Empowering Educators in Wildflower Microschools

Matt Kramer, CEO and co-founder of Wildflower Schools joins me to delve into the origin and growth of Wildflower Schools, a network of microschools rooted in the Montessori philosophy. The network now boasts 72 schools across the country. Kramer shares his insights on how to create environments that empower teachers as leaders so that their unique qualities and visions shine through. We also discussed the role of technology in enhancing educational practices; the significance of small, personalized educational settings; and how Matt thinks about fostering growth of the network while maintaining the space for individuality among students and teachers alike. I loved the discussion, for example, of one of the Wildflower schools located on the west coast of Puerto Rico that is housed in a local special education services program and has developed a version of Montessori that is focused on kids with neuro differences. As microschools continue to grow, I found this conversation fascinating as Wildflower blends the benefits of a national network with schools that are led locally and rooted in the community.

Michael Horn

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through how we get there today, one of my personal favorite people in and around the world of education, we have Matt Kramer. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Wildflower, which we will hear more about shortly. It's a Wildflower schools, or a series, network, if you will, of microschools that have been sprouting up like wildflowers dare I say. They have a Montessori philosophy at their heart. And I will stop talking and describing it there because Matt, welcome. It's so good to see you. You're gonna tell us a lot more in a moment.

Matt Kramer

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Michael Horn

Yeah, absolutely. So you’re in your 10th anniversary of the founding of Wildflower Schools.

Why don't you tell us your origin story for like, how it all came about and progressed to the point where you're now, you know, 72 schools, I think, around the country and continuing to grow pretty rapidly at this point.

Matt Kramer

Sure. Well, let's see. The first brief stop in the origin story is that I was a Montessori kid and, and I also have ADHD and couldn't sit still. And my first tour through pre Montessori schools didn't go very well. Spent a lot of time during recess in class making up for my inability to sit still. And luckily for me, we moved to a new city and my parents found a Montessori school for me. And you know, for the first time, school was largely a positive event.

I, you know, then fast forward when I was the president and CEO of Teach for America for a decade and helped bring a lot of people into the world of educational change. And as we did that, I saw a lot of just extraordinary people make the choice to go into all sorts of different settings across the country, in different cities, different charters and non charters. And at Teach for America, the thing that we would say to people on the way in is that this is a really challenging environment you're going to go into, and your job is to rise to the occasion to transcend the limitations of the situation, to be a leader. And the truth is, some people really were able to pull that off. Some people really weren't able to pull that off. But a lot of people in the middle were just ultimately worn down by the challenges and limitations of the situation. The, you know, their leadership sort of comes into a hard face off with the, with the system that's really designed to suppress leadership. And I had been thinking about this question of, well, what would it look like to have an environment in which actually leadership was supported, where like teachers actually could bring all of their capabilities.

And I was sort of toying with that question when I met this guy, Sep Kamvar, a professor at MIT who, coming at it from a different angle, he had been an entrepreneur, he'd sold the company to Google and he had risen up to the senior levels at Google, as head of personalization at Google, you know, back in the day. And he, you know, in that role, he had bought many, many companies for Google and brought in these entrepreneur teams and sort of had the same observation in that space that I had had in education. Like you bring in these extraordinary, they're clearly extraordinary, right? They've created their own companies and it's so good that Google wants to buy it. And then they get inside of Google and you just watch it crush the life out of them. And so he had this thought of, you know, he had a two year old at the time. He thought of, I'd love to create a school where the teacher's feeling, the teacher's experience and therefore what the teacher can project, is more like the entrepreneur and less like the person who just got bought by the behemoth. And he created the school in Cambridge and then, and then a few more that had this, that had this quality to them where every time you talk to a teacher, you know, the schools were tiny. They were like two teachers, 15, 20 kids, one room that's like the whole school.

And when you talk to the teacher and ask them, why are you here? What are you, you know, what brought you to this moment? They would tell an origin story that was like an entrepreneur was like somebody who had started a great charter that you might see. They had a great entrepreneurial, social entrepreneurial story about what brought them there and exactly what were they trying to do. And as I went from school to school, which is really like classroom to classroom, every single one of them had that same, like this is my thing, energy to it. And when I saw it, I was sort of hooked. I was like, ah, here we are. This is a way to bring together my personal views about child centered approaches to education and the lessons I had learned about the role that teachers can play in creating really extraordinary experiences if you create the right setting for them.

