Designing Microschools to Fit Purpose and Community Needs

Deborah Gist of Transcend and the XQ Institute and Victoria Andrews of Getting Smart joined me to talk about their report, “The Public Microschool Playbook: A New Actionable Guide for System Leaders,” a guide for public school districts interested in starting their own microschools. Our conversation explored the barriers districts face and highlighted solutions and real-world examples where microschools are already making a difference. My guests emphasized the importance of community engagement, starting small, and designing schools around the specific needs of students.

For those who have read my book From Reopen to Reinvent and followed my work, it’s no secret that I think many more districts ought to be operating a range of microschools rather than continuing to have a one-size-fits-all mentality around serving students. It seems like a big opportunity to increase student engagement—and by having a bunch of purpose-built and differentiated microschools serving different groups of students yet offering them through the district, you can also imagine still having the best of a big community with other offerings like sports teams and the like that might be a draw. How to do this, however, has been a challenge for many districts, so I was glad when this guide came out. I hope our conversation helps more districts move forward accordingly.

Michael Horn

Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live lives of purpose. Something we’re not accomplishing today. But two folks that we get to welcome to our show today, being dedicated to this work for a very long time and doing incredible stuff. So thrilled to have two friends here, Deborah Gist and Victoria Andrews. Deborah, obviously now superintendent in residence at Transcend and XQ Institute, but of course, you were the superintendent of Oklahoma’s largest public school district in Tulsa, your hometown, for many years and of course, commissioner of Education in Rhode island and many other things.

So first, good to see you Deb.

Deborah Gist

You too.

Michael Horn

And Victoria, you’re obviously a partner now focused on professional learning at Getting Smart, but you were the assistant director for an IB school, I think most recently before Getting Smart. So thank you so much for joining as well.

Victoria Andrews

Super happy to be here. Yeah. Can’t wait for the conversation.

Michael Horn

Well, we’re going to dive in because you all were part of Getting Smart Collective, Learner Centered Collaborative, and Transcend coming together to write, I think, a really important report, the “Public Microschool Playbook: A New Actionable Guide for System Leaders.” We’ll link to it, obviously in the show notes and up front, but it’s a really important playbook that encourages districts to get in the game, start creating microschools. And Deb, you’ve, I feel like actually I was in front of you a couple times from when From Reopen to Reinvent came out being like, districts should do microschools. And you’d be like, there’s not a playbook yet to get them to do it. So you guys have written that. Let’s, let’s dive in because I think it’s obviously incredibly critical. There’s a lot of interest in them.

Overcoming Educational Innovation Barriers

Michael Horn

Let’s start with the barriers, though, because you all note in the report that we’re not seeing a lot of district run microschools. You list several of them actually helpfully, but there’s not a, there’s not as many as there should be. So maybe let me start with you, Deb. And then Victoria, you jump in, like, what do you see as the big impediments or barriers that’s holding this back?

Deborah Gist

Well, I mean, I think honestly one of the very first barriers is just awareness and just a recognition of the why and what’s possible and how they could go about doing it. And then once a system leader, whether it’s a school district superintendent or a charter school leader or a leader of tribal schools or whatever the entity is, once they get the bug and they think, oh, I get it, like, I see how this could be such a game changer for my students, my teachers in our community, then you start encountering, you know, some practical kinds of things. And it’s everything from funding, which always comes up. It’s like, how do you set aside the seed funding in the long term, it really should be, but there are some things that people have to work through you. You might run into, depending on the state, on, on most of these actually certification challenges, like, you know, teachers of record and, and how that is done within the state, depending, depending on the design of the school, you might run into needing to figure out, you know, how you count courses, how you count attendance, you know, seat time issues and things like that. Then you have facilities. And again, you know, there are, there are typically in, in many districts.

There’s space available, but it’s figuring that out. And if you want it to be intentionally, which we actually recommend in the playbook, outside of the system, at least initially, you know, figuring that out and make. And then you have to work through, you know, safety concerns and all of the things. So we lay this out in the playbook. So I don’t want anyone to feel daunted by the that we’re talking about barriers right away. It’s. It’s very doable. And all those mechanisms that we touch on that I talked about.

