The AI Behind Alpha School

Many in education—and many beyond—are talking about Alpha School right now. Alpha has been featured in dozens of articles in the mainstream and education media outlets. Its leadership has appeared on countless podcasts to explain and dissect its school model and explore the bigger opportunity to rethink schooling.

On this episode of Class Disrupted, Mackenzie Price, co-founder of Alpha School, joined me and Diane not to explain Alpha School’s model, but instead to dive deep into how Alpha School is leveraging AI to radically rethink the school experience (Mackenzie has joined me in conversation before; you can check it out here if you’re curious). The intent behind this conversation is more on how AI itself is being leveraged at Alpha—from the core academic block to the afternoon spent in real-world projects and life skills development. What’s possible now in school design that wasn’t possible a decade earlier thanks to AI?

Chris Hein

So when the school shut down and went to remote learning, we were really fascinated by how quickly our kids adjusted to e-learning and how hard of a time the teachers seem to have with just the basic tools and systems and then how to translate their curriculum to a digital format. But the thing that really jumped at me was my wife and I were having conversations with our kids every day saying, hey, what are you doing?

Why are you guys playing video games? Or why you, like, want to go outside and play? It’s midway through the day and they’re like, we’ve already done our work. And we were like, that can’t be right. And so we double checked their assignments and their tests and where they’re at. And it was like, no, they got all their work done in a couple hours. And then it really made Teresa and I question, why does it take them eight hours a day at school if the school is teaching them the same content and administering the same number of tests and they’re able to get through it in a few hours?

Michael Horn

That was June 2020, and Diane and I were broadcasting during the height of the pandemic, and we were hoping that parents would realize that schools could be rethought dramatically, including by helping people realize that what we tend to think of as, quote, the academics could be done in much, much less time than the six plus hours that kids spend in traditional schools. Five years later, and thanks to a startup school network, Alpha School, the two hour message finally seems to be spreading like wildfire. So with that as a prelude, Diane, first, it is great to see you as always.

Diane Tavenner

It’s good to see you too, Michael. I’m a little disoriented by us changing up our normal intro, but. But in a good way, change is always good. That take from season one is honestly priceless. It’s taken us a bit longer than we had hoped, but we do seem to be getting some momentum towards some of the big opportunities that we saw in education back then and still are hopeful for now.

Michael Horn

Yeah, no, I think that’s right. And I’m glad you’re accommodating my whims on changing the format up on you today. But I am particularly excited because we have on our show today MacKenzie Price. She’s of course one of the co-founders of Alpha School, and MacKenzie’s been on my Future of Education podcast and substack before and we actually both have sub stacks named the Future of Education. We independently name them, so we’re vibing already. But MacKenzie, it’s great to see you again, welcome.

Scaling Education with Technology

MacKenzie Price

Well, thanks for having me. And, you know, it’s so interesting that you tell that story about the way, you know, education was done during COVID And we were pretty lucky because we’d started Alpha school back in 2014. So when the pandemic hit, you know, it happened to be during spring break. So the kids who hadn’t brought their laptops home came and picked them up at school. And we really had a very smooth rest of the school year because the kids already were doing their learning on the computers. And then we just said, you know, afternoons, we’ll just, we’ll, we’ll call it, you know, do whatever you want at home. But what’s interesting is a couple years ago or in 2022, when we really launched our learning platform with the advent of generative AI, we realized, okay, we can actually scale this. We can go beyond just, you know, a local school that’s doing a reasonable job of educating kids, and we can, we can scale it bigger.

And we were originally talking about the idea of 2x learning. You know, you can learn twice as much, you can learn twice as much. And even our own families were like, we don’t, we don’t care. Like, why does my kid need to learn twice as much? It’s not a big deal. And we, we’d have like, parent conferences where we’d be saying, hey, if, if your son, you know, hits his, his goals, he can be learning twice as much. And they didn’t care. And then we had this unlock idea of let’s call it two hour learning and say, hey, if your son hits his goals, he can be out of here in two hours and freed up to go do the rest of the things, you know, that he wants to do during the day. And suddenly the parents are like, Johnny, come on, get with it.

Let’s hit our goals. And it was that mind shift of, you know, let’s get your academics done in two hours. And as a side note, you’ll learn twice as much, but let’s do that for two hours. And then one of the code names we actually had for our learning platform was Time Back. And we went through a whole process in the last year trying to make sure, what’s our new name going to be? What are we going to call this? And ultimately we landed back on exactly what it is that we’re giving kids, which is Time Back to go do all these other exciting, interesting things during the rest of the day. Because it doesn’t take all day to educate kids. You can not just do academics, but crush academics in a much shorter period of time when you’ve got this personalized, mastery-based tutoring.

Transforming Education Models

Michael Horn

Well, and I think you’re speaking to, like, there’s many reasons why Alpha has done what many education startups struggle with, which is jumping into the mainstream narrative. And that sense of giving kids back their most precious resource, time is clearly part of it. AI is another part of it. And that’s where we want to dig in with you today, just given the focus of the podcast that we’ve had here. But let me perhaps frame it this way. We now have two school founders on this show, you and Diane, who have each created models that at one level I think look awfully similar in certain respects. If you mix in, say, Rocketship Education or something like that, which was founded in 2006 and is an elementary school model.

We can take that and Summit Public Schools that Diane founded and Rocketship and say, hey, a lot of the structures that Alpha Schools has at one level, like a relatively limited block of time on learning academics and content in ways that are personalized for the learners, large blocks of time for projects, a big focus on skill development and habits of success or life skills like growth, mindset, agency, and so forth, those are things that were present in models like that. But then we come to at least one big difference, which is, yes, Alpha was originally designed, as you said, right before the mainstream use of AI, just like Summit and Rocketship were. But Alpha is now aggressively developing AI powered dashboards, AI powered learning applications, AI powered knowledge interest, working memory graphs for students. And so, given our focus on the podcast in this particular season around AI, I just love to dive into the AI parts of the model with you. Even as we’ll say up front, like AI is clearly inextricably linked to the other elements of the overall Alpha model. Pulling them apart is not fair to you all. But just given that we’ve heard so many podcasts with you about Alpha, and we suspect most of our particular listeners have as well, I think digging into that AI question in particular, and this is maybe the framing we can bring to it, which is, what does AI allow us to do today? That was not possible in the best of the personalized models from a decade or two earlier.