Michael Horn

So there's a number of places I want to go there. And I'll, I'll say, I think you and I probably started talking around 2015, 2016. I'm probably going to get my dates wrong. But, uh, it was early in the life of Wildflower, and then you were super generous. It was before the pandemic, I want to say, 2018 or thereabouts. And you spent like a whole day with me, taking me through, I think, three of your sites in Massachusetts, both to explain what y'all were doing at Wildflower, but also to help me understand Montessori education more deeply. So maybe let's start on that side. I want to spend most of the conversation on the Wildflower side.

But Montessori education itself, you just mentioned child-centered education. Everyone has different definitions of that. I think there are a lot of misimpressions around what Montessori education itself is and how it aligns with, you know, you sort of get these food fights in education, direct instruction versus inquiry-based, and you're like, actually it comes together really nicely as an and in Montessori. And so, like, how do you describe what Montessori education at its core is about and sort of its extensibility, if you will.

Montessori Education Philosophy

Matt Kramer

Yeah. So I think the big idea behind Montessori, you know, thanks to Maria Montessori, who, depending on who you ask, was either the first or the second female doctor in Italy 120 years ago or so, the sort of key idea is that people sort of come wired from the factory with the blueprints for their own life in them, and that our role as educators is to just sort of help them through the process of bringing that to life, bringing themselves to life, creating the person that they're going to be. And the way we can figure out what works is by watching kids, you know, And I think one of her observations was kids of loosely similar ages, you know, sort of three year wide, bands of kids, watch them as they, as they make choices about what they want to do when they're sort of given freedom and learn from that about what the development characteristics are of kids of an age. And so Montessori, so first sort of the big idea is like this responsiveness to the natural developmental patterns. And then what she did is she started with 3 to 6 year olds for local idiosyncratic reasons in Rome. She started with a group of three to six year olds and spent a lot of time watching them and developed this theory about what kids of that age are drawn into, what helps them develop and designed a curriculum around it. And I'll say a few of the features of that three to six year old curriculum, which is what Montessori is most famous for, but it goes from 0 to 18 now. But some of the features that 3 to 6 year old curriculum were first of all, the kids should have meaningful freedoms to move around, to make choices about what they work on, to make choices about who they work with, etc.

And the reason there is first, because of what she found, what her philosophy developed about the stuff that's already in the kid being such an important part of what we're trying to accomplish. And second, her empirical observation that choice is a very powerful lever for engagement. If people get to pick the things they do, they are interested in them intrinsically, even if it's the exact same thing somebody else picked. We don't like people telling us what to do. And in particular kids don't like adults telling them what to do. And so on the one hand, a pedagogy that is focused on using the power of kids' choice to engage them in things and all the subtle instincts that kids have about what is worth doing that might not otherwise come out, like I'm bored of this because I now know how to do it. That should be a signal about it's time to do something else, not a signal that we should like tell the kid to get in their seat and sit down and be quiet.

And then the second part of it is the idea that there are better and worse developmental experiences to choose. And she spent a lot of her time during the early development of Montessori empirically trying out, well, what if we tried to teach the kids one to one correspondence, the idea that the numbers line up with the number of beads and that you go from one to two, not one to three. She spent a lot of time thinking about ideas like that and trying out different ways of teaching them and slowly refining it in the set of materials that does all the different skill areas that you want kid to build on. And because they refined this for so long, they got a lot of subtlety into the system. As one example I give people in a Montessori classroom, all of the little drawers and trays have these little knobs on them that are about the size of an eraser for a pencil. And the reason why they're there and they're that exact size is what she found, is that kids actually have the ability to write by moving around letters like little Scrabble tiles before they have the ability to write on paper. And it's actually a muscle control problem that prevents them from writing on paper, not an ability to form words with letters. And that you can actually accelerate the development of the muscles for holding a pencil by having them keep squeezing things about the size of a pencil.

So it's just sort of like a second thing she just slid in there on the side. Because they spent like 30 years developing the materials. And so the frame of Montessori is like on the one hand, kid choice, on the other hand, this carefully developed set of materials that were developed by watching what made what sort of helped the kids learn stuff. And then a framework for teachers that says your job is not to be the main presenter to the class. Your job is to facilitate the connections between the kids and the learning environment and materials that are around them. And as you do that, we are going this is I think one of the funny things people don't know about Montessori, it's actually a scripted curriculum. The teachers go off to Montessori training programs and they literally memorize the introduction presentations for every one of these hundreds of lessons and materials.

And they sort of check out on them one by one. Like you present the lesson, reading the script out of your memory to an instructor who's like, okay, you're ready to do this particular one. And they go through that all. And the reason why, again back to Maria, is she realized if you didn't put the teachers on a script, they talked a lot longer. They spent a lot of time sort of like wandering around. And whereas if you gave them a script, you could keep it down to like a three sentence introduction. And what she found is the length of the introduction was really not like a long winding introduction was really not helpful for kids, like locking in on the thing and deciding to explore it.