And then you also have enrollment and the procedures and different things like that. All of that is very technical things that can be addressed, I think, helping to lead the adaptive change of helping people to think how. How do we do school differently and what do we have to let go of and what do we need to embrace? Because we all want to serve students for their whole unique selves. But the barriers sometimes can feel daunting, but we can help people address them.

Michael Horn

Victoria, what would you add, yeah?

Victoria Andrews

I would just liken it to, you know, everybody has a dream of owning a home. And you’re like, oh, I’m going to get a house that’s going to be three bedrooms, two baths. It’s like, there are so many different types of houses. There’s condos, there’s townhouses, there’s modular houses. So sometimes it’s just truly, you don’t know what’s possible. And so for a lot of leaders that are leading, they’ve got the blinders on. Deb can attest to this just like I can, where it’s like the day to day, you’re just like, I gotta make it through. And we need to do what we need to do to make sure that the kids are safe and the staff is supported.

And sometimes, unfortunately, innovation is the last thing on our minds. And so not even knowing what are the possibilities to attract different parents to engage students in a different way, just even knowing that this is an option and this is an avenue to do that.

Michael Horn

Yeah, no, that makes sense. So I want to double click on a couple of them because you talked about seed funding. That’s one I hear a lot from folks on the ground like, we are stretched as it is running flat out. And to your point, Victoria, like the urgent and immediate, maybe trumps the important in the long term that maybe we should be planning for. How do you go about getting seed funding? And then the other one I’d love you all to address, I’ll just name it. I hear a lot about union contracts or policies or procedures. Like how do you think about batting those down so you can create space for this?

Funding Small-Scale Education Initiatives

Deborah Gist

Well, I’ll start and then this is probably mostly a Victoria question, but I mean, there are resources available. Getting Smart is one. VELA has given out grids and they don’t need to be big. So the seed funding, you know, having led large systems, even though I led large systems that were constantly needing to, you know, cut budgets and figure out how to adjust and so forth, the amount of money that we’re talking about is doable. So it’s about will, it’s about saying like we are, it is worth it to set aside an amount of money or co fundraise for it or whatever it’s going to take to get this going. I think sometimes people think it’s just a tiny, tiny number of students. And, you know, how do we focus on that when we have this much bigger population that we’re serving? But it’s not just about those students. Even though it is.

It’s really about how we are adjusting the system overall. Quickly, on the union question, you know, obviously it varies from state to state and district to district in very dramatic ways. I know from personal experience, but I would say that microschools are about teachers. I mean, this is about helping the union leadership and the teachers that are part of that union leadership understand that this is about respecting the professionalism of educators and giving them an opportunity to work with communities to build the kind of schools that they really dream about. So I think it’s a doable thing. But Victoria knows more about doing that on a day to day.

Michael Horn

You’ve been in the trenches, Victoria. So because you all are getting smarter, funding support, supporting a lot of these. So, talk about that.

Victoria Andrews

We have and what is inspiring is that you see once people wrap their minds around that this is a possibility then you see that like innovation light bulb go off and it’s how can I be creative with the space and the staffing that I have? I think about Canyon City out of Colorado. So they have a microschool and it’s experiential learning and they take the young people on various trips across the country and even globally. And their staffing model is so that they’re on the block schedule. But if there’s an English teacher that one of that English teacher section is with the microschool. So it’s not the hiring of an additional person, it’s just being creative and flexible within the confines that you already have. And so that’s a perfect example of like how do we address, you know, space operations and staffing? What do you have? How can you be flexible? I think it goes back to the point we talked about earlier of just being confined, of thinking like this is the way that we’ve always solved this problem, this is the way we’re going to continue to solve this problem. But it’s like what if you kind of flip things on their head. I’ve seen other spaces switch to a four day school model to accommodate a microschool.