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MacKenzie Price

Yeah, I think that’s a great way to frame it, because artificial intelligence in the learning science world now is what I believe is like the microscope to biology. It is the tool that is finally enabling us to integrate all of these learning science principles that have been known for many, many years can result in kids learning 2, 5, 10 times faster. It just was never possible to incorporate in obviously in a teacher in front of the classroom model, but even more importantly, even in an individualized adaptive app type setting. And so to give context to that, you know, when we first started our school back in 2014, we knew that we could use apps. So we were using things like Dreambox and Khan Academy and Freckle and Grammarly and Egump, a lot of the apps that were kind of out there. The difference was it was still hard to manage the way that kids worked through the apps. And so one of the things we found is that there’s a lot of what we call anti-patterns that kids will do when they’re using apps. It could be things like topic shopping.

You know, they jump in and say, hey, I’m going to go to, you know, I’m a fourth grader, but I’m going to try some fifth grade material just because it’s kind of interesting. Oops, it got hard. I’m going to back out of that. I’m going to jump into some third grade material or I’m going to kind of mess around on this or even more just not engaging with the apps. You know, you could have everything from a kid not even sitting in front of his computer or picking his nose or, you know, just rushing through the explanation and not reading it. And that’s where a lot of the big difference is. One thing to kind of just be clear about, we do not use a chatbot in our education platform. Chatbots in education are cheatbots.

And it was interesting. I actually had a big event last week in Austin. The National Governors Association came and toured and we’re learning all about our schools. And I made that comment, you know, we do not use chat bots. They’re cheat bots. 90% of kids are going to use them to cheat. And a couple hours later, there was another vendor who’s basically built a chatbot for education that was like, well, you know, I put him in a, put him in a little bit of an uncomfortable situation. But I think that’s really important to know.

And one of the things I really don’t want to see in our education system is we slap a GPT on every kid’s computer and suddenly say we’re an AI first classroom. Right? And I was actually talking to a Stanford professor a few weeks ago who said, you know, here’s the problem that we’re seeing. Educators are using, you know, chat features, ChatGPT to create lesson plans, you know, and do these things. Kids are using ChatGPTs to write their stuff. Professors or teachers are using ChatGPTs to grade it. And so basically the AI is just talking to each other. Right. And we’ve taken the human out of it and that is totally not what we’re doing.

So there’s kind of two features that I can go into around how we’re using AI in our model.

Diane Tavenner

Yeah, let’s take this piece by piece. MacKenzie, that will be that context is super helpful. Let’s start in the morning block where you’ve already gone a little bit with some of the apps and whatnot. You all roughly have about three hours where students are doing sort of two hours of head down learning that quote academics my language for that is content knowledge. So forgive me if I slip up and use different lingo. And as I understand it, and as you were just sharing, you’re using these apps or adaptive learning products and you named several for us there. But there are some places where you are using apps that, as we understand it, you’ve built for yourself. And this tracks with my summit experience.

Our first choice was always to buy quality products. Second choice was to partner with startups or companies that wanted to work with power users. And last choice was to build our own when it didn’t exist. So I’d love to unpack. Where is it that you’ve determined there wasn’t something good enough and that you have literally built your own application and are using it right now? And are those AI native applications?

AI-Powered Personalized Learning Systems

MacKenzie Price

So we’ve definitely had a number of years to test out a lot of different apps, see what worked well, what didn’t work, where there are gaps. And what I would say is we’ve curated over this period of time which apps are best for which grade levels in which subjects. Not all apps are created equal, but to kind of start at the very beginning where we’re using AI, we are using AI to be able to assess what a student knows and what they don’t know. So any student who comes into our Alpha school to start takes an NWEA math assessment. We also do math assessments three times a year for all students and that’s how we’re measuring growth. But what we do is we take the information that comes through that assessment as well as some other initial assessments that we’re able to do with students. And from there we have AI tools that will basically build out the personalized lesson plans that say, all right, here’s where a kid needs to go, here’s how we whole fill, which of course is a very common issue. Even our students who come into us with, you know, A’s on their transcripts, you know, can be three years behind in academic content.

Right. Actually we found out students who came in to us this year from other schools, if they had a B on their transcript, they were between three years behind and seven years behind. Which actually shows, you know, grades mean nothing anymore in this day and age. So we take the assessment and we have an AI tool that basically builds that out. So what does that look like?

Diane Tavenner

And that’s a tool you all have built internally, is that Time Back?

MacKenzie Price

That’s a tool that we built out. We have built that tool out and that is using standardized third party assessments like Max.

Diane Tavenner

Yeah, the results. And you’re ingesting the results on that.

MacKenzie Price

Exactly. So they build that. So the experience for a student, a student sits down in the morning during their core block of academics and they will log into a dashboard. We have a time back dashboard that a student logs into and says, okay, it’s time to do math. Now in some of our classrooms, kids get a choice of what subject they want to take on first. Other of our classrooms, you know, we have a set thing. Okay, we’re doing math first, then we do reading, you know, then we do language.

Diane Tavenner

And is that based on age?

