Map Academy is a new charter school in Plymouth, Massachusetts slated to open in September 2018 to serve students who have had trouble connecting, engaging, and attending school. The school’s vision is to be a haven for disconnected and underserved students, and to empower them toward high school graduation, and beyond.
We spoke with the co-founders of Map Academy—Rachel Babcock and Josh Charpentier—to get a sense of how they leveraged their robust research findings to drive the Design phase.
How will Map Academy be designed around what you learned in the Understand phase?
We have been working in the Plymouth area for a long time, serving and speaking to students who are off-track toward graduation. What we’ve found is that there are no educational options for students who are failed by traditional high schools. That is why we are designing Map Academy—to help our students address the specific barriers they face in graduating high school. Plymouth isn’t the kind of city where you’d find several alternatives to traditional high school—like one that focuses on recovery, or another that supports young parents. There’s nothing like that at the moment; we will be the only choice-based option for the students we are committed to serving. This means that we have to address a wide range of student challenges while recognizing that we cannot be everything for every student.
Plymouth is also unique in that we’ve got both urban and rural issues. We’ve seen and heard that the reality of our location must heavily impact our design. For example, there is a severe lack of public transportation, which means that we have to design for the reality that our students might not always be able to get to us. This is just one example of what we heard in Understand that demonstrated the need for a flexible and adaptable model and we’re designing with that top of mind.
What is another challenge to this stark lack of options?
We heard in the Understand phase that our families are often not looking for an option as they may not know that one even exists. We have heard this repeatedly in conversations with the community and we have built our recruitment approach to address this, including a new suite of recruitment materials and videos like this one:
How is your model is responsive to the needs of the students you will serve?
The decision to embrace asynchronous learning is responsive to our specific students’ needs. Removing the constraints of a traditional master schedule will allow students to use their time independently and flexibly. It also allows staff and students to be engaged in ways that go beyond school walls and school days. This is a massive mindset shift and has been our biggest intentional choice directly informed by what we heard in Understand. Traditional thinking about time can be a huge impediment to learning. For example, say a student only needs one more class to graduate and we can only offer that class at 10am. That could be a huge problem if the student can’t get to school by 10am.
Our commitment to flexibility specifically addresses challenges we heard in the Understand phase, like a lack of reliable transportation and the fact that students will be at different places in their educational trajectories. It also helps students who have personal challenges outside of school. For example, if a student is hospitalized for mental health issues, they can still access teachers and coursework. Or if a student is struggling with a personal issue and can’t handle group work on a particular day then they can sit independently and work on projects or go home and keep working. We have designed an environment where every student has access to their work and can engage with learning at a time that is best for them.
This flexibility will also be valuable for staff, who will be expected to differentiate and personalize learning for students (another need that surfaced in the Understand phase!). The flexibility we’re designing into the model will provide time for staff to truly meet students where they are.
How will your school designs address the different needs of all your students?
Personalization will be paramount to address students’ different needs because we know each student is unique—from learning styles and preferences, to personal challenges and past trauma. We will also be serving students who have vastly different experiences when it comes to their educational trajectories. Some will have interrupted or limited high school experiences while others will have completed a substantial amount of coursework already. Our research phase also showed that—no matter their educational past—many students will have skill gaps. We’ll need a way to validate skillsets quickly so we can focus on how to close those gaps and support students as they develop the skills and mindsets to realize their potential.
Another major insight we got from student interviews and focus groups is that older students—who are 18 or 19 years old—don’t want to be called freshmen. Once a school labels them as 9th graders, they grow frustrated. Those traditional grade levels are disheartening and significantly contribute to student attrition. That is yet another reason we see a need to remove traditional barriers and have chosen to utilize a competency-based approach.
What are some of the challenges you have experienced so far in the process?
Making our big ideas real has been a challenge. We know what students need and we have ideas for how to serve them but the shift to implementation is hard as we work to figure out the concrete steps that will get us there.
It’s also been a challenge to actualize our innovative designs and not be tempted to revert back to more traditional approaches, not because we want to, but because changing the status quo requires figuring out how to get around seemingly endless roadblocks. The external pressures can be intense because pre-existing parameters are made for traditional educational models—from learning management systems, to data compliance, to vendors, to district systems, and more. It’s all built with the assumption that schools will function as they have for hundreds of years. We want to stay true to what we know about our students despite the fact that that often means we often need work-arounds to rules and constraints. For example, how do we answer the simple question of how many 9th graders we have when we don’t have “9th graders”?
What was something that you found helpful in starting to transition from Understand to Design?
In our charter application phase, we got great feedback from Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. While it was difficult to have a team go through our ideas and poke holes in them, it really helped us a lot. It’s easy to get consumed with the individual details—making numbers line up, worrying about recruitment, etc. As school designers, it is important never get too entrenched in your ideas or mired in your to-do list. Having an outside perspective can be invaluable and lead to some very good feedback.
What is some advice to your fellow ENE cohort members?
We recommend that teams keep working to understanding their students and keep learning about innovative education throughout the Design phase. The landscape is rapidly evolving and we’ve found deep value in iterating on our thinking by visiting schools, talking to students, and networking with educators. At the same time, it can be a fine line between iterating forever and making clear decisions (of course—there is always time to iterate once the school is open and you can see your designs in action!) To address some of this, we found it useful to outline our core design elements. This codified the idea that, while everything is open for discussion, we have some parameters to stick to for making decisions. But at the same time, we are constantly wary of committing to a strict path that could cause us to miss opportunities to do something new. We balance that tension between having blinders and being too flexible.
We also recommend that teams have stakeholders with a mix of perspectives and priorities. We have one decision-maker focused on relationships and student needs while the other makes sure that our innovations can see the light of day (is there enough funding? Do we need a waiver?). This balance has been key to the process for us.