Nontraditional Education Is Outpacing the System With Real-World Skills, Student-Led Ventures, and Community-Driven Networks

Welcome to the future of education. And now here's your host, Michael Horn. Welcome to the future of education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think through how we get there, I'm really excited because we have, Shereen Radagon. She's the founder of a school we're gonna hear a lot about today, Colossal Academy, as well as the Innovative Educators Network, which we're going to discuss what that does and the ecosystem really that she has built, around helping a lot of school founders build meaningful places for kids to learn. So first, Shereen, great to see you. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. You're you're one of the people. I have very little, accolades, and you're one of the, like, check marks. I'm like, no. You're Michael Horns. Fuck. Just check. That's very kind of you to say, but you're the one doing the work. So let let's dive into that. Introduce folks, you know, your origin story to the colossal academy. I'm I'm excited to hear it. Yeah. So I am a fifth generation teacher. My great grandmother, my great great grandmother, was a one room schoolhouse teacher on a farm in Illinois. My great grandmother was a teacher. My grandfather was a superintendent of schools in a rural in rural, Illinois. My mother's special education in the urban setting for thirty five years and then came in. And I was like, no way. I'm breaking the cycle. Right? And, all signs pointed always back to, being a teacher. And so I I finally submitted to the fact that that's my calling. And I went into public school because that's where you go when you're a teacher. You get trained. You become a public school teacher. And then I swiftly found out that it was a dangerous physically dangerous for me to be there. I was breaking up fights. I was pregnant. And I was like, this is not what I saw, I saw myself as miss Frizzle, and we're gonna go to the digestive tract, and we're gonna learn all these things. And when we get there, it was like mandates. Here's your curriculum. How come they're behind in the test? Here's the state. And it wasn't what I thought. But so I said, okay. Let me let me go to private school. It must be better there. Right? Really elite, very expensive, top two percent, very elite, but there were bodyguards at at for different reasons. Right? Because these kids could be taken. Right? At the school that they had their personalized bodyguards. So and I was like, this isn't it either. I'm still checking in badges. I'm still, there were still some expectations there that I just was like, this isn't it either. Something's wrong. We're not outside. We're not going on field trips. We're not in the real world. Maybe Montessori is it. Let me go find Montessori. So I went to Montessori, and that was lovely. But I felt like something was missing for the future that I felt like students really needed to have some future forward competencies in order to be successful, computations, coding, programming. And I know that many Montessori schools do that, but I felt like it needed to be real and relevant and actual. Then pandemic hit, and I decided I really love teaching. I didn't want to be a people manager and asking how long they're washing their hands for and mandating the mask and making sure it's up past their nose. It's not what I wanted to do. I don't know if I got fired or if I quit. The short end, I no longer had a job at my school, which meant that some of the the families that wanted to, be a pod hired me to be their full time teacher. And I said, okay. Well, if they're paying a little bit less than than what they're paying as tuition, they could pay me to be all I need is four kids to make my salary. And then I started with four kids. We moved to six and ten and twelve. And so that's kind of the genesis. But what I found out there is, like, I get to do whatever I want. And when I mean whatever I want, it's whatever the kids want, whenever they want. In real time, you want drones? Look at drones. They'll be here on Thursday. Let me Amazon it. What do you want? You wanna learn how to code? You wanna go surfing? You wanna whatever you want, I can be that, and I can give it, and I can create those opportunities for you. And I was like, this is it. This was the misfrizzle that I had imagined, and it took me so many, like, stops along the way to get there, but I found it. And I found where I was able to be the teacher that I knew I needed to be for for young people. So cool. I I'm just reflecting on what I heard in my father's family is from Illinois, sort of a, you know, city, but not a main city anymore, from there. So have some resonance there, and then I feel like I went to public schools. I was then in the independent school world on the board of NAS for a little bit. Microschools have certainly spoken to me. My kids were in Montessori schools. The pandemic hit. We went into sort of this pod like thing very similarly, but they went back to Montessori because we couldn't find a different solution that would lean into some of the things you just talked about. And to be clear, it's been beautiful. And I hear that some of the excitement and passion you've introduced. So so tell us a little bit more about the educational model itself from Colossal Academy. And as you do so, I'd love you to, like, sort of reflect on, you know, kids desiring to learn about drones, getting whatever they want, versus, like, are there certain nonnegotiables that you say? Well and this is really important that you learn, through through the experience. I'd love to hear you sort of walk us