatly so, as if the set dressers from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood were doing a spread for Real Simple magazine. Globes and toys and a goldfish and books . . . everything but the trolley.

  “Every room felt like someplace where you’d want to just sit and learn. It was the perfect place for a kid to spend each day. There was a mural painted by the children on the fence lining the property. It was colorful, playful, and happy.

  “As we pictured our own kids here, Heather and I were just beaming. We knew there was an application deadline the following day. As we sat at the airport awaiting our flight home, we quickly downloaded the books we needed to have read as part of your entry process. We spent the entire flight home filling out our applications. We pulled our kids out of school the next day to complete theirs. When we were accepted, I scrambled to find a job that would move us to Austin.”

  Heather added to the memory. “I remember Allan’s total head-over-heels attraction to everything we saw. I also remember sitting in the Austin airport looking at each other and knowing at the same time what we needed to do, like it was destiny.

  “From my perspective, there were two novelties that hit me as we first observed Acton Academy that day. The first was that you discovered, before any other schools I’d seen, that the disruptive innovation of online learning pushes control to students in a way that fundamentally rethinks children’s capacity. If children have the capacity to learn via online delivery of instruction, then why not get adults out of the way and equip the children to go for it! I was amazed to see how liberally you embraced that idea, and yet it worked. Guides were on hand to activate the learning, but the children had adapted to do the rest of it without adult helicoptering. The liberation and empowerment for children were breathtaking.

  “Second, I was amazed by your environment. Each corner of that house—from the kitchen tools to the reading nooks to the robotics corner to the homemade hula-hoops in the backyard—was designed to prime curiosity, experimentation, and the joy of childhood. It looked like the better Finnish schools that get so much acclaim today. We couldn’t keep our own children in a conventional school any longer—no more conventional lessons, no more conventional playground equipment, no more teaching children to put a bubble in their mouths to stay quiet while they stand in line. Innovations that distribute power to the powerless have changed the equation, and you discovered this at Acton Academy, at least a decade ahead of the pack.”

  · · ·

  Heather Staker was a young luminary in the world of innovative education. As a high school senior in Irvine, California, she had served on the state board of education. She attended Harvard Business School and studied under Clayton Christensen, ultimately partnering with him in late 2010 to cowrite a report on the newest innovation in education—online learning—and how schools were capturing technology to serve students. As part of her research in writing this report, she and a fellow cowriter, Matt Clayton, called Jeff to interview him about Acton Academy. Little did we know this phone call would lead to the Stakers’ trip to Texas a few months later.

  Jeff had followed Christensen’s work on disruptive innovation with great interest and agreed to a fifteen-minute phone conversation. When they got off the phone, they had spoken for more than the fifteen minutes he’d agreed to. It was more like ninety minutes.

  Staker asked a few questions, but mostly she listened as Jeff described Acton’s goal of pushing control to the students, allowing them to progress at their own pace and interact as a community of learners. He described the school’s underpinnings and its adherence to Socratic teaching—as well as its use of several online learning programs, including DreamBox, Rosetta Stone, and Learning Today.

  When Jeff thought they were finished, there was a moment of silence on the other end.

  “Can I ask you a personal question, not connected to the study?” Staker asked.

  “Sure,” Jeff replied.

  “Would you consider letting my husband and me be the first people to start an Acton Academy in California? This is by far the most exciting school I’ve studied, and I want something like this for our children.”

  Heather and Allan had four children at the time and were living in Honolulu, Hawaii, but were considering a move to the mainland, with their eyes on California. Their eldest child was just starting elementary school.

  Jeff called me after hanging up with Heather and said, “Congratulations. Your school is captivating the best minds in education. Be ready to create a prototype kit so others c
an follow your lead. We’ll be receiving a copy of Heather Staker’s report soon. It’ll be interesting to see how she describes Acton Academy in comparison to other schools.”

  Follow my lead? I was building the airplane as we were flying it, as Jeff liked to say.

  Acton Academy was only two years old and it was already nearing full capacity at thirty-six elementary students (see appendix A). Word had spread that our students had progressed three grade levels, on average, on the national standardized test we delivered—and this was after only nine months in our program. The more seductive secret, though, was that the children at Acton loved learning. Our secret was out.

  But I wasn’t thinking about what the rest of the world wanted. I was simply focused on creating an engaging and challenging learning journey for the young children at Acton Academy. There was something happening within the walls of our tiny, adorable house. It was joyful learning. Could we bottle this up? In a kit? For others to use?

  I didn’t have time to think about that. The morning’s Socratic discussion was about to begin.

  · · ·

  Libby finished reading aloud the newspaper article and looked at the group of fellow students sitting on the floor in the circle around her. She’d just explained the premise for today’s Socratic discussion, which she had blended from different sources to give a complete picture of the issue:

  There were whales trapped in Arctic ice. They had only small holes to breathe through, and the holes were shrinking as the ice refroze. The open ocean was too far for them to reach in a single breath. The whales would drown as soon as the shelf above them solidified.

  Three commercial ships were also stuck in ice, their crews near starvation and hypothermia. They weren’t able to free themselves and couldn’t travel over the ice to safety.