How I Found Myself Running a Microschool

One of our favorite education writers' do-it-yourself approach to remaking school

Editor’s note: Kelsey Piper has quickly become one of our favorite education writers for the rigor, conviction, and clarity of her reporting. We are excited to get to share her experiences launching Oakland LEARN, a microschool in Oakland, California. Be sure to head over and subscribe to The Argument to find more of Kelsey’s work — we especially recommend her recent piece on how grading went awry, right below.

When grades stop meaning anything

---

As our kids approached school-aged I found myself wanting three probably-contradictory things out of their education. The first was freedom and autonomy. It seemed tragic to me to ask young kids to sit still all day. Our oldest daughter loved to learn at home; she’d spend hours giggling her way through a book of math brainteasers or lost in Percy Jackson. I wanted her school experience to foster that instead of crushing it.

I have no idea what skills the job market is going to need by the time our kids are old enough to need to worry about it, but autonomy and self-directedness seem like obvious qualities to foster in our children’s growth.

I wanted them to learn things that interested them, and to grow into stewards of their own education. My ideal system was one where kids set goals and adults helped them get there.

I’d flirted with ‘unschooling’: the idea that the best thing to do is offer kids a knowledge-rich environment, and then just trust that what they do is what they should be doing. But the more I read unschooling blogs and discussions, the more I came away dissatisfied with the unschooling community’s disinterest in pedagogy — in how kids best learn something — and in how to make sure kids were developing the basic competencies that’d allow them to fully explore whatever did interest them. Some kids will learn to read without being taught, but some won’t. To not provide kids with however much support they need to learn to read strikes me as among the most profound possible failures as a parent. Fostering freedom and autonomy could not possibly mean taking them so far that you allow a student to remain illiterate — which ends up curtailing their autonomy for life. And once I’d acquired this conviction on the subject of reading, it crossed my mind that other subjects and skills might be the same — some kids might need deliberate structured instruction to master them, and they might be necessary prerequisites for other things the kids will want to do.

So, pedagogy. This is a topic where lots of people have lots of strong opinions, many of them have a mediocre research study or two in their favor, and none feel fully satisfying. Discovery-based learning? Project-based learning? Mastery-based learning? I never felt qualified to have my own opinion here, or evaluate anyone else’s, until I had taught children at a wide range of ability levels.

Once I did that, I immediately formed a lot of strong opinions of my own and felt more qualified to take a stand on other peoples’ opinions. Giving my full takes on all of pedagogy would be a book, not a part of an article, but to highlight the most important places where I’ve changed my thinking on this topic briefly: I have become skeptical of a lot of clever pedagogy and feel positively about direct, focused instruction at a student’s level on a topic they care about and want to master, done in a regular and structured way until they’ve mastered it.

This is not the current fashion. You might have heard instead (if like me you follow elite private schools in the Bay Area) that students should instead learn through discovery, with projects that help deeply appreciate the reason behind a concept rather than merely teaching the concepts. This is true when it’s done well but I have come to believe it’s virtually never done well.

It is incredibly valuable, where it’s possible, to motivate a new concept by introducing a challenge and helping the kids discover the approach that will solve the challenge. Textbooks and activities that do this are precious and valuable.

Unfortunately a lot of things marketed as discovery-based learning or project-based learning don’t actually do this, because it is extraordinarily difficult to do. Instead, they end up amounting to arts and crafts projects with only a distant conceptual connection to the topic, or just to a slower, more frustrating lesson plan which ends up at the same result. These days I am instinctively suspicious that many things marketed as discovery-based or project-based learning are in this category: we don’t know how to guide a child down the stepping stone of inferences that’d let them discover the technique completely from first principles, and so we’re instead selling a lesson that’s thematically related but won’t actually teach them. Some kids may love to spend some time exploring and trying it out for themselves, but a lot of kids will smell busywork, and get impatient. Most students benefit from direct explicit instruction, where you teach a technique by giving an example of how to solve the problem and then letting them try it themselves. Direct explicit instruction is almost never our romantic ideal of how students learn best, but in practice many students learn really well from it, enjoy learning material presented this way, and are much faster to attain the mastery they need to use that skill for other skills.

So these days I think that learning should be highly differentiated, with no two kids progressing at the same pace. I think it should be mastery-oriented, it should often involve explicit instruction, and it should respect students’ time by generally trying to teach them whatever it is they want to learn in the most effective manner we know of to teach it.

That’s enough of a bind all by itself — freedom, autonomy, and direct, explicit, mastery-based instruction. But I also think that education should teach values and character, and that is the third thing I hoped to figure out how to get. Here, again, I wanted a bunch of contradictory things. I wanted my kids to learn to question authority, to tell the teacher if the teacher is wrong and hear “oh, you’re right, thanks for correcting me.” I also wanted them to learn to be respectful and learn to function in unfamiliar situations. I hoped they wouldn’t spend much time bored, but I wanted them to learn how to gracefully cope with boredom. (This doesn’t mean ‘by suffering through it’ — pulling out a book is a great way to cope with boredom!)

One thing I wanted — while understanding that if we succeeded at all our kids would form their own values and priorities, and hopefully surpass us — was to make sure they understood the values and priorities that I hold dear. I wanted to teach them liberal individualism and principled tolerance. I wanted their school environment to build and cherish the commonalities between classmates whatever their background. I wanted to make sure they thoroughly understood how bad the past was and how hard-won our progress. I wanted them to be inoculated against five-minute internet outrages without becoming jaded and cynical about the ability of hard work and honest advocacy to fix horrendous evils in the world around them.