through that. Sure. So there are definitely absolutes. We really firmly believe in a deep, knowledge in language, literacy and numeracy. We deeply understand that, and we think that that we're presupposing that that we're gonna need that in the future. Right? Even if we are replaced with the robots, I still believe in, like, passing on knowledge. Right? As humans, we that's what makes us different than any other animal is that we're passing on knowledge and we're teaching. We also firmly believe and we're declaring that nature is a future competency. You have to be in touch with nature. You have to understand how nature works. You need to be able to identify plants and know how to grow some food. That is a part of our model as well. Entrepreneurship is really rich and deep. We understand that, the traditional education system is outdated. And part of it is the reason it's outdated is it's not relevant for the future moving forward. We're not in an industrial, era. We're in the future era. And so what is that? It's gonna require people to be entrepreneurial, make their own jobs, problem solve on a deep level, and consciously make money. And that's that's part of what we do. And what we've found is, you know, we have amazing projects, and and we we took over this vacant lot next door, and turned it into a food forest. We're in downtown Fort Lauderdale in the art district, and there was a vacant lot full of, like, bricks and rebar, and the kids themselves pulled it out. We got it. We had to talk about responsible dumping. Where do you where do you put things like that? Where do you put a battery? Where does that go? Right? And so that was a beautiful project that we were able to do. And and they love their garden, and they think it's amazing, and they eat from it. We we have sugarcane and bananas and all kinds of local, Florida native, tomatoes and and and foods and and roots. But what I find really unlocks them is when they when they have an enterprise. So when they are making money, that's where I find that it's like, oh, I gotta understand how to work. Okay. What's the spreadsheet about? I'm like, I told you guys, like, you need to see your projections. What's your q three looking like, guys? What? How many more did you sell to get your two hundred dollar, goal that you spent spent for yourself? Okay. Once you make two hundred dollars are you gonna what are you gonna do with it? Like so those things, those skills, I feel, become super relevant when there's an actual dollar amount that that they are earning. So all of our students own their own business. They learn to be CEOs of their companies. They, right now, we're working on a beautiful, project, across the colossal academy. We have an online school as well where they design t shirts based on their identity. So they go into their identity, they build out t shirts, and they all have their own drop shipping site. Right? And so all of that goes into being relevant. They learn how to use Canva. They learn how to design. They learn how to ask questions. They learn how to, like, show their identity, find their core values, attribute those to colors, find the chroma hex, all of those things. They have a brand kit. Wow. All of their brand kit, and that's theirs. And and they have to justify why they're using Kelly green. Right? Like, kids like, I'm Irish. I'm using Kelly green. I'm like, that's great. You have to be able to understand why do those colors create that kind of a reaction in you. And what is that doing for you, and how does that represent the brand, and what kind of font do you wanna use? Right? So asking questions like that and and, then the skills that we're learning in it are transferable. They're able to have that. They can build portfolios. They can they can they have their own websites that they build every every week. They drop into their websites. They have their own LinkedIn accounts. They're they're meant to to find and create connections with people because, that's what elite private schools do. It's really your rolodex that you get from a private school. It's not that the education's any better or the quality of learning is any better. And in fact, I would might argue the opposite. Don't come for me for it, but I think it's different. Some of it is the accountability piece. Right? When you have a lot of money, you can turn those d's into an a. Right? You know, like, those things happen at very elite schools. And so it's not that their models are are any better. It's that they built a beautiful network of when you needed a job, who are you gonna call? Right? And so we have to elevate who's within our network so that we can, change our trajectory as far as who we're gonna be out in the world. So that's kind of like the model itself. We we center everything around relevancy. What is relevant for you? There's a we have a very large, wait list at we have four locations, but at the downtown Fort Lauderdale location, extremely large. I could just get another building, but I'm not going to because once once you go beyond thirty, you become a people manager, and then you have to use those old systems of, like, bells and whistles and times and clocks. And you have to manage people rather than, like, interact with people. And, we just are refusing to get larger. And it might not be the best you know, the old school best business decision, but that's what we're doing. But it sounds like you're spreading. I'm sorry. There's so much to love and dig into here. So let let me go in this direction for a moment. It sounds like you are spreading, though. You have four locations. If I understood correctly, thirty kids in each. You have an online school as