TEACHER TALK Q&A
QUESTION:What is micro-schooling?
ANSWER:
Recently a friend, knowing I am a professor of education, asked me what edpods are. She has a daughter going into kindergarten this Fall and is concerned about the quality of instruction she will receive during remote, hybrid or socially distanced learning. I had a loose idea. I had heard of pandemic pods, micro-schooling, learning coops and edpods, but I could not quite articulate what I thought I knew about them, so I told her that I would get back to her. I did some checking and here is what I found.
About 20 years ago in areas like New York City and San Francisco Bay the cost of private school tuition rose beyond what even wealthy parents could afford. And, seemingly out of nowhere arose the micro-school movement. Some parents began to homeschool their children, augmenting the instruction with professional tutors, but the children were missing out on the benefits of social learning, so parents started to form learning co-ops in their neighborhoods.
These were “in-home” schools where groups of children, often of varying ages and abilities from the same social group or neighborhood would meet to be taught lessons by either parents or teachers they hired, usually retired but sometimes only minimally trained.
Often, these micro-schools were no less expensive than private schools, because the teacher to student ratios were so small, but many parents paid the high price tag anyway, because they had the resources and were then able to hand pick the teachers they wanted for their children. Plus, they had a direct and immediate say about the curriculum and methods of instruction.
By 2015, micro-schooling had evolved from a simple idea, to a loose network of privately funded local groups across the country with deeper conceptual goals for specialized learning, working toward each individual child’s understanding of the academic content and skills. These micro-schools offer various instructional models and just as many customized schedules. The lessons cover a diverse range of instructional topics and teach individualized academic skills that could not possibly be taught in private or public school classrooms with larger teacher to student ratios.
Parents and educators who promote these environments say they are reinventing the one-room school house model where class sizes are typically smaller and the organization is simpler than schools are today. These parents may be romanticizing the idea of the one-room school house from back in the day, ignoring the fact that those environments perpetuated child abuse, ignored learning and behavioral disabilities and regularly discriminated against young women and people of color. The teachers of those one-room schools lacked training, and there was no educational infrastructure to support the special needs of some students. Education in America back then was not as much of a priority for families as was plowing the fields, feeding the livestock or bringing in the crops. Times have changed. Just a little.
Many (not all) of these new micro-schools use flipped classroom approaches to form blended learning models. In general, the instructional models vary widely, from direct instruction (lecture-based) approaches to hands-on and activity-based (experiential) approaches. Others use an inquiry-based, project-based approach or constructivist approaches. Most use a blend of of these approaches, depending on how qualified the teacher is.
Micro-schooling has been seen mostly as an alternative to public schools that people perceived are inadequate in some way. Some public schools actually are overcrowded, poorly funded, overly-standardized, and even physically unsafe, but this is rare. This narrative about public schools is exaggerated, because compared compared to homeschooling and micro-schooling, public schools provide more educational services, better instruction and a higher quality of overall education to more students than almost any other institution, including most private schools. Only the highest quality, most expensive, extremely elite private schools provide a better educational experience than public schools. And micro-schools in particular are unaccredited, unregulated and their quality is unknown. Despite that, they have been growing in popularity for 20 years now, mostly in urban areas, because parents with resources whose children can’t afford or get into private schools, want an alternative. This year, though, everything changed. The pandemic gave micro-schooling, now sometimes known as pandemic pods or edpods a new market, and many parents are discovering that starting them is more difficult than they thought.
Is learning in a micro-school the same as virtual learning?
Micro-schools can be virtual and often they have at least a partial virtual element to them, depending on the ages of the students and the wishes of the parents. Virtual learning environments almost always rely on a web-based platform for the digital aspects of the curriculum. There are corporate vendors who supply parents with these education resources but purchasing access to these platforms is quite different from hiring a professional educator who will regularly interact with children within a course structure, providing for their various educational needs and accommodating for learning disabilities. Hiring a legit teacher, who is trained to work with a specific age group and is educated in pedagogy, curriculum and has subject matter knowledge is expensive, and you get what you pay for.
Is micro-schooling the same thing as home-schooling?
This is not quite the same as homeschooling, because homeschooling is led by parents, tutors, or online instructors and is restricted to a single family, but the lines between micro-schooling, virtual learning and homeschooling blur from there.
Families who would typically homeschool their children have been drawn to micro-schooling for having a more established curriculum than homeschooling and more clearly identified educational outcomes and defined instructional models and the chance for their children to benefit from the limited but real social learning that comes from grouping their children with other children in their neighborhood. Some parents who do not have the expertise or patience to homeschool their own children, but do have the financial resources to hire qualified professional educators to teach in their homes are attracted to these innovative little schools. This also gives them more influence over curriculum and instruction than any private or public school.
Fast forward to the Spring of 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to close and then reopen with mostly rushed and inadequate remote learning plans. Parents were stuck at least partially homeschooling their children while trying to work remotely, and everyone involved understood that this could not continue. And, despite the best wishes of departments of education and school districts around the country, the pandemic is not over. Most teachers do not want to return to their classrooms for fear they will be infected, and many parents feel the same way about their children. Others are questioning how effective face to face learning really will be with face masks and social distancing.
Will Micro-schooling become huge in the 2020–2021 school year?
It most certainly will. With parents and teachers looking trying to stay safe, many schools that go remote will see their enrollments drop as micro-schooling takes off. New micro-schools that have emerged because of the pandemic are calling themselves edpods or pandemic pods. There are certainly upsides and downsides to micro-schooling, but for those with the means to pay a teacher to come to their home or the time to devote to running the edpod themselves, all the downsides are outweighed by their health and safety concerns.
Unfortunately, this option is only available to parents who can pool their financial resources with friends and neighbors to hire professional educators and pay for virtual-digital resources and regular COVID testing. This not only widens the achievement gap between wealthy children and those whose parents do not have those monetary means but it means that they are literally less safe from the virus if their schools open face to face, even in a hybrid model with social distancing and staggered schedules. If schools decide to provide remote learning instead, their children’s educational experience will be limited by the level of technology in their homes and the quality of the remote instruction that their school districts provide.
John Brown is host of the podcast TEACHER TALK and runs Teacher Leadership Network. TLN is a community of professional educators committed to opening a dialogue about what learning can be, in the 21st century. He is also a consultant with Praxis-Group LLC and a Clinical Professor of Education at The University of Massachusetts.