Tanya Sheckley on Rebel Educators

Imagine a teaching staff that was fundamentally on the same page about what works and what doesn’t work in the classroom. What would this mean for engagement, efficacy, agency, and turnover? Thirty-plus years of science of learning research has delivered this foundation. Unfortunately, much of it has never made it to teachers. Until now. A new program, called the Learning Blueprint, developed by neuroscientist and former podcast

guest Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, has proven effective at helping schools understand and embed key science of learning principles into everyday practice. It won’t replace any teaching systems that you may currently use, but it’ll make them work better. You can learn more by visiting lme.global.smart. That’s lme.global.smart. Tanya, you’ve been a business entrepreneur and an education entrepreneur. What does it mean to be

entrepreneur? It’s a great question, Tom. I spent my early career working in beer and realized working in corporate America that there was something more that I wanted to do and something different, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what that was. After I finished my master’s program in entrepreneurship, I started to try and start a few different things that followed my interest. One was a personal training. One was in marketing, and nothing really stuck or took. One was called

Gear for Girls. I was going to open this thing that was all outdoor equipment that was women-specific at the time. 15, 20 years ago, it was hard to find the women-specific stuff, but it’s finding that thing that you need, that is missing in the world, that you also recognize that lots of other people need, and how can you start to solve that problem? That’s where I see the heart of entrepreneurship. Of course, entrepreneurship in practice is a very different

thing. That’s more of a jacker, in my case, Jane of all trades organization. What I’ve been focusing on recently, now that we’re five years into the launch of our school, is really leadership and culture. Thinking back to some of the business books and business strategies and the quote of culture eats strategy for breakfast every day. Looking at, we’ve built so many amazing strategies and methodology for education now, is how do we really get the culture of what we’re building right?

Entrepreneurship is solving that need, figuring out how to solve it well, and figuring out how to serve the people within your organization, as well as the others who are utilizing your products. Yeah, I love that. It’s meeting a need, solving a problem, creating impact, delivering value. I’m Tom Vanderick. You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast, and today we’re joined by Tanya Sheckley. She is the founder and head of UP Academy, a progressive elementary school in San

Mateo, California. She’s also the author of a new book called Rebel Educator. Creating classrooms where impact and imagination meet. Tanya, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Tom. I’m really excited for our conversation. Did you grow up in Minnesota? I did not. I grew up in Wisconsin. So that caused ruffles and feathers when you went to Minnesota. As long as we didn’t talk about the Packers or the Vikings, it was all okay.

So at Minnesota, you majored in public health and dance, and you’ve also, as you just mentioned, you’ve launched a fitness business. It looks like movement, wellness, and fitness are a strand in your life. Is that true? And if so, how and where have you thought about incorporating that into a school community? Yeah, those are great questions. Yes, movement and fitness has always been a part of my life. And honestly, I didn’t realize it when I was a dancer. Dancing was something that I love

to do, but I didn’t think of it as fitness, and I didn’t think of it as movement to maintain my brain health or my mental outlook on the world. It was just something that I love to do. After I quit dancing and I finished college, I was a snowboard instructor, I was a mountain bike racer, and I continued to stay active and in different things. And it wasn’t until one of my friends, that I was out snowboarding with one day, I was like, hey, yeah, you can do this, you’re an athlete,

let’s go. And no one had ever called me an athlete before that moment. I was like, I’m not an athlete, we’re just out playing in the snow. But I guess snowboarding 100 days a year, it qualifies you as athletic. And after I left snowboarding, I moved in, I mentioned I worked for a beer company for 10 years, and I probably didn’t do anything really athletic for about the first five of those. And I really recognized the toll that it was taking on my mental thought processes and my

personal life. And so when I was 29, I decided to run a marathon, because I wasn’t on track, had never run. I was the kid in school who walked until my PE teacher could see me, and then I would jog until he couldn’t see me anymore. So a marathon clearly made sense. But I started running, and I joined a running group, and I found this amazing social network, and I also found that when my body was in motion and doing new things, that my brain would also be

in motion and doing new things. And throughout the past 15 years or so, give or take a few, I’ve definitely found that to be true. The periods of time or the seasons in my life when I am most active, then I am most healthy, and I am most productive. And so I found that correlation to be very important for myself, to be able to continue to move forward. How have you incorporated elements of wellness and fitness at Upacademy?