MacKenzie Price

Depends on the age. Yeah. And, and so it’s, it’s always interesting. You know, what we’re really working on creating is self driven learners who understand their skill of learning to learn. So like if you talk to some of our fourth and fifth graders, you’ll hear some of them say, hey, I usually will choose to take on my hardest subject first when I’m fresh and I’m ready. Right in our kindergarten and first grade classrooms, you know, that’s more, okay, it’s math time, it’s reading time, you know, and it’s kind of subscribed there. But basically what will happen is a student will go into the dashboard, click on the subject that they are going to take on. So that’s math as an example.

And then the dashboard takes them to the app that has been determined is the one that is right for them and what they’re doing. Now when I say right for them, we also as a school have kind of used certain things. For example, Math Academy is a third party app that we love. We think Math Academy is amazing. They’ve been fantastic partners to work with and it works really great for basically third through high school. We were Using another app for our younger students, earlier this fall, we were using Synthesis, which, you know, that’s a sexy app that, you know, parents kind of like, because kids are doing interesting things. We were seeing, though, like, I don’t know if we’re getting the results we want.

So we’ve made changes, you know, to that, but they’ll go to the level that they need. So you’ve got a fifth grader who maybe needs to go back and revisit concepts from third grade. You know, they have to hit this fast math, you know, concept, or they’re looking at these fractions or whatever it is. So it takes them to that lesson and they’re doing that. So that’s the first use of AI that we have. Now the second use that we use is the vision model. So what’s happening is we’re using an AI tool that we have built that tracks the screen and is actually watching to understand how is a student moving through this material.

So, for example, when they are doing reading comprehension, are they rushing through the article? Are they just scrolling to the bottom of the screen and randomly guessing, or are they taking the time? And of course, you can tell this is a reading article that normally would take, you know, 69 seconds to read. And this kid just answered it within 10 seconds. Okay, now we’re realizing we’re. We have an anti pattern, which is basically an improper use of engaging with the apps. So we’re looking at that in terms of the vision model to see how kids are learning. When they get a question wrong, are they watching the video? Are they, you know, taking time to read the explanation? And then our AI tutor creates coaching for that student.

So it’ll say, hey, buddy, we’re realizing that, you know, you’re not reading the explanation when you get a question wrong. If you take this time to go forward, here’s what it would do. And so we’re basically giving coaching. Now. The other thing is, in our schools, we also have our cameras turned on and they are recording the students. So they’re seeing if you know, the…

Monitoring and Progress Tracking

MacKenzie Price

If the computer has been, you know, quiet for a minute and a half, is it because the student’s not even in front of their computer, or is it because they’re goofing around with their buddy next to them, what is it that they’re doing? And so it’s able to do that. Now our families have the ability to turn that feature off at home if their students are using that feature at home or if they’re working at home, they can turn that off. But in our schools, we do require that that be turned on. And so we’re able to kind of look at the coaching. Now students will basically walk through each of their core subjects, generally in about 25 minute Pomodoro sessions, and then they’re done with their academics in that two hours. The other feature that we’re using with our AI tool is we can really well analyze and understand how a kid is progressing through the material. You know, what percentage completion are they on each of the different apps, you know, and grade level subjects, things like that.

How many minutes do we anticipate? How many weeks will it take before they’re finished with, you know, fifth grade math? If they put an hour of homework in a night, here’s how much shorter that will take. And one of the things that people love about that, not only do our students get to really see and understand, they have a sense of ownership over their academic journey. But of course, parents can log in, you know, every day if they want to, to be able to see what is my kid working on. What, you know, did he hit his goals? And then what. What we’re also tracking in the way that goal setting works is students are getting experience points, xp, to borrow, you know, a term from video gaming. And so the goal is that they get 120xps per day, which is 120 minutes of focused work. That’s one XP is equal to one minute of focus work.

And so that’s what we’re working on. And then when you ask about the apps that we’re using, we have built Alpha Math, Alpha Read and Alpha Write are some of the apps that we’ve incorporated into our model. And then we’ve got some other things that, you know, that we’re continuing to roll out. One that’s actually available to the public for free is an app that we’ve built that helps encourage the love of reading, which of course is a difference between learning to read and learning to love to read. And that’s called teachtales.com and you can go to teachtales.com and basically it’s using AI to generate personalized reading material based on a student’s interests that then delivers at the appropriate Lexile level for them.

Diane Tavenner

Awesome. There was a lot in there. So let’s.

MacKenzie Price

There was a lot. I need to work on more short sound bites. Well, I hope that doesn’t get worse as I get older.

Diane Tavenner

We all have things we need to work on, right? Let’s stick with those three apps that you’ve developed. So Alpha Math, read and write. Are you using those across all of your grade levels? And are they AI, are they adapt, are they AI native, are they adaptive? What’s going on with those apps?

MacKenzie Price

So the Alpha Write is something that we’ve been really excited about and we break this down just to have an idea of how the app works. We break this down with the idea of can you write a grammatically correct sentence, you know, then building onto paragraphs, then building on to essays and working through. And I will tell you, I mean, we had a lot of students, again, A students from their previous schools that come into Alpha. We had high school students who couldn’t write third grade level sentences, like, it’s just crazy how poorly this is going.

Diane Tavenner

Yeah, that’s one of the questions I think that comes up is where writing is situated in the model. So it sounds like you’ve got writing in the morning block as sort of a standalone kind of just expository approach to writing.

MacKenzie Price

We do have writing in the morning block now. Our students are also doing a lot of writing in the afternoon. So, you know, for example, they’re writing, you know, talks that they’re going to give for TED talks, they’re writing essays, they’re writing book reflections that are part of our afternoon block, which is our check chart time. So it is a common fallacy that people have of, oh, these students aren’t actually doing a lot of writing. They’re absolutely getting, they get a lot of writing in. But we’re really breaking this down into everything we’re kind of thinking about is what actually works when it comes to educating students. And where have we been doing it wrong? And that’s where I think it’s so exciting to see all these learning science principles that can come up. And you know, for example, here’s another thing that we do during these, the, the core block period.

