[CityOfThrowaway]

Really cool! A lot of parents had success putting their kids into a learning pod during COVID and it looks like you’re building formal structure around this type of thing.

I love that you’re working on it. If you can figure out how to make this work, the real power of the internet can be unleashed on education… and really just in the nick of time.

Some questions for you:

1. How do you choose the pods? What happens if the kids don’t like each other?

2. What depth is the coach supposed to be able to get into? Seems like a really hard job to context switch rapidly between topics when each kid is at a different place and doing something different.

3. What does the social component feel like? Are the kids mostly building comraderie around broader cultural topics as opposed to learning?

[amarkumar81]

Thank you for the kind words and good questions!

1.) We match students to pods after a family interview and spending time with the students. The dimensions we use for matching include geography, age, online program, extra-curricular interests, learning personalities, and other needs that students may have.

Despite our best efforts, we will certainly have situations where some kids may not like each other, but we train our Learning Coaches in building positive group dynamics and helping kids learn to work together (very much like the real world!).

2. We definitely don't ask our Coaches to be content experts; that would indeed be a really hard job as you point out. Instead, we ask them to be able to sit down with the student and figure things out using the course content. When the duo figures out a complex topic together, we hear from students that they enjoyed it a lot more (and learned more!) than someone just telling them how to do it. And in the situations where the duo can't figure it out either, the coach works with the online teacher to make sure the student gets the help they need.

3. Kids mostly build camaraderie around the enrichment activities we plan every day (e.g., music classes, building bridges with spaghetti/marshmallows) where they team up. We also have breaks for free play (e.g., badminton in the yard, Bananagrams with the Learning Coaches).

Academically, it's hard for students in the same pod to 'bond' since students can be in different grades (up to a 3 year age band in each pod), can choose which subject to work on and when, and can move at their own pace. Instead, students actually get that type of camaraderie with their online school classmates. Hope that made sense; but let me know if not!

[smorrow]

You don't need to "put" people places - they do that by themselves (and better than you can centrally plan - I know you don't want to hear that).

You don't need to make them go on the internet either.

And apparent "success", in the sense you mean it, isn't, either. It's just kicking the can down the road. Real progress would be the seemingly unproductive, a-month-for-every-year-in-school deschooling period like that of "the sleeping student" at Sudbury[1].

People had the chance this year and the last[2] to let children be free and they blew it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si0PPv-7yWo&list=PLBC7021B61... [2] We've known since April 2020 that kids don't spread it. Icelandic contact-tracing study.

[amarkumar81]

I really appreciate your push for learning environments that don't constrain students and students can just be who they are. In other words, what are the absolutely minimum number of things that we insist on as rules, so that students feel the freedom to take ownership over the rest.

(And thanks for sharing that Sudbury example; I had never seen it before but I love the message.)