And what are, what are those kids going to be doing on that fourth day, I mean on that fifth day and how do you staff for that? To Deb’s point, you’re respecting those educators as indeed educators and professionals and pulling them into the conversation. There are tons of great examples all across the country of people that are navigating unions and navigating staffing models and schedules and sometimes again people just don’t know what’s out there. And so diving into the playbook, what I do appreciate is that we highlight so many examples that are, that you can still reach out to right now if you’re not clear or if there’s a hurdle that you can’t quite cross.

Michael Horn

So part of that is you also show the payoff right from this and you have this section on the benefits which pretty striking results called out. You had Edge, for example, a district run microschool within Liberty Public Schools in Missouri. You had some cool highlights that I would just encourage people to check out the report, spend some time with it and then you jump. And I think that’s the perfect segue because you just talked about that school in Colorado that by the way, I kind of want to go to now. So I just took a note. Like experiential learning, traveling around the country and world. Yes, please.

Victoria Andrews

Yeah, check.

Michael Horn

Right, check. But the first stage you have in all this is planning and you name some specific considerations. Competency based learning instead of seat time, you’ve got alternative accountability and assessment models. Thinking about the microschools goals and how those line up. Right. Expanding teacher cert. You mentioned that Deb, and a bunch of other stuff.

What’s involved in this planning stage in your mind and like why is it so critical to tackle early up front before you’re getting, before you actually like have a school in mind and you’re starting to actually put in place.

Community Needs Guide Micro School Launch

Victoria Andrews

Yeah. So, I mean I’m so glad you asked me this because this is where I’m working with a community of practice right now. And so many of those leaders are looking to launch a public microschool. The first question is, does your community want it? Because you can have this passion project and it can be shiny and have all the bells and whistles and it can be competency based and PBL and you guys can go across the country and you know you’re helping everybody. But if your community doesn’t want that, then it’s for you, it’s for the, you know, it’s for the adults, it’s for the school board, it’s for that passionate parent. So first and foremost is what’s your why and who is that for? And really honing in and we, not just for public microschools, but that’s something we’ve just learned from microschools in general. They are responsive to the needs of their community.

It wasn’t the ones that were just that cupcake fluffy like oh, I just want to do something cool. Like that’s just what you did, something cool for you and that’s in service to no one. And so we definitely don’t encourage that is really, really hone into your why and you’ll see that at the beginning chapters of the playbook of just like what are you doing? What’s your purpose? And the ones that have a level of sustainability like you highlighted. I was hoping you would bring up Liberty Edge out in Missouri. They, they looked at okay, why, why are young people leaving? What do families want? What are they asking for? And then they build a program that’s responsive to that. And so that’s what are highly, just start off with that why.

Deborah Gist

True.

Victoria Andrews

And don’t be afraid to ask the families because they’re going to tell you. They’re going to tell you where they’re going, why they’re going there, or even the young people, what do they want? What do they want that’s different? And then you can take that information and I don’t know any middle schooler or high schooler that’s going to be afraid to tell you exactly what they want when it comes to their education.

Michael Horn

Fair enough. Fair enough. You have this section that comes after right on the designing and it starts to get into this thing around like don’t make it one size fits all. Really fit the purpose. I’d love you both to talk about that. But also in the context of like, as you’ve, you know, been designing across the country, Victoria, like, what do you see as the biggest opportunities, Deb, when you put your lenses on leadership, like, where do you see the biggest opportunities to start? What populations? What are the whys that really grab communities right now that maybe are tuning out to the traditional options?

Deborah Gist

Yeah, I mean, it’s really endless actually. You know, in the microschool world, you see everything from, you know, Montessori programs for the littles to programs specifically designed for newcomers to more career and tech kind of focus school schools for older students. I mean it just, it. They could serve any group. And I think, you know, as Victoria was saying, just understanding your own community, what the needs are and what is most ripe. Hopefully systems, and not all systems have the capacity to do this, but larger districts, particularly if they’re losing enrollment, they know why they can track where their students are going. So analyzing that data and understanding, like people are voting with their feet, where are they going and why?