Yeah, so one of the things that we do that’s unique to our school is a multi-sensory learning approach. So just like I’ve found that my brain works best when I’m in motion, and I’m an adult, so I can separate those two things, and it’ll still work for me. We find that from the neuroscience of learning, we learn best when our bodies are in different states of activity, different states of motion, and when we’re almost in kind of a mini flow state where we’re not focusing necessarily

on what our body’s doing, but we can focus on what we’re thinking about or learning about, because our body is otherwise occupied, and especially for children who really need to move and learn, they need to move and they need to play, and their bodies integrate learning through play. They need that time and that movement. When we can do that movement also while they’re learning, that learning becomes stickier. It stays in their brain. They have a

deeper understanding of what’s happening because their body was in a state of motion when they were learning the thing that they’re learning. So for example, we often teach phonics and review phonics while the kids are jumping on a trampoline. They might review sight words while they’re throwing scarves up in the air over a blower and chasing them down. They do letter pattern recognition while they’re doing hand fluency on the wall and crossing midline. And these are for

the really little kids who are just learning to read, but by incorporating that multi-sensory approach, that motion and physicality with the learning and academic and mental aspect of it really helps students to gain that learning faster and for it to stay stickier so they can use it and transfer it to other places. We also incorporate yoga. We have PE. We’ve utilized a local gymnastics place and taken our students there. We get out on regular field trips, so we try and stay active

outside of that as well. And we have a full indoor sensory gym that’s in our school that students can use for brain breaks as well. Oh, I love that. This, Tonya, this reminds me of, there’s a recent Hubertman Labs podcast. Hubertman’s a biologist nearby you at Stanford and he’s done a couple podcasts on the links between movement and learning and he’d, I think, reinforce many of the concepts that you talked about. Tonya, you had three children

and in your book you, and on your podcast you’ve talked about how some of their learning differences really influenced the formation of UP Academy. How did your own three kids inspire your school? So our school was really founded and inspired by my oldest daughter. My oldest daughter, Eliza, had cerebral palsy and finding the right educational fit for her. She was super observant, super curious, super social, but also mobility challenge. She couldn’t walk. She used

a wheelchair to get around. She was nonverbal, really presented a challenge. And so we had done, I’d spent the first five years of her life looking for the right therapies, the right treatments, the right things that were going to help her progress. We worked with specialists all over the country and all over the world on speaking, on eating, on movement. And then when we got to the school district, they just weren’t willing to incorporate any of the things that we knew,

that we had learned, that we knew that worked. And part of that is they’re constrained by their policies and their procedures. They’re constrained by their budget. They’re constrained by staff. But they’re also constrained by, they just don’t have to do what’s best for students. They only need to provide a certain level of education and accessibility. And I became really frustrated with that. And I really thought about it from a perspective of all students. Like if

every parent who wanted to send their child to public school was faced with this, kind of this wall of them saying, well, yeah, but we’re not actually going to do the things that are good for your child. We’re just going to do the things that we do. It made me wonder how many people would really send their kids to public school at that point. But this is what we do to our students with disabilities. And I just, I felt like there should be a better way. So we started talking to

other families, started looking at other ways of creating education. And during this process, my oldest daughter unexpectedly passed away. So it set us back quite a bit and stopped us for a moment of, you know, this, doing this for Eliza, she’s no longer here. Is this really something that I still want to pursue and continue with? And the resounding answer from myself, from my husband, from my family was, yes, we had learned so much from her. She had taught us so much about

what was possible for her and so many other kids that we really wanted to move forward and do what we could to create this new methodology of education that then, you know, the goal was to create the methodology and then take it and share it around the world, be able to train other schools, be able to work with other educators to be able to share this inclusive project-based learning approach. And so we moved forward with that. My other two children, as you mentioned, are currently

in my school. My daughter this year was our first graduate. And for her, she’s twice exceptional. We didn’t know. She’s also dyslexic, which because of her twice exceptionality, her giftedness is in patterns and recognition and puzzles and visual spatial awareness. So it would take her three times to read a page, but her brain would then put together the puzzles of all the words and the letters that were, her brain was also moving around because it saw them

as a puzzle, not as words, but then figure it all out. So it was taking her twice as long to read things as it was taking her peers, but her comprehension was so strong and she was so determined to read and love to read so much that I think in a public school, it probably wouldn’t have been caught because she was reading just at the lower part of grade level. She wasn’t falling behind. She wasn’t appearing to struggle. But this was, I feel like this was the gift that her sister gave her

was the school that had the small class sizes that had the ability to get to no students, that had a multi-sensory curriculum and research based innovative ways of looking at students and looking at curriculum where her teacher really said, look, yes, everything on paper is in line, but something’s not connecting. We should have this evaluated. And so, you know, like I said, I think it’s the gift that her sister gave her and it’s allowed us as a school, you know,

not just her experience, but the experience of several other students in the school of similar and differing learning challenges that were able to see that were able to individualize that and able to make learning fun for all of the students, which really is the way education should be. You know, it shouldn’t be a slog. You shouldn’t fight to go to school. It should be exciting. It should be interesting. It should be engaging. Kids should want to be there and to be

with their friends. Tony, you called that a progressive school and you’ve given us a pretty good description. But when you say progressive school, what’s the two or three sentence summary of what that means to you? By progressive, we really strive to be looking at the latest research and methodology of what’s working not only for our school and our students, but other innovations in education around the world and trying those out on an ongoing basis.