Three sentences was about right. And so that's sort of Montessori. You know, as you get to the older level, kids, what kids needs evolves. And so 6 to 12 year old Montessori is following a slightly different theory of the environment and the case of what they do, but it's also in the case of like, well, what do 6 to 12 year olds need? What do they do naturally? And how do we create an environment that works for that and it just keeps on going up.

Michael Horn

Yeah, and I will say it, I mean it's known for the children house years, as you said. But like the LE and UE lower elementary, upper elementary experiences for us have been even more magical in many ways because it also builds right on itself through those materials and the connections that are made from abstract or, you know, what's concrete to abstractions and things of that nature. It's been pretty cool to see. And I think the way you described it is interesting also because it, it sort of, if people can get over that first objection wherever they're coming from on the world of priors, there's like an answer for it. Right. So if you believe too much choice is bad. Well, you know, scripts and constrained choices. Right.

Like, and really thought out curriculum materials is an answer for you. And it turns out every lesson has a direct instruction component. So we got that right. And then, you know, if you believe it's too regimented so forth like the incredible choice that is brought to bear in a daily and weekly basis and then the executive function skills that people are developing, these kids are developing is just extraordinary as you're going through it.

Montessori and Project-Based Learning

Matt Kramer

Yeah, I think one, you know, to look at the elementary years, I think one of the interesting things, you know, there's, I think there's a growing number of project based environments, especially at the, you know, at the preschool level. Maria Montessori's work has substantially influenced the rest of preschool over 125 years. And at the elementary level, you're starting to see more of that too as you see more choice driven situations. But generally it's project based is sort of mostly what we mean by choice or child centered at the elementary level. And what you see in Montessori, that's a little different. But actually personally, I think is sort of inspiring when you think about it, inspired when you think about it for a minute is Montessori treats all of the first through sixth grade as actually one big project. And they refer to it in a slightly culty way as cosmic education. And the goal, the project is for a child to understand the world around them and to find their path through it.

What, like, what are they going to what interests them? What's going to draw them towards being an adult, which is like on the other side of this journey. And so they, this starts out in elementary, in Montessori with these five things that are called the great lessons that are like dramatized stories that the teachers tell the kids. You know, one of them is about the formation of the universe and earth and planets. One of them is about the emergence of life. One of them is about the emergence of human beings. One of the story of communication and one of the story of math. And each of these are these involved detailed stories that sort of give them a sense of like, how does this huge thing, like when I look around the world and I see mountains and streams, how do I understand it? That's story number one.

Right. And so, and then the kids are drawn into picking things to do out of the things that are triggered by that. So, you know, the kid. I'm really interested in the piece about the solar system and why the planets don't spin away and the teacher will guide them into a research activity for that. And so the projects don't like get rotated. We don't have like a monthly project like, okay, now all the kids are going to do this. Like we have a six year project and then we just keep helping the kids connect to it again and again and again.

Michael Horn

That's a really good way of saying it. And it's not something. I hadn't thought about it in those terms, but it also helps handle, again, I think a lot of the objections you hear around project-based learning when it goes amok. Right. So. All right, let's move from Montessori at a moment. So you sort of chose that as the organizing philosophy, if you will, for the Wildflower Schools. But then you have like a fairly decentralized model of educator led created schools that are spawning themselves like wildflowers a little bit across the country.

So talk us through the organizational model and some of the decisions that you made there and how that reflects the network that you now have of 72 schools.

Personalized Education vs. Standardization

Matt Kramer

Yeah, well, I, I shared at the beginning that sort of philosophy which is like, how do you, how do you think about creating an environment in which the teachers total experiences, passions, beliefs about the world, which all of that is energy fodder for the creation of a great humane educational experience. You know, I think about, when I think about big schools, of course there's a lot of great big schools, but when I think about big schools, there is a premise problem, I think, which is that if you need to get 20 or 30 or 50 or whatever teachers to teach the same program, that program can't have very much to do with the individual teachers. Right. It sort of has to be made generic to be a curriculum. And you know, God forbid, when we're talking about a curriculum that is statewide or countrywide, then you really have to sand off all the edges.

Michael Horn

A lot of lowest common denominator there.

Matt Kramer

Right. And if you believe as I do that actually the stuff that makes a teacher unique is actually the most exciting stuff. Right. It's the thing like when you think about your favorite teacher in your life. Usually it's the idiosyncrasies about that person that are the memorable pieces. And so, for me, it's the entrepreneurial spirit of the teachers, the space in which that can come out that's sort of the essential idea. And in a lot of ways, it connects to the theory for kids. Right.