And then asking students as again Victoria said, the student, we need to listen to the student voice and engage them in design. So what is it that is keeping them from coming to school, staying in school, being engaged in school, and what would draw them in and excite them? So a microschool could be anything. It could be, you know, arts focus, sports focused. It could be for students with special reading needs or students who are over age and undercredited. You know, it could be any number of things that a community decides is the greatest need that they have at that moment.

Victoria Andrews

Completely agree, Deb. Some of the ones that I really do appreciate are like da Vinci Rise out of California, that microschool is part of a larger network. But they’re focused on those youth that are unhoused. They have to have a flexible schedule. If I’m a parent, if I’m a young person, and this is my second entry point back into school, I might have a kid or two and I might be working full time so that 8 to 5 or 8 to 4, 8 to 3 schedule is not going to work for me. But it doesn’t diminish their desire to want to graduate. It shouldn’t hinder them from getting a diploma or having access to work based learning opportunities or having an internship or an externship. Just because I have these additional responsibilities and if anything that I’m more dedicated because I have, you know, a higher calling to pursue for, so looking.

Designing Education for Diverse Needs

Victoria Andrews

I would say designing with, if you talk to your community and you figure it out and like Deb said, there’s so many reports and the data is there, but truly developing with a fringe in mind. So if you notice that your unhoused population is not being addressed through McKinney-Vento data, then what are you doing to support them? If you see that you’ve got a large amount of students that are coming back into the system or coming back into your learning environment that are newcomers to the United States, how are you supporting them? If you see that you have got a lot of, you know, mobility happening, like just dig into the information it’s there and then design with that population in mind. Does it have to be a hybrid schedule? Are there days where they need to be on campus? Do they need wraparound supports to make sure that they are successful? Do they need to meet with counselors? Do they need to be on an accelerated path? Do they need more opportunities to engage with work based learning opportunities so that there is a pipeline. So it’s not just I get my high school diploma, but what else is there afterwards? So really creating the microschool with those parameters.

Michael Horn

Hearing both of you talk about this and then Victoria, I love that phrase, focus on the fringe. I think it’s a really important one because these schools we’re talking about are like 25 to at most 150 students. So I think a lot of times the district leaders that I talk to, they have a mindset of like, oh, it’s got to be for everyone. But actually you can find these different segments, right, and you could theoretically run several different microschools, I imagine. So I’m, I’m sort of curious to hear you both reflect on, you know, could you have multiple microschools going? One of my observations is that there’s not a lot of focus on high school in the private microschool market.

But listening to both of you, you’re giving a lot of high school examples, actually. So maybe it’s different here. So I’m curious to hear you both reflect on that.

Deborah Gist

Yeah, I mean, my dream as a system leader was the school district I led was an authorizer for public charter schools. And you know, we developed and opened a public microschool in collaboration with a collaborative of parents. But my, but my dream was that we would get to a point where we could have almost a process like that, where community could come and say, this is our idea and we would offer them some kind of support with experts like the folks at Getting Smart or Transcend to come in and support them to get the specifics of the design in place, but to give folks an opportunity to say, oh, actually I know of a need. I have an idea. Whether it’s a student or a teacher or a parent or a business leader or whatnot. That’s one way of saying let’s have a, let’s have a variety of these. Let’s set a goal as a system to say we’re going to have three next year or we’re going to open one. Let’s, let’s pick the one that has the, that is most right.

There are different ways to do this. And it could be that you say, we have a need and we’re going to replicate this model because we tried it. So we’re going to, instead of try to grow it into a big school because that’s sometimes what we think. We think, well, we have this microschool. So now let’s make it a big school. You could say, well, we’re going to, we had this microschool that worked. Let’s have three more in different parts of the city that makes it more accessible to, to other students.

