Work Generated Learning with Andrew Salmon of Intangled Learning

Andrew Salmon, cofounder of Intangled Learning, spent a decade building commercial structures before a persistent curiosity about education pulled him into classrooms as an industry mentor. That path eventually led to a partnership with cofounder Kevin, a math teacher Salmon met while volunteering with disengaged students. Together, and accelerated by the disruptions of the COVID era, they began developing what they now call work generated learning: a model in which the practices of an organization, not a faculty-designed syllabus, serve as the curriculum.

The core premise is straightforward. When an adult learner is already working inside the environment where professional practice actually happens, importing a representative curriculum from outside that environment is, at best, a proxy. "The best thing you could possibly have is the actual practices themselves," Salmon told host Darin Francis on the Signals in Higher Ed podcast. Intangled Learning positions learners as researchers inside their own organizations, building what the company calls a practice portfolio: structured narratives documenting instructional strategies, decision trade-offs, technology use, and reflective observations gathered over roughly two years.

Practice first, theory closely connected

The model departs from the traditional teacher preparation sequence, which typically layers coursework and theory across several semesters before placing candidates in a student teaching or residency role at the end. Intangled Learning inverts that order without abandoning theory altogether. As learners surface the practices of their school community, they identify specific gaps where deeper academic study would strengthen their work. A research course is then triggered by that identified need, rather than prescribed in advance by a course catalog. The result collapses the trade-off that working adult learners routinely face between completing coursework at night and preparing for the classroom the following morning.

Salmon is careful to distinguish his apprenticeship model from what he calls the "Mister Miyagi syndrome," the idea that an apprentice simply imitates a master practitioner. Instead, learners are embedded in a community of practice, a concept drawn from the work of researcher Etienne Wenger, and are equipped with frameworks to navigate membership across multiple communities simultaneously. The university program is one community; the school, the students, and the families are another, and Salmon argues the latter is plainly the more central one for a practicing educator.

Where institutions push back

Resistance at the school district level has been limited. Leaders who went through traditional preparation tend to warm to the model once they understand it, and working educators find immediate relevance in an approach that does not treat their daily practice as separate from their academic development. The friction, Salmon explains, sits primarily inside higher education institutions, and it centers less on philosophical disagreement than on accreditation defensibility. Faculty who might otherwise embrace the model find themselves asking how they would justify non-standard assessments to their accreditors. Intangled Learning's answer is to work with willing faculty to map the portfolio and research process against existing course objectives and assessment standards, demonstrating equivalence without requiring a full program overhaul.

The business case for institutions ultimately rests on enrollment differentiation. Salmon is direct about this: higher ed has largely treated its challenges as a marketing problem, when the underlying issue is a product that has not changed substantively. "You can only put so much sizzle on the steak," he said. "At some point, you have to deliver something substantially different." For adult learners in particular, the standard online experience, a weekly discussion board post paired with assigned readings, does little to distinguish one institution from another or to address the retention and burnout problems that follow graduates into the workforce.

Early results and the longer arc

Intangled Learning is candid that the evidence base is still forming. Early cohorts are small, and longitudinal outcomes take years to materialize. What the company has observed in its initial groups is roughly ninety percent of program completers remaining in their original schools, a retention signal that aligns with the theoretical basis of the model. Research on why teachers leave the profession consistently identifies loneliness and lack of support ahead of compensation. A learning model that situates the educator inside a shared community of practice from day one addresses that isolation structurally rather than incidentally. Salmon sees the same logic extending beyond teacher preparation into manufacturing and other organizational contexts, wherever professional learning has defaulted to isolating individuals rather than entangling them in shared practice.