All of this made it apparent to me that I wanted to play a significant role in their school. I wanted to help read books and talk about if they were a fit for the curriculum. I wanted to help organize ways for the kids to give to kids who were poorer than them. Schools teach a lot more than reading and math. If you have an articulation of what makes for a good American, a good human being, a good neighbor, a good friend, this doesn’t just get passed on by osmosis! It often gets taught by example more than by explicit instruction. But it needs to get taught, or it won’t happen.

A major focus in schools in my area right now is social-emotional learning, which is a really broad category that includes some stuff that’s obviously really important and good, and also some stuff that strikes me as silly, misguided, or counterproductive. I am emphatically in favor of teaching kids emotional skills. How to calm down, how to bounce back, how to react when something is too hard, how to cope with stressful situations or competition or disappointment, how to respond to cruelty and how not to be cruel (even kids who are not trying to be cruel can really hurt each other just out of sheer interpersonal incompetence. And also, some kids will be trying to be cruel!). I think some teachers have extraordinary skill in projecting a kind of emotional steadiness which students can emulate and grow in the presence of. I don’t have that skill myself, but I aspire to it.

So a lot of stuff in the social-emotional learning bucket is really good. But I’m skeptical of some of the implementations I’ve seen. One is a tendency to treat all issues as social-emotional learning issues. For a concrete example: I saw a parent whose middle schooler was really struggling with math. They asked for advice. The responses were overwhelmingly from the SEL toolkit. How is the kid’s relationship with the teacher? Has the kid been screened for anxiety? Does the kid do negative self-talk? Does the kid experience too much pressure from peers to be ‘smart’?

I followed up with the parent to ask — has the kid gotten routine drilling in foundational arithmetic? (That is, times tables and so on?) Because kids who have not gotten routine drilling in foundational arithmetic will very frequently fall apart, in exactly that way, when they reach harder middle school math. The kid had not, it turns out, gotten routine drilling in foundational arithmetic.

A lot of cases are like that, in my experience. Something is attributed to emotional issues, but it’s really about academic ones: Whether a child is bought in on a subject area. Whether they are being taught challenging material at their level in an effective way. Whether they are getting good instruction. Of course it causes emotional issues when a child is in a classroom learning nothing, because they never learned the prerequisite skills! But the emotional issues aren’t the cause, and you’ll get a lot more mileage out of doing a good job of instruction.

I also think the SEL considerations for kids are very individual. My oldest daughter is competitive, and does her best work when I offer to race her, or when the class is competing to win a paper crown that reads ‘queen of math’ (or ‘king of math,’ of course).¹ My son, three years younger, has a yearning for meaning; he learns best when the lesson is directly connected to his current career aspiration. He’ll ask “do doctors need to know subtraction?” and then happily learn it if persuaded they do. My next oldest kid seems to yearn more than anything to be among the big kids. She demanded to be taught to read and do math because she sees them doing it. Each of them have some social-emotional skills that come naturally and some that are a huge fight. It’s an area that demands nuanced and evolving models of each child, and where I want to see low turnover and sustained relationships so that the teachers can be candid with me about what my kids need and how to deliver it.

So. That is the impossible set of conditions I’d set myself. I wanted a highly differentiated school with good pedagogy and lots of student freedom and autonomy where kids learn to think for themselves but also get a morally and intellectually serious presentation of my worldview and values and individualized support in developing as people. It’s not shocking that I had to start my own thing to get that. And so three years ago I joined with some other families and hired a friend who was a teacher to run Oakland LEARN.

These days I’m excited about how well we’ve squared all these circles. Classes at Oakland LEARN are optional; you can always walk out, to the playroom or outside. Kids can and do leave any class they don’t feel excited about. But usually almost all the kids join me for Oakland Strict, where we pretend to be a much stricter old-fashioned school for an hour and get in our times tables, spelling, group reading and composition practice.

Students learn at their own pace. Most of them are very advanced, in some cases ludicrously so, but not all of them; I take as much pride in helping a student who joined us unable to read get to reading at grade level as I do helping a student who we’ve had for three years take Algebra II in third grade. Most of the kids only spend an hour or two a day working — less, for the younger students — and the rest of their time playing or reading.

But there’s also a bunch I’d want to change. I’d like the school to be bigger. I think the kids would benefit from more kids to play with; we’re a microschool because it was easiest to start a microschool, not because we think the ‘micro’ is a key part of the formula. I constantly daydream that a sympathetic billionaire will drop ten million dollars on us and we can buy and outfit the perfect venue and grow over the next five years to serve a couple hundred students. We are also constantly changing what we’re doing. The kids’ needs change, our best understanding of how to serve them changes, and frankly I think sometimes kids benefit from change itself, learning whether the waters of a new activity or new dynamic really suit them. The parts of the program that I’m pretty sure will stay consistent are 1) highly differentiated students (kids are not all the same and do not all benefit from the same instruction), 2) mixed-grades (this makes differentiation easier and I think reduces pressure to be the ‘best,’ though I’d ideally split the K-1 or maybe K-2 out from the older elementary kids), and 3) an environment oriented towards freedom and autonomy. The rest we will vary as we go, as part of trying to do a very complicated vision justice.

1. We never have the kids compete against each other in skill; we have mixed-aged and mixed-ability classrooms, and it’d make no sense. When they compete, it’s in ‘points’, which are meant to represent a similar amount of focus and effort for each kid.