Introduction

 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 some of the most interesting work in education today; micro-school founders, homeschool parents, hybrid school educators, people who've left or maybe never even joined the conventional education system and are building something else, something they believe in, something hard to capture in conventional terms. I wanna know what they see in their work, what learning actually looks like when you're paying attention to a kid for hours every day, week after week, year after year. What surprises them, what changes their mind, what they wish more people understood. And I wanna do it in a way that lets the work itself come through, not a sales pitch, not a manifesto, just real conversations with people who are doing the thing. Here's why I'm making this. I've spent the last 15 years in micro schools and self-directed learning environments, mostly with Agile Learning Centers, the network that I co-founded in 2013, and I've spent the last decade working with ALC Mosaic in Charlotte, watching kids build lives full of learning that no test could measure and no transcript could fully capture. What I really believe is that learning can't be proven by tests or grades. Learning happens everywhere, and it's revealed by people who witness it and experience it. The conventional education system has spent a century convincing people otherwise, and families and educators all over the country are increasingly seeing through that, leaving conventional schools and building something that looks much more like what learning has actually always been. The thing that's been missing is a way to communicate the value of all of this. Tests and grades were built for a model that these folks have left behind, so work that's happening in these microschools and home schools and pods and hybrids is rich and real, but it's hard to make visible to the broader world. The people doing this work end up underestimated. The movement ends up underestimated, and the truth about what's happening gets reduced to political talking points or anecdotes, or worse, comparisons to the very system that this work is trying to leave behind. That's the gap that I've been trying to think about, and it's the reason for these conversations. I want this series to be a place where the breadth and depth of what's happening in our movement gets seen, where practitioners can speak in their own voices about what they're doing and why, where listeners, whether you're a parent considering this for your kid or an educator thinking about leaving the system or a funder or a policymaker trying to understand what's happening or just someone curious about how kids actually learn can hear directly from people doing the work. Episodes are conversational, hopefully about 25 to 30 minutes. New episodes every week or so. We'll see. If this resonates with you, feel free to subscribe wherever you're listening. Share it with someone you think will enjoy it. Thanks for listening, and enjoy the first episode.