Like, the theory for kids is that there's something good in them and we create the right environment to help it develop and emerge. And, you know, back in the day, when Maria was doing her work, that that journey sort of ended at around 24 years old. You know, neuroplasticity for adults was not a thing 100 years ago. She sort of thought you were a fully formed adult, and then you were like that way for the rest of your life. But we now know that that is not the case. Right. We now actually have learned quite a bit about how people continue to develop. They continue to become things, become new things over the course of their life.

And teachers, in that sense, are actually a lot like kids. They're in a process of becoming, too. They have things that are inside of them that you can't reject and think you're going to turn them into something they're not. They also have the capacity to adapt. And so that really is like the idea in Wildflower is like, how do you create a Montessori for adults space where this is a prepared environment for people. Montessorians, who want to create schools that reflect everything they've learned and everything they believe and everything they are as full participants

So that's really the idea. And. And what we do, you know, in the process of starting schools are what we say to people is, on the one hand, this all the schools in the Wildflower network are going to be authentic Montessori schools. So your school that you're going to create is going to be that. And on the other hand, that does not say everything about what your school is going to be like. Montessori is sort of like one dimension of the total, total experience of being in the school. And so you see these other things that are the teachers, like life lessons, life experiences that show up. I'll just, you know, a few examples of them. You know, you and I were talking earlier about a school in Boston, Roxbury.

Yeah. Before we hit record. Yeah, Roxbury Roots. Yeah.

Matt Kramer

Yeah. And. And that is a. It's an absolutely beautiful school, and it is an authentic Montessori school. And you go in there, if you know what you're looking for, for Montessori, you're like, ah, this is Montessori done right. But also the school's founders had a vision of an Afrocentric culture in a Montessori school. And this just comes out in so many ways when you're in the program.

Intentional School Environments

Matt Kramer

From, you know, the, you know, somewhat trivial things about just like art and decoration to the vibe and the schedule and the food and the like, it all comes out and you just feel like you're in a space that is intentional, it's coherent. And so I would say cultural alignment is like one dimension that you see in schools, but there are a bunch of others. There's a school on the west coast of Puerto Rico that is actually housed in a local special education services program and has basically developed a version of Montessori that is focused on kids with neuro differences. And they, you know, and in their particular case, they take kids with a very wide variety of, sometimes very intense, different styles of learning. But because of the heritage of the teachers and the site, building a very one on one individualized program fits with the way they see the world. You know, another, another example is we have a school in Indiana called Montessori Field. And it's basically an outdoor school. It's like set into a nature preserve and they never go indoors.

And you know, and, and you look across network, there's 72 schools and there's dozens of themes and really 72 individual implementations using those themes that come up. And they just, they reflect the teacher answering the question of what is it that a school that includes all of me in it, what is it that a school like that could do that would be wonderful for children, wonderful for families, wonderful for community? Not like, what is the generic answer to that question then? How do I get myself to do the generic ideal, the platonic school concept. It's like the one with me in it. What's that one look like?

Michael Horn

Yeah, and there's a real color to your point. Right? It's not Montessori frozen in time either. Right. There's some evolution there. There's bringing you. It's. But it's still distinctly Montessoril every school that you go into are these.

So each of these are educator owned, is that correct? Or like what's the structure?

Matt Kramer

The schools themselves are non profits. Okay. And Wildflower, the whole is a nonprofit as well, but they're sort of tiny little nonprofits, like one or two rooms, 20 to 50 kids, two to four teachers, is sort of the typical size. Each one's a nonprofit, and the teachers are the co executive directors and the actual leaders with kids every day. And that's sort of one of the core implementation thoughts about, like, what does it look like to create environments in which the teachers can do this? It's, you know, we don't have a lot of rules. We put a lot of authority in the hands of the teachers.

But one of the rules is the people who make the decisions for the school and the people who spend all day with the kids have to be the same people.

Michael Horn

Okay.

Matt Kramer

And the reason why is we don't think. We think there's something massive that gets lost in translation when the expertise of a teacher has to get packaged up and turned into something for a principal to make use of, or the wisdom that a principal's acquired, making hard choices has to get, like, retranslated back to a teacher, and they have to understand and embrace that experience. We just think that translation is too complicated. You need it to happen inside the head of a single person so that the teacher can, you know, I think, you know, we've all spent a lot of time in schools. You know, like, for example, one of the, one of the big challenges in school is the fight over class sizes. And in every school I've ever been in, there are economic pressures that lead the principal to want a few more kids. And there's other factors that lead the teacher to want a few less kids.