Optimizing Learning

MacKenzie Price

We’re, we’re measuring what percentage accuracy students are at to understand are they in the zone of proximal development. Right. If they’re getting more than 85% of the questions right, you know, then that’s a sign that they’re, they’re in too easy material. If, you know, they’re under 70, it’s a sign this is too hard. How do you make sure that they’re staying in the right spot? And so that’s the other part that the AI tool will kind of say, whoa, hold on here. We’re noticing that there’s something changing or that a student’s not being hit at that right level. The other thing that’s going to come in to play is we’re also going to be able to really take a lot of things around cognitive load theory principles and understand, okay, if a student only needs 5 reps of a concept in order to master that concept, they shouldn’t have to sit around and do 10 reps. And if the student needs 15, they shouldn’t only get 10.

So that’s just some ideas of some of the things that are coming in the pipeline that generative AI is going to make really available.

Diane Tavenner

So two things I’m trying to understand and contrast to pre AI to now that we have AI because a lot of what you’re describing sounds very much like what Summit Learning was about. You know, we built thousands of playlists and young people, they actually had a lot of choices. So we were working on self direction in, you know, they would do a pre assessment, they would know what they know, they would prepare, you know, and study and learn. And then they would take a post assessment, we would assess all the things you’re talking about. So I guess I’m wondering in these apps, is that similar or is AI actually playing a new and different role here? And then I do want to get to the sort of time back coach as well because I realize it’s connected. But, are we using AI in these apps? Are these sort of still adaptive learning apps? Are they?

MacKenzie Price

Yeah, the third party apps that we’re using are not using, you know, an AI feature and they’re not creating dynamic content. You know that, that is created. This is, you know, The K through 8 Common Core curriculum is what’s, what’s being fed into these apps. Where we are getting to is we are going to be moving in, in 26 to dynamically created content. Obviously there’s been a problem. There’s still hallucination issues. In fact, we have a group of high school students, kind of our, our top honors students who we are testing out dynamic content and they’re able to say, hey, guess what? The AI is acting up here. Like this is totally a wrong question on that.

But right now what we’re doing is we’re going through and we’re analyzing every lesson before it’s out there. So this isn’t just like an LLM creating a fifth grade curriculum. We’re still using that. Where the AI tool is really being used is around that vision model. So that’s the biggest difference is that, and that’s part of the reason, you know, if you talk to families who went to Alpha, you know, six years ago, you’ll hear a much more varied experience. Right. We had a lot of families that my kid wasn’t learning.

They were goofing around. There wasn’t this connection. Now there were a lot of reasons for that. We didn’t have the motivation model locked in. We didn’t have the high standards, just expectation. But the other big part was it’s really easy to goof around when you’re learning on these, you know, in general on these apps. And so that’s the biggest thing right now is that our AI tutor is ensuring that kids are moving efficiently at the right level and then understanding what the pace is for that and creating basically new lessons that will fill academic holes, you know, and go at their pace, is what I would say. But yeah, if you’re looking at, you know, for example, a math academy, you know, type of thing, you know, that is static content that, that kids move through and kind of work on.

We used to use IXL, actually. IXL kicked us off of their platform. They don’t like us for some reason. They literally won’t even tell us, they won’t talk to us. They just say, you’re off. But we had used IXL a lot. And actually one of the things I always say for families that are wanting to recreate this at home, I actually think IXL does a really good job across a lot of dimensions. They were a pretty good app.

They don’t like Alpha for whatever reason, but, you know, that’s where we’ve kind of been able to figure out what this is. But I think the other question is, when you talk about things like reading, writing, it’s really helping break down our apps that we built. You know, they’re breaking down into small components. Let’s make sure a student is excellent at this and then build from there. I think in a traditional classroom, having students write a five paragraph essay is not necessarily helpful. Instead, are they really understanding the structure and mechanics of a sentence? Are they understanding what a paragraph should look like? Are they going. And we use really the idea of building blocks in all of the work that we do.

Diane Tavenner

So does that mean you’ve got under underlying at least the apps you’re building sort of a knowledge graph that you’re, that you’re working with in order? Yeah, I mean that again, fairly. Okay, fairly consistent. Let’s dig into that AI coach or tutor, like you said, because it sounds like this is not a traditional dashboard where young people are looking at Their own data and information. Maybe they are. But what it sounds like you’ve really got is this AI coach or tutor coming in to keep them motivated. I mean, the apps you’re talking about, lots of schools have them, as, you know, lots of schools, they just don’t get the number of minutes, they don’t get the progress. And so is you’re. It sounds like that’s the key.

So that is an AI tutor or. But it’s not a bot that you were referencing.

MacKenzie Price

Well, it is, but you’re not correct about. Yeah, you’re not correct about that. The AI tutor is not providing the motivation levers. There’s no motivation that’s happening through the apps. The motivation is all through our guides, our human teachers. They are focused on motivation. And just to be really clear, the reason we’re having the success that we’re having and the academic results we’re having is not because of our edtech. Our ed tech is fine, it’s whatever.

But there is no magical edtech product that just immediately motivates and makes a guide or makes a student, you know, lock in and be able to learn well, We haven’t built it. We haven’t seen it yet. The key for us is that we have freed up the time of our human adults to be able to focus on motivation. And so that could be everything from, well, from the idea that students earn alpha bucks for hitting their XP goals to, I was just talking to one of our kindergarten guides the other day, and she said, you know, we have kids where when they hit, one of their goals, when they. When they unlock a goal that they.

They’ve done, they have a secret sniggle, they have a secret signal, they’ll, you know, scratch their nose. And that signals, oh, you hit a goal, let’s do a silent dance party. And It’ll be a 15 second, you know, the guide is doing the silent dance party, and then they move on to the next thing. It can be individual motivation, you know, models. We had a student who, as a result of hitting her academic goals over a period of six weeks, she earned time in a professional recording studio to record an original song that she had written and was singing. So that’s the whole key. And by the way, 90% of what creates a great learner is a motivated student.