Victoria Andrews

You brought up a point, Deb, in that it doesn’t necessarily mean like, let’s just make a bunch, like, you know, the franchise model. It could be we’re a traditional comprehensive high school and we’re thinking about rolling out project based learning, but instead of flipping the whole system, let’s do a microschool of project based learning. And those teachers that are going to do it are then going to infiltrate the larger school system.

So if you have like two or.

Three years or even a full four years for that, then the likelihood of success will be higher because you’ve worked out the kinks with a smaller group before you launch it with a larger group. And so that’s another way to like, okay, now we’re going to roll out project based learning across our campus, or what did we learn? What are some of the mistakes we made on a smaller scale? I mean, Deb, you know, trying to redo a whole master schedule in the middle of the year literally incites fear in everybody. So instead of doing that small, you know, small test drive, a smaller experiment would be a great way to kind of scale the practices of a microschool.

Deborah Gist

Sort of the Edgecomb model. And then you have the in Issaquah with Heather Taliaq’s leadership,, that’s what I figured in mind, Victoria. But you know, they have a school within a school that Julia Bamba there leads and you know, they’re starting to explore, okay, how do we, you know what, who else might benefit from this model? But it was that, that high school, that secondary school within a school model as well.

Victoria Andrews

And like, let’s be honest because, and I know Julia, we both do very well. She, like, they started off in high school and they were like, okay, they had some challenges with enrollment and recruitment and they took those learnings. Actually, this would be better suited for middle school and pushing it down. So just because it didn’t work in that environment, they didn’t say, oh, microschools don’t work, throw the whole thing away. They took their learnings and they just moved it down to middle school. And I think that’s a great example. They didn’t consider that a failure. They took their learnings and then just moved forward.

Deborah Gist

And I think that’s such an important reason. It’s one of the many reasons why microschools are so important for public systems. We have to be more nimble. We have to be, have the kind of learning experiences where we’re serving a population, and we should be doing this everywhere. But it’s just harder when you have, you know, a thousand students versus fifty students to be able to shift gears. If something’s working, let’s do more of that. Let’s lean into it. If it’s not working, let’s fix it or stop it or whatever that might be to have that continuous improvement built into the system.

Michael Horn

Yeah, it seems like a huge thing that you guys are pointing to, right? This testing and learning, this iteration culture. I’m shocked often at districts that are like, tomorrow we’re all doing this and you’re like, wow, this is going to break in like a hundred ways. We can’t even imagine. Let’s start small before we try to go big. You also have the advantages of a coalition of the willing, not just of the teachers, but also the students who decided to show up. And that gets into the other piece. So you have the planning, designing and then implementing is the third part of this playbook.

And you bring up a lot of interesting things. Talk about launch, sustaining, strong culture, experience, like a whole bunch of things that people should check out. The one that just for this conversation I want to get into because it relates to what we’ve just been talking about is recruiting and enrolling students. Because those are two words that are not like heard that often in district settings because they don’t have to do it really that much. Right. And so recruiting and enrolling students, Victoria, like what, what are the big things to know there?

Victoria Andrews

Oh goodness. As a former dean who had to recruit students for her class, it’s you, you want to make sure it’s not just, you know, Deb and Michael are excellent students. So I want them in my program. But it’s Victoria the knucklehead. Like, hey,is this a good program for you?

Michael Horn

Like, I’m pretty sure you have it the wrong way, but keep going.

Deborah Gist

Yeah, okay.

Targeted Outreach for Experiential Learning

Victoria Andrews

My parents would probably argue not, but you want to make sure that you’re reaching out to not just the students that are going to just say that it’s just a good program, but also that it’s a good fit for. It might be better, you know, that experiential learning program might be better suited for the Michael’s and Victoria’s of the world because it’s more hands on learning and it’s because, you know, they have a mentor that’s in the community that’s going to check on them. So it’s a true village that’s taking care of them. So it’s, I know that like counselors and because again I have served in that capacity. It’s a lot to say, okay, we want you to ask and you know, recruit, but publicize it in a way that everybody is knowledgeable of it. So it’s not this very cherry picked society that gets access to this microschool because that’s a quick way to create more division in a space that’s already divisive. So, what’s the goal? Who is it for? How are you going to make sure that that group is indeed being served by it. Because even if you do create a certain program, but you don’t get those right students in there, they’re not going to give you the feedback that you need.

