What school and teacher is not trying to banish learning failure? Well, when I spoke to Glen Taylor, the Co-CEO of Centric Learning, a former educator and passionate change-agent, I was struck by their work-alongside view of helping do such banishment.
Centric Learning is helping schools innovate by flanking their structure and schedule with project- based online learning solutions that are live-teacher led. The personalization inherent in students solving real-world problems and answering complex questions is a game-changer for developing their knowledge and skills.
The thing is, Centric Learning has innovated the digital aspects of directing learning that are not simply a digitizing of old methods. They’re banishing student learning failure by banishing the old methods of teaching and learning. They’ve replaced them with methods that engage the current generation of learning on their grounds, in their desired modality of social inquiry.
With Cognia accreditation and researched digital methods that yet weave in human teaching intersection, Taylor’s company is helping schools become efficient, teachers to become guiding tutors and school schedules to break into one-on-one help or small cohorts.
Taylor dreams of a time when the access of very tailored learning that is still “high-touch” by live teaching becomes “mesh-networked.” His vision is that the world of geographically dispersed teachers reach the geographically dispersed local students in an any teacher-to-any single student or cohort in a magical mesh of learning brought about by the internet.
The vision dissolves worries about the teacher shortage instantly when you grasp it.
“Our teachers are experts, we spend a lot of time on training to make sure that they are,” Taylor said. That statement combined with a modifiable curriculum in a fully digital platform with some auto- grading means that Centric Learning can intercede where schools need them like a ninja team of educators.
But how?
Of course, the issue is how it actually all comes about, that transactional juncture between a school or a teacher and the folks at Centric Learning. I just had to ask the uncomfortable question of how Centric Learning manages to insert itself into the difficulty of master schedules and the right students with time carved out of already assigned classroom times. The logistics of that issue are what have always withheld schools from thinking of themselves as sourcing hubs of teaching-from- anywhere and their already overwhelmed-with-requirements existing teachers who are typically loathe to give up any of “their” time.
Schools do, after all, have to satisfy “instructional minutes” and put adult humans into classrooms for disciplined focused attention to learning.
Taylor chuckled at the question. “We have account managers who spend a lot of time with each school and their teachers to formulate that agreement,” he said.
Centric Learning has big contracts in Michigan and has helped revert that States’ drop-out rate of some 33,000 students a year. They’ve had even more growth since the Pandemic than before.
They’ve also got dual diploma programs in the Netherlands, Brazil and the U.K. Find out more about my new friends at Centric Learning here.