10% is having the right level and pace, which is what our edtech tool does. What the AI tutor does, though, it actually does give kids the ability to go on their dashboard and each day and see, okay, I hit my rings, I filled my ring. It kind of looks almost think of an Apple watch, you know, with exercise rings. That’s what it is for each student is, did you fill your ring? Which means, did you get your XPs in that subject? And then they can go into their learning dashboard and they can see at any time, here’s how much I. Here’s how much I hit. We even have a waste meter in the corner that says, you know, you’ve wasted 20% of your time you were wasting by not engaging in the right way or not accurately doing that.

Diane Tavenner

So the student doesn’t actually, like, engage with the AI tutor. It literally is just powering this dashboard then.

MacKenzie Price

Well, it’s powering the dashboard, and then it will pop up and say, you know, it’ll write something like, hey, watch the video explanation. You know, sometimes it’s, you know, going.

Diane Tavenner

It was like a nudge or something.

MacKenzie Price

One of the things that, yeah, we’ll see is that, you know, we’ll often say to students, you know, often the fastest way forward is to slow down, slow down and read the explanation. So it does that. But here’s what it’s not doing. There’s not some little avatar Dashy, that pops up and is like, hey, Johnny, you’re doing such a great job. Two more questions, and then we’re doing that. It’s not that kind of thing. The AI really is kind of under cover.

And it’s again, building these lesson plans and then analyzing and understanding how a kid is moving through that.

Diane Tavenner

Building the lesson plans that are in the apps or in the after.

MacKenzie Price

Yeah, taking them to the right spot. So it’s able to say, okay, we’re going to take you.

Diane Tavenner

Oh, by lesson plan, you’re saying directing them to specific.

MacKenzie Price

Directing directly to this math academy. And we put up these basically guardrails. That don’t allow a kid to pop out of Math Academy and say, hey, instead of doing this concept, I’m going to go play over here. I’m going to go do this. And I think that’s a problem in traditional classrooms when people are using apps. They’re given their iPad or their Chromebook, they’re put on Khan Academy, and then they’ve got the ability to kind of bounce around. There’s one other topic that I think is also important, and this is actually a lesson we learned very early on, is the idea of requiring students to do some work each day in each subject. Right.

And there’s a lot of alternative education systems that’ll say, hey, if a kid doesn’t really want to focus on math for a couple months, that’s okay. They want to pursue reading. We actually believe. And this was, I’ll never forget the very first year we had a first grade student who absolutely loved math. Loved math. He was at 8th grade level math. And the problem was he needed his guide to read the word problems to him because he couldn’t read and he hadn’t read in like months. And that was one of the early unlocks where we realized, okay, we have to require, you know, time in each subject each day that students are accomplishing, which some, again, some alternative schools don’t do that.

Diane Tavenner

Yeah. So it sounds like then, the motivation is highly related to this relationship that young people have, which we know is very powerful. And then just following the directives essentially of the guide and then the technology to do what you’re telling them to do and stay on track.

Confidence Unlocks Student Motivation

MacKenzie Price

Exactly. And then I think the next part of the motivation, kind of the deeper level of motivation is and you know, people often go, oh, is extrinsic motivation bad? And you guys know, there’s all the research that shows there’s not necessarily even that same, you know, intrinsic versus extrinsic. But what we are seeing is that as students become more and more capable, you know, and build up their knowledge, they become more confident and they do get more motivated. They suddenly realize like, wow, okay, I can be 99th percentile in, you know, math, in language, in science, I can do this, it’s not as hard. And so we find that kids, their identity really changes as they start to see that, wow, I’m capable of learning when I’m given the right level and the right pacing and I get motivated to do that. And that is what I think is the really cool unlock that we enjoy seeing when students finally realize this. Like, wow, I can do this.

Diane Tavenner

Yeah, definitely. You said that one of the benefits of this approach is you freeing up the guide time to really do the more important things. And as I understand it, one of those activities they do is one to one meetings with the young people in this morning block. This was one of them. Continues to be, I think the most highly rated element of the summit model is the mentoring model with the one to one check ins as a part of that. And over the years we started leveraging technology to enhance those check ins. I’m curious if you’re using AI in any way to support the one to one check ins and, and what that looks like.

MacKenzie Price

Yes, we are. So we actually mic up the guides during those one to one check ins and then they’re using, you know, we take those transcripts and we’re running them through for everything from what percentage of the time were you talking compared to the student? Right. If you’re talking too much, that’s a problem. How many questions were you asking, you know, versus stating what are some of the things that are happening there. We also actually use that technology for some of our students as well. So an example of that, one of our students in Arizona, he struggles with a growth mindset, you know and he’ll, when he’s struggling in his academic work, he’s quick to say I’m dumb or I can’t do this or whatever. And so we put an AI mic on him and then he and his guide go through daily and analyze how are you speaking to yourself? Were you being kind to yourself? And what we found amazingly is that just him knowing he has this lanyard around his neck that’s listening helps him remember, hey, speak kindly to myself. I can incorporate these growth mindset strategies.

So we’re able to do that. We have guides that wear these lanyards throughout the entire day so that they can understand and then get feedback on their coaching. And so, you know, that’s, that’s a great part of it. We’re using AI. We’re very much, our organization is very much on be AI first in everything we do. How can we always take everything to the next level and build that out? And then of course the other aspect of AI, you know, that comes across in our afternoon life skills workshops is kids are learning how to use these tools that are going to help them be successful. So you know, kids are starting to build out and develop these brainless and then build out an LLM. In fact, we actually just had a pretty exciting thing happen last week.

