What We See

Lacy Manship co-founded ALC Mosaic, a self-directed school in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has been a key leader in the early childhood program there for 13 years. Today she holds the space for reading and writing across the school: a Reader's Workshop where kids from five to teenager choose to come in and work on literacy while kids climb trees and dig in the sandbox right outside the door. In...

What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. Microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs talking about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss. Justine Wilson spent seventeen years in conventional schools, teaching and then leading buildings across Ohio, Colorado, Egypt, Brazil, and Qatar, before founding Curious & Kind Educ...

What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. Microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs talking about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss. In this episode, Tomis talks with Jill Haskins, founder of Kainos Microschool in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Jill is a former public school teacher who said she'd never homeschool, then did; sa...

Sheri Grace has a PhD in early childhood education and spent years teaching teachers before she went looking for the thing her textbooks had left out. She found forest school, got a little mad nobody had told her about it sooner, and started Piedmont Forest School in a Winston-Salem park where, as she tells it, no one had ever actually played. Five years on it runs five days a week, and this fall...

In this episode I talk with Denise Lever, a former wildland firefighter who started homeschooling while her family moved nine times in thirteen years, and who now runs a network of eleven microschools in an Arizona town of six thousand people. We get into her three-tier model of autonomous founders sharing one building, the GPS meetings where guide, parent, and student sit down together to design...

Chelsey Harrington co-founded Evergreen Academy, a nature-based microschool in Conway, Arkansas. In this conversation she describes what learning looks like there. Two crawfish in a creek become a two-week investigation that quietly moves through biology, habitat, and seasonality, with the younger kids out hunting for crawfish chimneys and the whole group ending up sculpting clay models; one catal...

In Episode 02, I sit down with Iman Cassells Alleyne, founder of Kind Academy in South Florida and creator of Launch Your Kind, a program that has helped 90+ microschools get off the ground. Iman's K–10 program spends the first two weeks of every school year without touching academics, and parents are stressed. By the end of the year, her neurodiverse learners have grown over a full "grade level"...

What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. Microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs talking about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss. In Episode 01, I sit down with Lauren Yacht and Sarah Lavezzo, founders and directors of Scholé Center for Innovative Education in Northern Virginia. We talk about what learning looks li...

 Welcome to What We See, conversations across indie education with micro schools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss. I'm Tomis Parker, and this is the introduction to a conversation series called What We See. Here's what it is: Over the next several months, I'm going to be sitting down with people doing...