well. Tell us, like, tell us, like, who the students are, how many, and, like, how are you staff? And, you you know, I Yeah. These are not traditional teachers that are working with them clearly. So, like, who are the adults that get to interact with them? Yeah. Who of them maybe the right way to ask it is who of them are on your payroll versus, like, they get to interact in the community as they build the social capital you just described, which is beautiful, by the way. Thank you. Yeah. It's it's been these are all questions I'm answering, and we're building it as we do it. But who we serve are really the students who are on the fringes of the inter like, the traditional ed. The kids with the largest adverse reaction to the traditional ed is who we're serving, and they're really the first generation of whatever education system is coming next. They really are the the trailblazers. They really are the students that are developing the new the the new model. Right? And but what's profound about these students is although they have adverse reactions to the traditional model with all kinds of symptoms that can look across the board like many different things. What we're finding is they're extremely talented and totally capable of so many other powerful tools that skill set that that's gonna drive innovation forward. Right? So they might not be great at sitting still and taking notes and doing but what they're really great is problem solving and collaboration and communication and figuring out a new business that's gonna I have a student who has a, costumes for, new guinea pigs. So she made wings for guinea pigs. Not a traditional student by any means, but where her talents lie is there. So that's, you know, who we serve. A lot of times, parents are just like, I cannot stick my child in a traditional classroom. I don't know what it is. They're magical. I believe in them. They're dying in a traditional system. You know, another matrices for us is joy. You should just you can get to the same result joyfully. Right? So we try to unlock the joy in everything that we're doing. So our online school, as you know, most of what's happening in the future is gonna be digital. How do you practice showing up online if you don't ever have to do that? What is your background? I'm not actually the prime example, but what does your background look like? What how do you dress for online interviews, online communities that you're gonna be in? That's the workforce of the future. So the the online school really helps to solve that learning digital citizenship, how to show up, how to collaborate across screens, and that's allowed us to to be with our students in Jacksonville and Miami and have all kinds of, cross pollination. So our online school also serves, sixth through twelfth grade. Okay. So the beautiful thing about that is I, as a micro school, could not hire one biology teacher to come in three days a week for one hour. We just couldn't do it. So what we're able to do now is be able to utilize the same pool of teachers to make sure that our our students have deep access in the areas that they need to. We we have, partnered with ASU Prep, and licensed some of their, classes, and then we colossalize our other classes. So, we use AI tools that help to, help with research. They learn how to manage their projects and, find collaborators across them. So to your initial question, yes, we have four locations, Miami, Jacksonville, and we have a school in Mexico, Merido, Mexico, and my and my school in Fort Lauderdale. Wow. Teachers own their school, belongs to them, it doesn't belong to me, and the the point is you serve your community. My community looks different from somebody else's community, and you need to serve your community and call on the community experts to, pour in because they're dying to come into our classrooms and teach something. So my job is to teach you how to be a teacher for a day for forty five minutes. Don't talk for more than ten minutes, sir. Do not talk for more than ten minutes. How are you gonna engage them? What are they gonna eat? What are they gonna touch? And engage their senses. And so I I give them like a rap sheet of how to do that. And then they build partnerships within the community. So our staffing looks like we have two amazing veteran teachers whose goal, I think most teachers' goal is to, like, unlock the child within really deep discovery, joyful learning, play based learning, nature nature awareness, and they're they're both veteran teachers. Those are kind of like our, staples. And then we have the other teachers that that do some deep depth, and then we have specials in Florida. We're so blessed with so many people that decided to leave education but stay leave the traditional classroom but stay in education, thank god for them. So that might look like just chess or home, home economics we're able to bring back into the classroom or someone to do permaculture. And so these are our specials, podcasting, t shirt design. Right? Like, those are the those are the specials that we're able to bring in from teachers who have left the nontraditional classroom and and decided to start their own. Very cool. Very cool. And so and then the online, if I understand correctly, that's older students. The in person, is that younger and older? Just younger? Like, who what what what's the age? You know? Who's the Six to twelfth grade. We're sixth to twelfth grade. Okay. Throughout. That could be Insofar as there's grades. Yeah. Yeah. That could be a seventh grader doing algebra. It could also be a seventh grader doing fifth grade. Got it. Whatever that looks like. But their age wise, it's about eleven to