“But not just plant them,” said Chris. “You have to water them and make sure they have sunshine.”
“These are like your seeds of potential,” Kaylie said. “Everyone has them. We call this your genius—your potential for greatness that is unique to you. But if you don’t nurture the seeds of potential inside you and help them grow, they’ll die and waste away, just like apple seeds tossed into the trash.” She paused to let this settle in, and then asked, “How can we help each other’s seeds of potential grow? How can we be the good soil, water, and sun to ourselves and each other?”
Ms. Anna grabbed a whiteboard to record their ideas:
Read good books.
Don’t bother people when they are working.
Say nice words. Don’t say “stupid.”
Be curious.
Work hard.
Practice.
Tell the truth.
This was the Socratic method in action—a guide asking questions and moving deeper with the children’s responses, all the while holding tightly to the boundaries of time and discussion rules.
Kaylie looked at the clock and knew she had to close the day.
“Let’s keep this list and think more about how we can help each other grow our seeds of potential. Next week, we are going to write our contract. This will include the promises we make to each other.”
Kaylie explained the importance of keeping promises, of honoring the contract, and what type of consequences there might be for breaking the promises. Then she closed for the day.
“Thank you for a wonderful day of learning. Namaste. The light in me honors the light in you.”
Kaylie and Anna were adding their own personal touch to the ceremonial feel of Acton. “Namaste” was Kaylie’s gentle kindness shining through.
“Namaste,” the students said in unison.
Little did we know on that day that the gracious Hindu expression would become the traditional closing of every single day at Acton Academy. The traditions were beginning.
Chapter 5
Learn by Doing—Wrestling with Rebels and Rulers
“A couple of days ago Nicholas was getting ready for school and tears were streaming down his cheeks because his sunburn hurt so badly. I was ready to have him stay home, work from his laptop, and apply more aloe every hour. When he realized this was my plan he said, ‘Wait! I can’t stay home! I’ve got work to do!’
Even a year ago, I would have never imagined him exhibiting that level of responsibility. I wouldn’t have dreamed it was possible. I’m glad he learned the lessons that lead to responsibility in sixth grade instead of during his freshman year of college.”
—Robert Yacktman, Acton Academy parent
As our first year continued, each learner was coming into his or her own sense of self in our space. I was witnessing a tribe of strong personalities forging its customs. From soft-spoken and shy to rambunctious and active, each child’s individuality shone through while being tempered to fuel the covenant-bound group.
When one spoke too softly in a group discussion, another would say, “We can’t hear what you said and we want to hear it. Could you please say it a little louder?” When one child pushed another at the drinking fountain, another would say, “We don’t do that at Acton.” When one took more cookies than the allotted amount during lunch, someone was bound to say, “That’s not okay.” And when one was making too much noise during reading time, it never took more than a few seconds before I’d witness another redirecting him to his book.
These young students were sticklers for their standards, and they had set them very high with their Student Contract (see Appendix B). They were not afraid to claim their new role in life as managers of their space and time. The children were gentle and consistent in their feedback to each other.
This became the foundational practice for peer accountability. The adults were easily released from the role of classroom managers or disciplinarians. Each student strayed from the rules at times in minor ways. But not one disagreed with the premise that the rules were legitimate and the contract was sacred. They were the authors of both, and they took pride in their identity as the Acton Academy community. This was their culture.
This group of seven children set the path for our future by finding their voices with each other. The words were clear and kindly spoken. And they were heard. Together, the students would be the ones to carry this torch forward. The roots of a student-driven community were taking hold.
Hark! A messenger!
On a cool November morning, the children were focused on their independent core skills work. The excitement of the new school year had settled into a comfortable routine. The Entrepreneurship Quest was a big success, culminating in the Second Annual Children’s Business Fair, which had more than tripled in size. The Contract was signed and hanging on the wall. The seven founding students were now a group of intentional learners on a mission. There was a relaxed, quiet buzz around the schoolhouse.
Suddenly, there was knocking at the front door. Ms. Kaylie called everyone together. This was not a normal thing for her to do. She declared that the king wasn’t happy that we had our own free school.
“He has his eye on us and will be sending us a letter soon,” she said. “I think this is his messenger coming to the door now.”
Ms. Anna was standing outside. She had on a black tricorne hat with a faux white ponytail hanging down the back. Her jeans were tucked into black boots, and her white shirt was buttoned up high under her blue blazer.
“I deliver to you on behalf of King George this proclamation,” she announced. “You are under the order of the king to follow it.”
She handed Kaylie the proclamation, which was rolled up and tied with a ribbon. Kaylie unrolled it and read it out loud.
“King George has ordered each person to take everything out of your desk and stack it on the right corner. From now on, nothing may be put in your desk. Everything must be stacked on top.”