One of our students at our high school had built up an LLM around safe teen dating advice and she ran a research study with the University of Texas professor around basically how good was the LLM she built compared to a chatgpt and suburban moms and they just submitted to Nature with that research information. So it’ll be really exciting in the next couple of months. We’ll hear if that gets accepted. And that should be a pretty cool thing. So that’s the other part of this is you’ve got to make sure kids are being equipped to learn how to take advantage of all these new tools that are constantly coming out.

Diane Tavenner

For sure, for sure. Let’s move to that afternoon block and unpack that a little because I think I hear far less about the afternoon time, which is familiar to me, because also in the Summit model, you know, the self directed learning time seemed to get all of the publicity in the play and whatnot. It was only two hours. It was only 30% of the young person’s grade, but it got like 90% of the attention. So let’s break the afternoon into the K8 and the high school because I think those two are different in your model. Talk about the K8. Yeah, talk about the K8 afternoon, where I understand it’s young people are learning life skills. Is this a project based approach? Who’s planning this? Is it a curriculum? I think, as you just said, students are encouraged to use AI from their side.

But what I’m really interested in is how are guides and educators using technology and specifically AI for this afternoon block, the dashboard here. What’s going on there?

MacKenzie Price

Yeah, this afternoon block is really when our guides are shining in terms of being able to plan and connect and mentor our students. And that’s done a few different ways. So when we think about In K through 8, our students are participating in these life skills workshops that are developing leadership and teamwork, financial literacy and entrepreneurship, relationship building and socialization, public speaking and storytelling and grit and hard work. And so every workshop that is created has to be able to pass two tests. One is, what is the life skill that is actually being taught and how are we going to assess at the end of the six week period whether that has happened? So, for example, you know, we’re in the week before the holiday break. We’ve got test to pass events happening at all of our schools around the country where parents and people from the public can come in and see something that’s being done that the kids have been working on and understanding. Did they learn this life skill? You know, an example that we often talk about because I think it really highlights the idea of how do you learn grit? How do you learn, you know, stick with something when it’s hard? So we have students who participate in grit triathlons. And that could be things like having to solve a Rubik’s Cube, juggling three items for 30 seconds and running a mile without stopping.

And when you can see that a kid has, you know, a third grade student has been able to understand, okay, there’s an algorithm and I keep practicing my Rubik’s Cube and I start by juggling scarves and eventually I’m juggling balls and I incorporate atomic habits to, you know, walk and run. At the end of six weeks when these students are able to accomplish that goal. And it shows grit. We also do a lot of physical workshops that build out things like grit, like facing fears. For example, we’ve got a rock climbing workshop and that actually for our kindergarteners, they’re climbing a 40 foot rock wall. And when you watch the difference between a student at the beginning of that six week period, you’ve got a five year old who’s like, I don’t even think I can hold on to one of these suddenly going 40ft up. The only one more amazed by that are their parents, right? Their parents are like, this is amazing. So a lot of physical workshops that are doing, doing things and then the guides will use AI tools as part of building out those workshops. Being able to measure one workshop that we do every year that’s very popular.

It’s a communication and basically uplifting others workshop. And the test to pass for that workshop is that kids go into an escape room, you know, one of these, one of these rooms where they have to, you know, solve a bunch of different puzzles and logic things and all that to go. And we mic the students up and we use AI to analyze what percentage of their language is considered uplifting and positive. You know, where are they doing that? We’ll do that in sports activities. Kids will get feedback on their public speaking. They’ll be using AI tools to build graphic novels, to build films, you know, all kinds of things that they’re working on that way. And so that’s a combination of group workshops. And then they also get individual time to pursue what we call kind of check chart independent projects.

Diane Tavenner

Ah, so it sounds like then your guides are using just AI, like an LLM to help them plan those workshops. And then are you rubric gradient or just checklist grading?

MacKenzie Price

We’re rubric grading as well. And so we have for each life skills workshop we’re grading, what is the quality of workshop. And that’s everything from, you know, the kids’ assessment of did they love the workshop. You know, we’re constantly surveying parents, kids to make sure that what we’re delivering is right. And how are these guys going? The thing that we’re calling it.

Diane Tavenner

And that feedback from the rubric, is that derived from the AI or is the guide doing that? And then is that also incorporated in their dashboard?

Iterating to Build Measurable Skills

MacKenzie Price

All a combination of both things. And I think in a lot of ways what we are constantly doing is iterating. How do we build upon a workshop, how do we make, are we doing each session that kind of comes together. In fact, you know, today again, it’s the last week before the holiday break. We’ve got staff days every evening, you know, after school as we kind of plan and go through what worked, what are we doing to kind of increase, you know, love of school, the learning 2x in 2 hours and then development of life skills. So we’re working through a lot of these types of activities of, you know, how can we make this alpha life core soft skills measurable? Right. How can we understand how to measure these skills versus just kind of saying oh, you know, sure, they’re learning leadership qualities, you know, from, from something. What are the things that we can do to, to kind of build that out?

Diane Tavenner

Interesting. One of the conversations, big conversations, is how AI can and should change the role of the educator. And you all have purposely and publicly redefined the role of the teacher to be a guide. And I’ve been tracking through this conversation. You know what I think some of the shifts are in how you think about teacher versus guide and educator and how AI is enabling that. So let me run this back past by you and see if I got it right. So the guide’s not planning any sort of lectures or traditional lessons and they’re not doing any assessment. They’re leaving that to the technology.

They are doing one to one check ins and they’re getting feedback from sort of AI inputs from their recordings and things like that about how they can improve. So that takes time. We know in a teacher’s day if you’re transcripting all of those things, they’re going to an educator’s day and then they are planning the afternoon workshops. It does sound like they’re doing some of the assessment there. And they’re certainly, you know, working closely with the students on the motivation piece and engaging directly with them. And it does sound like that’s supplemented by AI. Did I get that right? Sort of the role of the guide, if you will.