eighteen. Very cool. And so now as I'm jealous in Massachusetts of what you're starting to build in Florida, my turn to ask the, next question, which is, like, you were frustrated as a public school teacher with a lot of the requirements, restrictions, things of that nature. Right? But how is the policy ecosystem helping you here, and maybe where is it still leaving something to be desired as you're starting these new microschools and and serving families in in these in these really cool ways? Well, the policy in Florida has actually created more need for micro schools. Right? So people are deciding that they want something that serves their family, because, unfortunately, the public schools have become like a battleground of culture wars, right? And so we've been able to build community schools or micro schools however you want to like title them in order to serve the communities that are needing that. So if that means you want to read African American history and take an APA African American history class and you can design a school like that and that's great. You want to be LGBTQI inclusive? Build a school like that. And then the culture wars don't need to exist because you have a safe and inclusive space where students feel seen, loved, heard, and can actualize. Right? And so, the the policy now, you know, what we're we are open to having, universal, savings account, which really allows for accessibility, so that students can make choices, families can actually make choices. The the hardest part is really about the visibility, knowing that we're there because we're so tiny, which we'll we could talk about with Annette, but we're also just so tiny and we're all just in our own little orbit. Right? So the ESA has really unlocked a lot of entrepreneurship. And in fact, that Broward County, spends nineteen thousand dollars per pupil. Our tuition's fifteen thousand. And once I started to look at my budget, I'm like, where is all the money going? How are people every square inch of this place is accounted for. Every dollar is accounted for. If I had nineteen thousand dollars they'd be, Elon Musk and I would be putting kids in space. Like, if I had that much money, where's all the money going? Right? Yeah. So I think having access to funding that allows us to be sustainable has been amazing. Where, policy and practical are kind of in dissonance right now, I have the same school zoning requirements as a four thousand person high school. So the fire, which is costly, it's costly to outfit a school. The zoning requirements, I have fourteen twenty six square feet and that means I need a sprinkler system and a whole fire, a whole fire, system. We also need to some of the health department restrictions just start matching the microenvironment. So those are where that where the opportunities for growth need to be, and I think we're working on it. Right? Like, if you have twenty kids, do you really need to be zoned as a full fledged stand alone commercially? It it just doesn't. It's a It doesn't make it doesn't make any sense. Make sense. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense at all. Okay. No. Super helpful. So that's a perfect transition then. Because the other thing you found it is this innovative educators network. Tell us about what it is and and and its purpose and and and why you created that. Yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. So I'm gonna just tell you, if you don't know surfskate science, Michael, the next podcast you need to do is we need to focus on them. Okay. I'm gonna email you after this. Cool. Tony from Surfskate Science. Tony and Yuli Fujiardi started this amazing program, and our students utilize surfing and skateboarding on Fridays to learn physics, marine biology. We are out. They turn beaches and skate parks into classrooms. And it was during the pandemic, and Tom and he was like, would you would you wanna get, like, lunch or dinner? And I'm like, yeah. Let's get together and just, like, hang out. And we have the same issues. Right? Like, zoning requirements, and where do we find this form, and how do we? And so then we asked a couple more people. Tobin from Acton, Fort Lauderdale. Amazing. We have four kind of Fort Lauderdale, locations here. And I was like, Tobin, miss Suarez, miss Ratchet, do you guys wanna have lunch with us? And so it just started to grow. And as we were growing, we're realizing we're all facing the same issues. And, so we just decided to do something about it. Tony is incredible about, like, super action oriented. I'm very grassroots. And so the two of us just have been such a beautiful partnership in making sure that microschools and providers, we have a hundred and twenty in South Florida, which is West Palm Beach, Miami, and Broward, counties, serving over eight thousand students. Tampa has opened up their own chapter and so has Jacksonville. And so our key, our key pieces the key contributions that we do are visibility, so we have showcases to let parents know and bring everybody together into the same space. We do conferences and showcases. Press, getting helping, getting you the word out, nationally and and locally. Local's always hard. What else are we doing? Oh, just entrepreneurship. How do you keep your books? How do you do marketing? What's a funnel? Like, who's a bookkeeper? Who where do I get insurance for? Twelve students. You know? Like, those kind of shared resources that we're able to help each other out with. And Tony's gonna kill me. There's a fourth one. Oh, yeah. Okay. Just like, what this changes in education in the platforms. Like, what are the best practices that we can share those better practices with each other? So