The students giggled. This was fun. It was a game and they knew it. They ran to their desks and did as they were ordered.
For the rest of the day, every thirty minutes, a proclamation would be delivered and read out loud. Each one was hung on the wall above the fireplace.
You must ask permission to go to the bathroom.
Snack time will be only at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. No one can choose any other time, and all snacks must be eaten in the kitchen.
Everyone must line up at the door and walk outside together for free time.
You are allowed to do only math work this morning. No reading or writing.
You are allowed to read only the books on this list.
The fun lasted for the first few announcements. Then the students began to get annoyed. The day closed with more than a couple of frowns and grumbles.
The king’s injustice
The students returned the next morning expecting the start of what they considered to be a normal day. It was not.
There were more proclamations, more restrictions, more alterations to the routine. By midday, when they realized they were not getting much work done, their annoyance turned to anger and tears. Their freedoms were gone. They were being directed, lectured to, and strictly monitored.
“This isn’t fair,” Bodhi said.
“We can’t work under these circumstances,” Charlie said, seriously upset with this change of fate.
“We deserve to be able to eat when we need to and go to the bathroom when we need to,” another voice added.
“This isn’t Acton anymore.”
A revolt and a roll of the die
Anna waited for silence, then said, “If you believe a revolution against King George is the only way for you to get back on track with your learning, you may choose to revolt.” She paused. “But there is a high probability of losing.
&n
bsp; “If you choose to revolt, you must write a formal declaration of independence,” she explained. “And then you must roll the die. If you roll a one or two, you win. Three, four, five, or six and you lose. Losing is significant. It means you will lose free play time and dessert at lunch for the rest of the session—four more weeks.”
Stern and tight-lipped, Ms. Anna played the part perfectly. The students’ anger only increased. We had not fixed the die. This was a real-life experience in learning how to calculate odds and weigh risk, with real consequences.
Charlie took the lead.
“Revolt!” he cried out. “I’ll start writing our declaration now!”
And so he did. They all gathered around him, and after his first sentences—We are not animals! We deserve to learn freely without the intrusion of terrible rules!—each one added a sentence or two, then signed it with a flourish. Then they stormed up to the wall of proclamations and pinned their declaration of independence on top of them.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Ms. Kaylie said. “It’s very risky.”
“Yes, and we’ve chosen Charlie to roll the die,” Ellie said in her quiet, steady voice with confidence.
Kaylie, Anna, and I were anxious. This could turn out terribly. If it didn’t work out, there would be lots of tears and some very upset children going home today. And the rest of the session would be more like the traditional school we had rebelled against in the first place. I had to leave the studio—I couldn’t watch the rolling of the die. What Jeff and I envisioned as critical learning experiences for our children—real risk taking with the potential of experiencing failure or loss—now felt like a bad idea. Couldn’t they just read about the risk those early rebels took in a textbook? We were setting up experiences in which the adults had no idea what the outcome would be.
While this is the essence of the Socratic method, when combined with this level of experiential learning, it was feeling like a real punch in the gut for me—one who likes to control things. I was beginning to sense what the emotional journey of an Acton parent looked like—a personal journey fraught with feeling out of control, anxious, and vulnerable. I stayed in my small office and listened at the doorway.
The guides gathered the group and gave Charlie the die. “Remember, you must roll either a one or a two to gain your freedoms back,” Anna said.
“Go, Charlie!” Cash said.
Charlie shook and shook and shook the die. He tossed it. The room was silent except for the die bouncing along the wooden floor. When it stopped, Anna looked at it.
“It’s a two!”
Joy and relief. Everyone, including Kaylie and Anna, squealed with glee. The children ran up to the wall of proclamations and started ripping them off with great vigor. When they were all torn off the wall, they looked at each other and said, “We can now do any work we want!”
Within five minutes, they were all moving into places at their desks or on beanbags or at the common tables in the kitchen. Our schoolhouse became peaceful and quiet again. They were free to work. And working is exactly what they wanted. They would have time the next day to reflect on their learning and process the experience with the guides. This would include writing and discussing the knowledge they gained about American history and, more importantly, what freedom means, what it felt like to have it stripped away, and how this experience will impact their lives moving forward.
But for now, it was time to revel in being able to do the work of their choice.
Claiming our identity
We traveled through the days and weeks, as happy sojourners with each day’s learning directing us toward the next day. The students had found their strides using the online math programs (see appendix H), were reading and writing every day, managing conflicts based on their Contract, painting an outdoor mural, working their bodies hard in PE, and launching into their next project, robotics and electronics. No one felt the urge to stray from our mission or skirt from working each day. This group of young children showed up early and stayed late. They wanted to be there and they wanted to learn.