MacKenzie Price

Yeah, you did get that right. Now there’s one other aspect of the guide’s job, in the morning academic time, in the core time. You know, I think people have this, this misconception that oh, you know, you’ve got a kid, a group of kids that are just staring at computers with no adults in sight. Our guides are there and they’re engaged, but they’re not there to teach academics. So if a kid says, hey, I’m struggling with this, you’re not going to see one of our guides saying, okay, let me, let me show you how to work through this problem. You got to carry the one. Let’s do a tutoring session on this. Instead.

They’re going to be basically asking students questions to help them understand if they have used their resources. So, hey, were you able to watch the video? Did you go into the resource library to find another answer? Did you check these kinds of things out? And so that’s where they’re really providing coaching around how to go about learning to learn. Here’s one. I don’t know if you call it an exception, but one thing I will say for our younger students, our kindergarten, first and second, we have not found to this point a replacement for reading than that one to one reading time. So we have reading specialists at all of our schools for our younger learners who are working with students on reading. And our students get one to one pull out time, you know, to be practicing that reading. It’s something critical. We are seeing, you know, certainly some great progress and success around learning to read.

But you know, you have to have that time reading out loud with a human. And so that’s the one thing I would say is our guides in our younger levels, we do have certified like reading specialists who are at those schools. And it’s, it’s critical.

Diane Tavenner

We didn’t talk about the high school afternoon time. And as I think you alluded to, and as I understand it, this is where young people are picking one project to work on for four years. And again, I don’t know if that’s a headline or if that’s accurate. I must say this is an element of the model that gives me a little bit of pause and so I’d really love to underbutt a lot of buzz. So what’s actually happening for high school students for those four hours, four years?

MacKenzie Price

You know, so we have two tracks for our high school. We have what we call an honors track. And the idea of that honors track is basically kids who kind of, you know, want to be sort of Ivy League bound. They’ve got ambitions of going into a top 20 university. And so in that program we’re basically saying, okay, we’ll deliver 1550 SAT score scores, you know, fives on at least a few hard AP courses and what we call an Olympic level Alpha X project. This is a project that is as impressive as being an Olympian. You know, what is it? So an example of that, one of our students who just got accepted to Stanford this past week. She’s the student who’s also submitting her research to Nature.

If she’s accepted, she’ll be the youngest female ever and the only high school student in history. You know, to be able to do that, you know, they work on something big. Now during that time when they’re working on these Alpha X projects, there’s no question that you’ll have kids who might, they might decide to change their project 10 times during their four year experience. What they’re really developing is the skill of learning how to go deep into something and become an expert. And so we’ll do things like they’ll go into, you know, two week long sprints where it’s like, go learn everything you can learn about this subject. And at the end of that two weeks, you know, just as often as not, you’ll have kids come out and go, actually it turns out I’m not interested in that. I want to go into something else. And the other thing is these projects that kids work on aren’t necessarily what they say, oh, I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.

Right. I’m going to go build this out in college or something. But it’s a project that they’re kind of, you know, able to develop and go deep and become an expert on. Now we also have a non honors track at our school and that non honors track is for kids who say, you know, I really love the idea of getting time back to just go do things I’m interested in. So for example, you know, we’ve got a student who wants to get his pilot’s license and he loves the idea of flying planes. Now does having your pilot’s license at age 15 get you into Stanford? Yeah, you know, maybe not, but it gives you time to go develop these things. So a lot of our athletes who want to have time to pursue their sports or whatever. Now what all of our students do, and that non honors program basically is 1350 SAT, which is, you know, top 10%, fours and fives on APs, you know, and time to go and develop the interests that they have. Honors students are spending about three hours a day on their core learning.

The non honors track is about two hours of what they’re doing. Kids are still taking AP courses, they’re still doing all those kinds of things.

Diane Tavenner

Sorry, you lost me for a second. Where’s the AP course? Is that in the afternoon or in.

MacKenzie Price

No, that’s in the morning. That’s the core academic time is students are taking four years of English, four years of math language or, you know, foreign language, all that kind of stuff. So they’re doing that in the morning. Afternoons are for. For working on these Alpha X projects. And then we do a lot of workshops around life skills for all of our students. So that’s everything from rejection training to giving and receiving feedback, you know, leadership challenges. A lot of things that students are working to kind of build out those skills is what our high school program looks like.

Diane Tavenner

So in the high school afternoon, there is sort of still a framework curriculum. Maybe it’s not every day, all the days, but that you do have some of these skills that you’re doing in some workshop, being around with students.

Developing Projects with Real Impact

MacKenzie Price

Yeah, there’s absolutely a framework. And then for the kids who are working on their Alpha X projects, they basically go through different levels, right? So, you know, as an example of the kind of the highest level where basically these kids are getting out and they’re launching real businesses or activities. One of our students, who’s the senior this year, she’s working on getting a musical launched on Broadway. So she actually spends, you know, five, five to seven days a month in New York City, you know, working on recording with producers, meeting with potential investors, you know, doing those types of activities. So she’s kind of been released out into the wild, you know, in some ways to go work on these projects. But the other thing that we have in common is every day our students are spending an hour working on their brain lift. So this idea of whatever the interest they have, they’re staying current on research, what’s going on, and they’re using this brain lift to then build out whatever their LLM and GPT is based on this. They also work on things like creating a spiky point of view.

So an example of that, we have a student named Alex who is building a plushie doll that is basically a mental health coach. And his spiky point of view that he’s built is he believes AI can actually provide better counseling to a teenager than a human counselor. Now, that’s a very spiky point of view, right? Especially when you think of all of the dangers on this. But he’s built certain things in his system that he believes are making a successful AI mental health coach. And so the idea is building out these things and being able to learn how to become an expert on using AI to build this thing out. So we have another student who’s interested in creating. He’s a filmmaker and wants to create, you know, his ultimate goal is to create an Oscar winning, winning film.