we have guest speakers come in, and you can choose to come to the webinars or not come to the webinars. And really what we are is community. We show up to each other's open houses. We cry when we have to close our doors together. We help you play. Like, we had a school that just closed, and we helped all of us buying a chair, buying some kind of something from the school, showing up, passing the word around so that when this person closed, not only did she place the students in in a better environment or an environment that would serve them, but also just, like, helping her dissolve that business with love and and and kindness around the work that she's done. Wow. So Wow. Very cool. I wanna connect that work to something you said earlier because you said that your teachers own their own school sites. You don't own the one in Jacksonville, right, or Miami, right, and so forth. Because I think you said something powerful, which we often forget in my experience in education, which is that these are really local of the community, of the context institutions, maybe we call them, that, exist in that environment. And, yeah, there are things that are, like, common just like the laws of physics, you know, transcend San Francisco to Boston to Boston to Miami. But how you build the bridge in each of those three places is very different because of the local terrain. And so too, I think, as you build these schools. And and I guess I'm I'm curious because as I hear you talking and you've built this innovative educators network, the thing that I keep thinking is, like, scale, I don't think is one of these schools growing from thirty to a hundred thousand. But I suspect scale is like a lot of families getting the right option for their kid to make progress and sort of as a movement growing up over time with these principles underlying it. And and I just maybe I'm leading the witness, but I'd I'd love to just have you reflect on how we get to that greater scale. It's something that, you know, we think a lot about on my end, and and Tom Arnett sort of have my my colleague at the Christensen Institute, he sort of has this belief that as a as a sector, we're gonna have to be able to solve more complicated and different kinds of problems or, like, the kid that stays in high a traditional high school because they love football even though the rest of the experience sucks. Like, we have to sort of figure out how to bring those people in over time. I I just sort of love you to wrestle with that question or tension or or opportunity. Yeah. I see innovative educated network, and I see the moms, family members, aunties, caregivers, teachers. If you mess with our kids, which traditional ed has, we are endless, relentless. We will stay up till four o'clock. We will drive eight hours for our children. Right? And this is true for both teachers and caregivers. And so it's, like, almost tirelessly we were taking on this mission. Right? But the other piece I will say is I feel like the independent micro school owners and the and and and the that's who Ed in Ed focuses on. We're like the mycelium of this movement, and we're a network that's just kinda underground. And we move really swiftly, and we're supportive and super collaborative. Right? And I think that that root system is really gonna keep us grounded. I can imagine as we see schools closing, we can still have a sports program. We can we can have micro schools within a larger school. We can have twenty micro schools in a large high school. Like, there couldn't be that showcase. There there are schools now opening up in malls. I think we have to really reflect and think, what is school, what is schooling, who has to go to school, should you have to go, all these like underlying questions of like what is education, how should we be delivering education, What's compulsory? What's not compulsory? As a society, do we want educated population? I'm gonna say yes, that's my own standpoint. And I think we'll solve those problems as we come, and we see now we have, in, in our network, we have a coach, an Olympic coach, and he does PE for students and and runs sports. And we have, because there was a need for homeschoolers to also still be able to do the sports, they have a competing team. They have competing teams in track, And so they're still able to compete and be in the in the net in the and go for professional athleticism. We also find that professional athletes are using microschools and homeschooling as a real option because they get their school done and then they do what they need to be doing. So they're training after school, or they have private trainers, or they're joining in, in a different way. So, yeah, I think that I think where our challenges are right now are some of the, like, landmarkers of graduation and prom. Oh, yeah. And so I think we're just gonna create those. I think there's a problem. We're entrepreneurs. We'll just solve the problem. So we'll just have a problem of our own. You're right? And we're even modeling it. One of our micro schools is doing a prom this year. So Oh, wow. Okay. And you're modeling it, I guess. Right? You're modeling it for the students, what it looks like to be entrepreneurial, to build something meaningful and lasting that contributes value to the community and those who participate in it. So, I I let's leave it there. Shereen, this has just been really educational for me, and just beautiful, just beautiful stuff you are building out there both within the schools that you directly support in this broader network. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. And for all you tuning in, we'll be back next time on the future of education.