By mid-January, it felt like we were missing something. We knew the character traits we valued in each other—courage, curiosity, kindness, responsibility, and good humor. We knew our mission—that each person would find a calling and change the world. We knew what our Contract stated—our essential rules to grow our seeds of potential.
But who were we? We needed an identity, a symbol to show the world. “A mascot!” Ellie said one afternoon. The group started listing their ideas for a mascot on a whiteboard. They decided over lunch one day that the list of potential mascots was long enough—Owls, Eagles, Aviators, Aces, Knights. It was time to discuss the options and then vote. It took their whole free time to finish debating the qualities of the prospective mascots. It was time for a vote.
“Should we let the parents vote?” asked Ms. Anna. All agreed this was a good idea. I sent an email to each family that afternoon so they could discuss and send their votes back to me. That evening the votes rolled in.
I arrived at school the next day with an announcement. It was a tie between Owls and Eagles. We needed to take another vote. Another email home and another evening later, we had our mascot.
We were now the Acton Academy Eagles.
Growing pains
Word gets out quickly in a town when parents and children are having a happy time with their learning experience. With very little advertising or publicity, I began getting daily phone calls for applications and requests for tours. We still felt like we were living in an idyllic world—our sweet schoolhouse with so much learning happening each day—and I was enjoying flying under the radar. More than that, I was afraid of what growth might do to our wonderful learning community.
“Jeff, what if this is working only because we have three particular magical ingredients in place right now—two great guides, seven amazing children, and a perfect setting? I just enrolled another family with two older boys. I’m afraid the whole thing might fall apart.”
I was feeling scared and selfish at the same time. Part of me didn’t want anyone to know about our little school. The children were thriving. We felt more like a family than a school. And I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. “I don’t want to tell my friends about this,” Carolyn said to me one day as she dropped off Cash. “I want to keep this all to ourselves.”
But it was time for Acton to grow.
Chapter 6
The Abyss of Assessment—How Do We Prove Learning?
“Why am I happy my kids are at Acton Academy? To boil down five years of the best, most unexpected gift is like boiling down a small sea. Our kids have developed confidence to learn independently, lead with compassion, and develop focus without losing curiosity. Learning to integrate the balance of freedom and accountability is having positive impacts in both school and family life.”
—Yolanda King, Acton Academy parent
As we entered our second year, we had more than doubled in size and would triple before the year ended. The report Heather Staker was writing, The Rise of K–12 Blended Learning, when she toured our school had shone the spotlight on Acton Academy. She had interviewed educators at schools coast-to-coast, from Kentucky to California, Illinois to New York, Kansas to Florida. Each school was in some significant way adding digital learning to its curriculum and giving students more leeway in how they used their time with online tools. Blended learning was the term used for this combination of online learning in a bricks-and-mortar school.
“Online learning appears to be a classic disruptive innovation with the potential not just to improve the current model of education delivery,” Heather wrote, “but to transform it.” Online learning had started small, she continued, with roughly 45,000 K–12 students taking online courses in 2000. “But by 2010,” she added, “over 4 million students were participating in some kind of formal online learning program.
”
She devoted three pages to Acton Academy and gave special attention to “Acton Sims,” the series of online simulations Jeff developed to teach entrepreneurship and business finance when he founded the Acton School of Business. They were state-of-the-art interactive experiences for graduate MBA students that we were using with our young learners at Acton Academy.
What seemed to impress Heather—and what separated us from most other blended-learning endeavors—was the role students played in the classroom.
“They are accountable to their peers,” she wrote, “and this team-based approach motivates students to master their fundamentals.”
Heather Staker’s report put Acton on the education map worldwide. On one hand, I could breathe a deep sigh of relief. In 2009 we had embarked on an odyssey with no assurance that our idea of a learning community would work; and less than three years later, an education expert, Heather Staker, had put an academic stamp of approval on our adventure. The report brought credibility and increased interest in Acton Academy.
On the other hand, with added growth we knew our processes needed to become more systematized. We needed to scale what we were doing to serve a larger group of children and parents.
And we needed to show evidence that real learning was happening.
Test scores: amazing results but not enough
We knew we needed a baseline test for two reasons. First, we wanted to make sure nothing was falling through the cracks in terms of core learning—reading, writing, and math. Second, parents want to see how their child compared to peers nationwide.
Over the years we have used the Stanford 10, ERB, and Scantron standardized tests, and most recently moved to the Iowa assessment. All tests proved what we had hoped—the children were progressing easily through more than one grade level per year.
In fact, they were progressing, on average, 3.5 grade levels every nine months. We’ve even had an Eagle earn a perfect score on the PSAT.
Courage to Grow Page 6