And that tug of war is like a permanent feature of school life. And in Wildflower schools, it's not. And it's not because those two forces don't exist. The same forces exist, but the teacher's got both of them inside of them. And so they're thinking, what are the pros in the context of my program of having a few more kids in the classroom, what does that do for me and the kids? And what would I do with the money and how do I feel about all that, and what are the downsides of that? And let me weigh it all and decide what I think is best. And there's no communication problem. It's just like, you know, it's the parts of me. And they get to sort it out and figure out what to do.

Michael Horn

It's really cool because it's a personal trade off. Then let me ask you, so the core organization, if you will, the spine, the wildflower schools that you run, what's the role of that within the network? What's the relationship between these small microschool that have spawned out across the country. What role does each play?

Matt Kramer

So we think of ourselves sort of as a membership organization that the schools join and are part of. Our particular role. I guess there's probably a few things that we do for the network as a whole. One of them is we support the process of new people entering the community and starting schools. And so we have this thing, it's called the school startup journey. And it's basically, you know, again, it's like a Montessori prepared environment for adults. It's basically like a Montessori space for creating space, not physical space, but like space for creating a school. It's sort of structured. And, you know, we have.

We walk people through it. There's, you know, they don't have to do it in exactly the order that it's laid out. You can move the pieces around and do it the way that strikes you as right. But it's a structured way of figuring out what your school is going to be. And it has two points in it where you get advice from people who have already been through this, starting Wildflower schools, once, sort of at the end of your visioning work and again at the end of your planning work. And the teachers are, you know, they're sort of designing their program, and then they stop, they pull back, and they.

And they share with this panel of folks what they're up to. And the panel folks gives them advice. They don't have to take the advice, but they do, because these are wise people who've been through this. And, you know, unless it's somehow the panel doesn't appreciate something really important to the teacher, in which case they don't take the advice, but they incorporate what they feel they should, they revise their thinking, and they eventually turns into a school. That whole process, the tools, the support, the advice process that are. We support all that. We help them get access to financial resources and technical experience, et cetera.

You know, mostly we know things like how do you create a school in this community? And what are the rules? And all that stuff. And so we help them with all that. We help them by providing it once the school's up and running, we provide an ongoing suite of supports, tools to be helpful to them. And it's, on that one, I would say it's a fine line we're walking because there are things. None of this happens in a vacuum. And our American context teachers have largely heard the message that their work is not very important and that they should mostly follow the orders that they're given.

Empowering Teachers with Budget Management

Matt Kramer

And teachers come to us acculturated by that set of messages. And so one example of a thing that we sort of do in a way that I think sometimes strikes people as funny is if you ask the Wildflower teachers, do you want to have control over the finances of your school or would you prefer if Wildflower would actually run the back office for you? The wide majority of them would say, we'd prefer if Wildflower run the back office for us and we don't do it. And the reason why we don't do it is we have concluded that there are subtle lessons you learn from doing your, from managing your budget, about trade offs, about how much money you can invest in things, about which programmatic things should be considered reasonable to try out, and not reasonable, try out this subtle stuff you pick up about that from owning your own budget that you just cannot get another way. And so rather than create the back office that sort of everyone kind of wishes we would do, instead we create a bunch of tools that make it possible for people, most of whom have never run a small business, most of whom are not administrators by background,

Michael Horn

And won't necessarily want to, to your point.

Matt Kramer

Yeah, right, but, but who are going to need the lessons learned. And the, and the power that comes from understanding something essential is like what the money is for and how you use it. We create tools to make that possible. And then the last thing we do is we, I would say we sort of hold together the fabric of the network, right? In a decentralized environment, people are relying on other people to do certain things that align with the community's values and standards and the brand that we share, things like that. And so, you know, we basically create the environment to like make sure that that's true. We get people together, we gather them all in person so that they can learn from each other and things like that. So those are the sort of main roles that we provide. And you know, if we do a good job of it, we are both making it easier for them and also not, not changing the fundamental feeling that a teacher has.

You know, I use this as sort of my personal test of whether we're doing it right is if a teacher has a thought in the afternoon about something that could be done better and they go home and sleep on it, can they implement it in the morning? If the answer to that is no, if there's a staff meeting required or approvals required, we've done something wrong. Right? The cycle is supposed to be observe, learn something, sleep on it, implement the next morning. And as long as that stays true, stays the case, then we're doing what we're supposed to be doing in terms of the facilitation of the network.

Michael Horn

Very cool. I have like a million questions based on things that you've said that I want to ask, but I want to keep it to some reasonable time. So I'll do maybe a little bit of a lightning round and then maybe a couple other probing questions and then we'll wrap. But on so, you know, you're 10 years old, right. Talk to us about the state of Wildflower if you will. What's been the impact? Where's the growth? Yeah, let's start there.

