151. Deeper Learning and Mastery at Red Bridge, with Orly Friedman

Listeners, if you are inclined to go to the Red Bridge school website, which I hope you are, and you click on Our Team in the NAV bar, you will find the following bio for Orly Friedman, Red Bridge’s founder: “When I began teaching in 2007, I wanted to expand real opportunity for kids, and since then both opportunity—and the skills to seize it—have shifted; technology lets more people create and connect, but it only matters when learners have the know-how and confidence to use it—that is, agency. Agency sits at the heart of Red Bridge: while traditional schools reward compliance, we reward initiative. Students don’t just receive information—they drive their own learning—and they show up eager, day after day. Designing for agency means reworking school systems and structures; the experience won’t mirror your K–8 memories, yet the essentials remain: caring teachers, hands-on projects, academic challenge, and the joys every child loves—field trips, the Halloween parade, and more. Our tactics are fresh, but our values are rooted in a long line of progressive educators—John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and Deborah Meier—and in the last fifty years of cognitive science and psychology, translated daily by a skilled team.” I will note here that before launching Red Bridge, Orly was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Transcend. She was a founding team member at the Khan Lab School and has degrees from Yale University, George Mason University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Mason Pashia, the producer of Getting Smart’s podcasts and page editor and producer for Getting Smart’s blogs (and by the way, I recommend reading everything and listening to everything that comes from Getting Smart), wrote the following for this episode: “When you step inside Red Bridge, a San Francisco-based K-8 microschool, you immediately recognize that you're in a place that LOVES learning. Imagine kindergarteners with the agency to shape their own days and their own curiosities. Picture a curriculum built around 'noticing'—empowering students to connect, find and solve problems in their community. Red Bridge is a place where personalized, competency-based and high-agency learning is so much more than a soup of buzzwords; it's a daily practice that's nurturing a new generation of changemakers. Schools like Red Bridge are signals from the future, showing us not only what school could be, but what school can be.” And finally, here is an excerpt from a letter written by a former student of Orly’s, before she founded Red Bridge, that I think is so beautiful: “Hi Ms. Friedman, I hope you're doing well! I wanted to reach out and thank you for being such an amazing third-grade teacher at Murch all those years ago, and to let you know that I'm now becoming a teacher. I'll be teaching fourth grade in Aurora, Colorado, and school starts next week (ahhhhh!). I wrote about your class (featuring the green pouf) on my application for Teach for America, and I'm planning to have a Funky-Monkey-style shared writing project in my class as well. I just wanted to send a quick note before the year starts to say thank you for being an inspiration to me. I would also appreciate any first-year-teacher tips you might have! Thanks for everything, Olivia.” Our episodes are edited by the talented Evan Kurohara. Our theme music comes from the catalog of pianist, Michael Sloan.