Like Deb said, to be agile and be nimble and to make those iterations using the design process. So recruiting is crucial. And like you said, Michael, most public schools are not, we’re not excellent at it because it’s like, hey, if you’re on a bus, you’re coming to my school. But when you think about a very specialized program, coaches recruit, the robotics teacher recruits, whoever has an exceptional extracurricular program, they recruit. And so taking that same kind of approach when it comes to a micro, public microschool would be excellent.

Deborah Gist

Yeah. More and more systems are creating, as we did in Tulsa, a unified enrollment system. And then using that enrollment system to help make those matches, to make sure that that access is there, that families easily can understand what their choices are, how to access those choices, and just having the microscope be a part of that overall system. So that ideally you get to a place where, whether it’s a microschool or a comprehensive school. Because even though not all microschools are right for all students, of course. But a microschool might not be right for all students. I mean, some students are going to thrive much more in a larger, more comprehensive school.

And so just making those matches, making sure the access and the awareness is throughout all families and students.

Michael Horn

So this brings us to the last question I want to ask because you have this bigger vision that microschools can really help scale change. And what’s so interesting about that statement though is by definition, a microschool is purposely designed not to scale, it is designed to stay small. But that they could have impact at scale is sort of the argument. And I can see many pathways through which that could happen, some of which maybe would undermine the innovativeness of the microschool, some of which might help the district innovate. I’m just really curious to learn from you all. How do you see impact at scale from following the strategy? Like, what is the pathway to helping every student, you know, have a better educational experience in front of them by pursuing this innovation through microschools?

Scaling Microschool Practices

Victoria Andrews

I think it’s a combination of what Deb mentioned and what I was talking about previously, like those practices that are done in that microschool can be taken to scale, while the microschool itself will stay small and agile. But the practices, whether it is competency based learning, a four day school week, whether it’s an internship program, whether it is whatever that you’re piloting that can be taken to scale. So that would be a way that it could have a larger impact. I think when we, in education, the way, the only way we tend to think about scale is like more numbers, like more, more, more. It’s like, hold on everybody. We’ve kind of seen that that doesn’t always work. But what are the practices? Maybe it’s the staffing model that you’re trying to get a grasp of.

Maybe it is team teaching in that microschool. Maybe it’s partner teaching. So what, what are those specific practices and having the cycles of improvement noted so that when it is taken to scale that you can say, okay, we knew that this was a challenge, this was an obstacle and we can kind of meet it head on. So that’s, that’s what I envision as a key component for implementing and then taking things broader than just the microschool.

Deborah Gist

Yeah, I think, yeah, for sure. I mean you might scale practices, but you might scale the school through replication or franchise, I think Victoria said, or through growth. You might say this is really working and it could work bigger. But there are some microschools that are so specific to a group of students that they just are going to be awesome where they are. And that doesn’t need to be the goal. I mean, the fact that you have a school that’s serving in a beautiful way, this niche group of students and families with a teacher who it’s also perfect for or more than one teacher, that that alone is success and ought to be something that our systems are willing to embrace. But I’m confident that whether it’s a standalone school or, or scaling practices or scaling the model itself, that this is a way of thinking about teaching and learning that is long overdue and that systems really, really need to consider because the way we are doing things now, we all, I think, recognize is outdated and we need to figure out ways we can better engage students and prepare them for today’s world and the world that’s coming in the future.

Michael Horn

Well, they are voting with their feet. So I hugely appreciate both of you, not just for writing this playbook, but then doing the work to help districts increasingly create these options. So there’s more, I mean, more availability, these options for every single kid to find the right school experience that’s going to work for them. So Victoria, Deborah, really appreciate you both and we for all you tuning in we’ll be back next time for more conversations like this on the Future of Education.

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