Matt Kramer

We've got 72 schools now, up from one a decade ago. There are a growing number of them that are operating as like micro charters.

Michael Horn

Do not just micro, private, like microschools that are private?

Matt Kramer

Yes. The original ones were pre K and they sort of made themselves accessible to low income families. We serve a diverse group of families in all of our schools, made themselves available to families who couldn't afford to pay preschool tuition by the use of child care subsidy programs, which are different in every locality in America, but you know, follow some similar patterns. And then we created K through 12 schools or you know, first through third, third through fourth through sixth grade schools and those can't access child care subsidies. And so we needed a system that would allow those to be intentionally diverse too. And so we created an idea of how you could run tiny, tiny charters. And we now have five charters in Minnesota, New York, D.C. and a couple in Colorado.

We just got approved actually for our first charter in Ohio and we have eight other charters that are in development in other places in the country. And then this was less true 10 years ago, but it is increasingly true now. More and more states have ESAs or vouchers or some other school choice type program. And a lot of our schools at the elementary and secondary level use those programs. And so, you know, back to your question of like, where's the growth? I think that, I think there has been real energy. The pandemic was a factor in this, but post pandemic I think has continued to show the secular trend here. There's been real energy both from families of wanting to do something that is more customized and more adaptive to their own kid. And there's been more teachers who have sort of seen the, oh, this is really, it's hard to be myself in these big systems and I would like to try something where I can bring more of myself.

Empowering Passionate Teacher Leaders

Matt Kramer

And I think that pattern has been you know, that pattern is a secular one and we are seeing energy behind it. And, and the schools sort of pop up everywhere, geographically, I guess, is the last thing to say. You know, at one point we put energy into whether we would like grow in specific locations. And what we've learned over time is the secret sauce of this is the teacher leaders. And so when somebody comes to us and they have a vision for a school that they want to create that reflects their learnings about the world and a community that they've lived in, that they want to create it in, and they're like, they've got passion to do this. It doesn't matter where they are. We should help those people. And so that's where we see the growth.

Michael Horn

It's interesting because I think a lot of people tell the story through the parent, student demand side. But you're right, educators are demanding this as well. And it's been through this conversation. Right. The student journey and the educator journey come together in these schools. It seems one of the big hypotheses that you had when you started, and I'll try to get this right, was that the ed tech world had misfired by trying to create student facing tools, and that the most powerful place technology could actually be an aid was as a, basically a boost to teachers to better observe students and understand what they needed when they needed it and so forth. Did I get that summary right?

Matt Kramer

I'll add one edit to it.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Okay. Make the edit first.

Matt Kramer

Yeah. Which is, I think to me that the core thought for edtech is that the tech should follow the curriculum, the pedagogy. So if your idea is you're creating a tool that is basically a math facts drill tool, a child facing iPad app is a perfectly good way to replace the old paper and pencil drill tests that we did when I was a kid. Like, you know, even in Montessori classrooms, we had a stopwatch and a worksheet filled with little one digit addition problems and you see how many of them you could do in a minute. Right. An iPad's a great replacement for that pedagogical thought.

Michael Horn

Right.

Matt Kramer

But Montessori's pedagogical thought is about children's choice in an expanded environment. And when you put an iPad in front of them, it narrows the whole world down to that little experience. You can't have the expansive world of choice that way. And I think technology offers us things that we can do that reflect that more open, expansive, real way of engaging with the world, technology can help that too. But it's a different kind of technology.

Michael Horn

Well, so it's interesting, right, when you say that, because the argument I've made actually is Montessori has tons of technology. It's just not digital technology. And so your example, the iPad there makes a lot of sense. Right. It's actually one more tool in a suite of bead cabinets and all sorts of things. Right. That students can use to learn whatever, you know, they're struck by or what's on their plan or whatever at the moment.

So. But you were talking about building technology specifically to aid teachers, I think, in the observation work. What have you learned about that? Where is that work at the moment?

Matt Kramer

Yeah, I mean, it sort of emerged out of this thought at the beginning. Montessori teachers are trained to observe the children carefully and they have this whole note taking, observation system where they make note of what the kids are doing. And it's sort of the data that that leads to, the equivalent of lesson planning of Montessori is like, what do the kids do? How engaged are they in it? What things seem to draw them in and what things seem to pull them out? And like, you make notes on this. But if you talk, Montessorians all learn that process in Montessori training school. And then if you talk to the Montessorians and if they trust you, they will tell you that it is an overwhelming task to try to keep track of what all the kids are doing any fraction of the time. And so you have to make massive approximations of things. And the more you are making approximations of these things, the more it is an intuitive data set rather than observational data set.