And part of what he’s done is to create basically a spiky point of view around how filmmaking can be done. And he just got accepted. He reached out to a bunch of different podcasts. He got accepted and invited on three podcasts. Now a lot of rejection training going on in there as well, where there’s a lot of podcasts who say no answer, you know, or whatever it is they do. But they’re learning all of these skills during this time. Plus getting the traditional academics that, you know, students in a normal school are getting.

Diane Tavenner

Where would science labs fit into this model? Or, you know, projects that are in history where we know kids, you know, dates, facts, information is, is based, but you actually need to understand the big themes and trends. Where does that fit in your model?

MacKenzie Price

Well, if you take things like science labs. We don’t have science labs. Our students are taking AP Biology, AP Physics, AP Chemistry. But they are, you know, watching great YouTube videos that are exploring these topics instead. We haven’t found that there’s this critical piece of getting kids in a lab doing beaker experiments, you know, as part of what they’re doing. They can watch these things. Now. Kids who are really excited about something that they’re working on, you know, in science can go in and build something out.

So for example, we had a student who got really interested in cancer research and epigenetics, and she ended up going out and creating a documentary that’s been viewed over 5 million times around cancer and epigenetics. So we kind of think like everything we do at these schools is taking an interest or a passion that a kid has and figuring out how to get them out in kind of real world experience with things and how they can build. We had a student who loves physics, really interested in science, loves physics. He also went on to become a professional water skier, but he would take physics principles and then work on how he could improve his water skiing times and rope length, you know, incorporating physics principles. So there’s things they do there, things like history, for example. You know, students are taking AP World and AP European and AP US History. So they’re doing all those things. They’re getting a lot of experience on writing, obviously, as they’re, they’re learning on apps, they’re coming out with, you know, fives on their APs and doing very well, and they’re having some connected time with each other where they’re, they’re basically going through some checkpoints at the same time.

Where they’re interacting last year towards, you know, basically in April you heard a lot of singing because kids had basically used AI tools to help them remember a bunch of their facts for AP world history, you know, with basically in the, in the same vein as Hamilton lyrics, you know, and, and working through those things.

Diane Tavenner

Is that the College Board’s digital curriculum that they’re using for the AP courses? Yeah. And then, that like joint collaborative time would be in the afternoon. Is that how it connects?

MacKenzie Price

Yeah.

Diane Tavenner

Got it. Awesome.

Michael Horn

This season of Class Disrupted is sponsored by Learner Studio, a nonprofit motivated by one question. What will young people need to be inspired and prepared to flourish in the age of AI as individuals, in careers and for civil thriving? Learner Studio is sponsoring this season on AI in Education. Because in this critical moment, we need more than just hype. We need authentic conversations asking the right questions from a place of real curiosity and learning. You can learn more about Learners Studio’s mission and the innovators who inspire them at www.learnerstudio.org.

Michael Horn

This has been super helpful, MacKenzie. Huge thanks. But before we let you go, we have this segment where we, where we get away from the conversation around education generally, although not always. Just things we’ve been reading, watching, listening outside of work if you can. But if not, that’s cool too. So we’ll let you have the first say at it before Diane shares what’s been on her list.

MacKenzie Price

Well, I’m sure that I’m going to give you an answer that is not going to be impressive to any of your followers or listeners.

Michael Horn

I guarantee you most of my answers are unimpressive. So go ahead.

MacKenzie Price

My absolute favorite thing to do in the evening when I get time to relax is I love to take a bath and I have a huge television that is mounted in my bathroom in front of my bathtub that is non-negotiable. My husband and I just moved into an apartment a year ago and I was like where is the TV in front of the bathtub going to go? Like I will not move into an apartment that doesn’t have that option. And I got in the bath last night and I was so excited to watch the Taylor Swift Eras documentary. So I am halfway through the first episode. My girls and I, and actually my husband too, we totally bond over that. And then actually later in the evening my daughter’s home from college and we’re watching this show called All Her Fault. It’s like about a kidnapping and it’s the gal from Succession, you know, the redhead from Succession, she stars in it. And one of the guys from White Lotus season one.

So I do. We like those types of shows. We loved White Lotus. This All Her Fault. I just watched the Beast in Me. So I do, I sometimes can be known to binge some of these Netflix shows, but I do them in the format of about 35 minutes, which is how long my bathtub water stays hot for. And then I’m out of time.

Michael Horn

And then you’re out.

Diane Tavenner

There you go. Well, I’m totally, I’m totally cheating today. I’m gonna share a novel that I’m going to read over the holidays. My favorite living authors, Ian McEwan. And he has a newish novel out called What We Can Know. And I, I’m literally counting down the days to the holidays and to being able to crack this one open and savor it. I’ll give you two sentences from the New York Times review that make me excited. Quote, it’s a piece of late career showmanship.

McEwan is 77 from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure, I sometimes felt like laughing. I will report back.

Michael Horn

And you’ll have to report back because I was going to say you just quoted the New York Times, which is an item for later but yeah, so, all right, I’ll wrap with mine, which is MacKenzie, to your point. We binge watched Four Seasons with Tina Fey and Steve Carell. It’s a Netflix. I hadn’t heard of it. It’s like an eight episode first season. There will be a second season based on the cliffhanger at the end. And I would say it’s about three couples, sort of 50s age group is roughly where they are and through trials and tribulations that is hysterical.

A lot of predictability and yet still very funny as it went through. So we really enjoyed it and I think binge watched it in two nights. I think so.

MacKenzie Price

Oh, great. That might be our holiday activity too for some time.

Michael Horn

There you go adding to your.

MacKenzie Price

I love that. I love that.

Michael Horn

Awesome. Awesome. Well, MacKenzie, huge thanks and as always, huge thank you to you, all of you, for listening. Keep coming with your questions, comments and all the rest, and we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.

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