Data-Driven Montessori Teaching Tech

Matt Kramer

The less Montessori is a data driven pedagogy. And the data drivenness, you know, that goes straight back to Maria. It's like core to the case. And so what we said is, well, what if we could teach computer vision to look for and make note of all the things that the Montessori teachers are supposed to be looking for? And so this was, you know, this was 10 years ago we set out to do this. A lot of the technology has matured substantially since then. But at the time we were, you know, basically saying, can you teach a computer to recognize when a kid sat down with a piece of work and how long they worked on it and how concentrated was that work, and then when did they put it away and those sorts of things and then produce it all for the teacher so they could have a robust data set on which to do again their Montessori equivalent of lesson planning. Of which things am I going to introduce to who, which day next week? And you know, who do I need to reconnect to something because they seem like they're bouncing off of the material as opposed to getting engaged in it. And so we built this, we built a prototype of it.

We piloted it in five of our schools. It's really quite amazing I think in that way it's a proof of concept for this different thought about technology of if you have a pedagogical model that involves the children having broad freedoms in the real world space, can you still use technology to capture something really important about it? And the answer to that is yes, you can. It has been very challenging to figure out how to fund or I'm going to use a dirty word here, commercialize this technology. I mean, it's nonprofit for us, but still the same sort of general phenomenon. And because there's a lot of R and D work in getting things like this to work, it involves like custom hardware, you know, in these pilots you have like these little ultra wideband sensors that are tucked into the tongues of the kids shoes to keep track of where they are and what they're interacting with. And so, you know, we did all this sort of thing and, and it's sort of complicated. You got to get over some threshold before it's useful enough that anyone wants to try it. Like they don't want to try, you know.

Matt Kramer

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you got to do that. But it's sort of not the normal way that ed tech develops for the most part. For the most part, the edtech models like create a, you know, minimum viable web front end that does something and show that the kids are interested in it and then you upgrade, upgrade, etc. You know, it's not a high R and D field in part because it's not a field with big home runs generally like the, the net, you know, there's no equivalent to like Uber in edtech. And so, so, you know, we just found it's really hard to figure out how to do it.

And so we recently actually paused the project. And you know, I actually, I'm a real believer in it. So I hope someday we find a way to breathe new energy into it because I really do think the future of educational classrooms at the preschool and lower elementary level does lead you down that path. It leads you to think like actually we don't want the kids 100% engaged in computers. Their brains are not ready for the abstraction from reality that that type of environment creates. But we do want to know what they're doing and we do want to be able to be data driven, responsive. Not just by, you know, giving them a test every now and then, and then, you know, presenting new material based on what they do and don't answer on the test. And I think that, I think the world is going to want responsive, smart classroom designs that enable that.

Matt Kramer

But I think we just are not quite there yet.

Michael Horn

No. Super interesting for those listening. If you want to help on this, this is a good way to get engaged. Shameless plug. But it's also interesting because I think a lot of the tech first first microschool networks that have also popped up over the last 10, 15 years, a lot of them have come back to the same observation about younger kids as well, that a more Montessori physical environment makes a lot of sense developmentally. And then as kids get older, more and more of the work or certainly sort of learning the core knowledge or skills can be done online and then right the, the abstraction becomes more possible as you age up. Let me ask, do you have time for two more questions if we keep geeking out? Okay, so this may be a strange question, but you're like 10 years of students served.

Matt Kramer

Yeah.

Michael Horn

How do you think about outcomes and what you've done for those students? Like how do you all think about that as a network and what, you know, as impact from the student side. And I say strange question just because like it's not a test that shows you this or things like that. But what do you all look at?

Matt Kramer

Well, it's a really good question. For most of Wildflowers history, the overwhelming majority of the kids we served were preschool and kindergarten age kids where there are some standardized tests out there. But I think they are particularly weak, especially for when we're talking about three year old kids where like the basic brain structures that we refer to as intelligence in older kids and adults, those are actually not settled in 3 year olds yet. Like they have not formed yet. You can't measure them until they exist. And so a lot of our history we actually use assessments in especially as the kids get older, both ones that other schools are used to. I mean especially for the kids above third grade they're taking state tests if they're in either a charter or a voucher state where they require tests.

But even in the, you know, kindergarten, first, second grades, we're using things like NWEA. But we also Use other measures like Minnesota Executive Function Scale as a test of, you know, basically kids ability to manage their own thoughts and choices. So we've tried a bunch of things. I would say my comment on assessments is I sadly think we're not there yet. I think the thing that we really want and I, somebody recently told me that there is a new thing that Stanford's been working on that actually might be really good in this one. What we want is a tool that can be used for an assessment of a kid's learning on early literacy and early math where when you get the results back, as a teacher, it tells you what you need to know to think about that kid's education. It's sort of the same standard that you would ask for if you thought about sending a kid for a special ed related review. Like we're going to have this kid evaluated for ADHD and you bring a professional in and they would observe, they would write a bunch of notes down, that observation, the output of that observation is the thing you want to try to figure out what to do next. That has to me that is the standard for assessments of academic things. It has to produce the guidance to the teacher about what comes next. And I don't think we meet that standard most of the time. I think the sampling methodologies lead you to be like, oh well, it's more accurate at the level of a whole class that it is at the level of an individual kid. The level of individual kid. It often tells you the things you feel like you already know. To me that's unacceptable.

And we can't, we're not going to get assessment data that we feel good about using in the Broadway set of ways you could use assessment data until we clear that threshold. So I would say for most of Wildflower's life when we're talking about the really young kids, we have not cleared that threshold. And so we've been mostly like on a journey to figure out how to do it rather than to be really excited about it. That said, you know, we do use NWEA results. We just saw the ones for our New York charter come in. They were really strong, you know, so they're fine, but they don't, they don't feel, it doesn't feel like a good measure what we do in the absence of that, and this is a controversial thing I would say what we do in the absence of that is we put a lot of faith in parents to understand whether things are good for their kids. And we ask them what they think of the kids' experience and we ask them whether they would recommend it to a friend.

And we put a lot of trust in their ability to say what is in their interest and in the interest of their kids. Because in the absence of having a more reliable, objective measure of things, we think they're the people who know best. And you know, we asked the net promoter question and the net promoter scores for Wildflower families are in the 80s. And I think that,

Michael Horn

And for those that don't know, that's really, really high.

Matt Kramer

But yeah, it's about as high as you can get in terms of their enthusiasm about the schools. And it reflects the fact that the school experience for kids is really bespoke. Right. Like kids do not have the same experience when they come to Wildflower. The beauty of a 20 kid school is the teachers can actually think with the parents, with the kid. What does this kid need for this to be the experience that will help them become who they're meant to be and deliver that. And turns out that's mostly what families want. They want an educational experience that reflects who their kid is and what they want.

And they want somebody who loves their kid and takes care of them. And in our environments we can do both those things.

Michael Horn

All right, last question. You're 10 years old now, still growing, you know, several school openings a year, as you said, starting to do more elementary school, as charter and ESA have become more and more viable, on top of the three through six age three through six that you were doing 10 years from now, where do you think you all will be?

Matt Kramer

Well, yeah, I think it's a great question. I don't know the answer to it. We've been growing at around 20% a year for the last few years. So last year we, you know, the school year right now, 13 new schools. We're thinking this coming fall, maybe 15 to 20 new schools. And you know, like a lot of sort of network type designs, it sort of grows in that like proportional way. And so, you know, if we can do our part, right, if we can do the part that's about making sure we have the resources available to make startup grants and startup loans to schools, making sure that the tools get better, making sure that we're continuing to put the invitation out into the world to educators that this is something that they could think about doing and being helpful, my anticipation is that we will just keep on growing at the sort of clip and you know, as you do compound 20 a year over a period of time, it starts to get to be a big number.

You know, when I think about, like, how many Wildflower schools could there be in America? Like, how many kids. Would it make sense to have an environment like this available? I mean, listen, kids need different stuff. I'm not proposing that we have a Wildflower school for every kid, But I would not be surprised if Maybe this is 20 years, not 10 years, but like, I would not be surprised if there were tens of thousands of schools like this, you know, and it may not eventually all be Wildflower. At the moment, there aren't a lot of networks of decentralized microschool concepts growing very quickly. There's sort of only a few of us. But I think there's something powerful in the idea of really small schools, especially for the younger age kids and, you know, some degree for the older age kids too, that, you know, was once the way of things in America. We let it go for reasons that I think, looking back on, it turned out not to be persuasive.

They were persuasive at the time, but. And I think I don't see any reason why things won't migrate back in that direction. So that's, that's what I think our job is, is to create a set of tools in an environment in which if the, if, if it is meant to be, that there will be tens of thousands of these, our job is to make it possible.

Michael Horn

He's Matt Kramer, CEO of Wildflower Schools. Check it out online. Wildflowerschools.org Congratulations on 10 years. Thank you personally for the time you and many of your team members have spent with me teaching me, but also for supporting my own family and just really appreciate it. And for all you tuning in, Check it out, learn more. And we'll be back next time on the Future of Education.

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