We really aim to be fluid in our methodology and keeping what works, adapting or getting rid of what doesn’t work pretty quickly for our student population and to meet their interests. And really focusing on real world project based curriculum that allows for student agency and interest. So often drawing in current events, but also leaving lots of room within the structure of what we want students to learn to give them space for what students want to learn.

That’s a beautiful description. And how many students do you serve? And now that you’ve had a daughter graduate, any thoughts about adding grades to Up Academy? So funny you should ask. Yes, we have just subleased a larger building. We are planning to launch a middle school in fall of 2023 and we’ll go through grades 678. So my daughter will be one grade above that and won’t be there, but my son will benefit and partake in that program.

We are a micro school. So we have right now we have three small mixed age classes with a maximum of 10 students each. So we’ll have about 30 students this year in our lower school. And then our middle school will be designed to take an additional 30 to 40 students. So our goal as a micro school community, and as we’re looking to branch out and help others to open up academies, we’re really looking at keeping schools lower than 90 students. Understanding that when we look at

the sociology of community building, 90 people is about the maximum that you can make solid social connections with in any given point of time. And that’s a really important part of our school is having the multi-age and interconnectedness of the community. I appreciate what you’ve created and I’m fascinated by your commitment to sharing it with others. And Tanya, you’ve been doing that through professional learning experiences. You’re coaching people on starting new schools. You’ve

launched a podcast where you often give tips on school starting. Why the drive to share what you’re learning about school formation? I think there are several reasons. The first is at my heart, I’m still an entrepreneur and I love starting stuff and I get excited to help other people start stuff. And that’s super fun and energizing for me. And when I can mix that with the passion that other people have for starting schools that are going to serve

their learners or their children and their community, that’s even more exciting. You mentioned, I do have a course and when I talk about, one of the first things I talk about in the class to helping others start schools is I started mine for a very specific reason. And most people that are there are looking to start a school for a pretty specific reason. But the more schools that we can create and the more ideas that we can put into the world, the better we can serve our communities and our

students. And that just benefits all of us. My way works for a broad amount of people, but it’s not for everyone. And so we need those other ideas, we need those other schools, we need those other places. And we need other people trying the new things so that we can all learn from each other and grow together. So that’s a part of it. Part of it’s definitely that, you know, the school was started because I didn’t find what I was looking for in a public school or in any of the private

schools in the area. And I live in the Bay Area, there are a lot of private schools here. And schools for every type of learning challenge, learning disability, any diagnosis, or just looking for affluent private schools when we think about, you know, kind of boarding school type schools or language school, like they’re all here. But what I was looking for wasn’t here. And I know there are lots of other families and lots of other students out

there who aren’t getting really what they need from their school. And so if we can share our methodology, if we can share a story or a tidbit or even just one little thing that one educator can do differently in their classroom, that’s going to support a student, help them love learning, help them feel connected to their teacher in their school, and help them want to be a part of that community and want to go to school every day. Then that’s a small piece that I can do or, you know,

that our school and our methodology and our educators can contribute to helping the greater good of the next generation, if you will. And that’s really the greater purpose is how can we help everyone to serve an inclusive student body to the best of their ability. Tanya, I imagine your book is was authored in the in the same vein as an effort to serve other families thinking about school formation. I love the title of your book and your podcast,

Rebel Educator. Say a little bit about that. Yeah, I think like as we were talking a little before we started recording, I feel like people get into education either because they were straight students and they love it, or they were always in trouble and they hate it. And I’m kind of in the middle there where I was a straight A student. I didn’t love school, but I knew the school game. I was good at it. It was easy for me. But I want to do something different. And that idea of being

a rebel is how do you disrupt the status quo? How do you challenge the tradition of what’s always been done? And so I’m coming from the outside. Like I said, my background previously was in beer. I had kids. I joined education late in life. And of course, you know, when you have absolutely no background in education, launching a school is the perfect thing to do. But it also gives me a really interesting perspective as to use an overused term as a disruptor to education.

Because I am coming at it from how do we best serve students, not what are the policies and procedures? What have we always done? How can we just tweak what we’ve always done to be a little bit different? But really starting from the ground up, how do we support our students and create a student centered approach and create a methodology that’s going to work the best that it possibly can for the best number of students that it possibly can. And so the book was, yeah,

a piece of that and a sharing of stories of both my time in the classroom, educators in our school in the classroom, other educators in other schools, and their experiences with some different project based approaches, different ideas in the classroom. And really with the idea that, you know, if you if you go through and you read the different stories and look at the different projects, and maybe there’s one idea in there that as an educator or as a leader, that we can do

one thing differently in our classroom or in our school. And even that one thing, you know, if it’s one thing a year or one thing a month or one thing a quarter. So we’re not trying to completely reinvent the wheel and completely reinvent culture, but just slowly shifting like, hey, what if we add this one thing in the classroom? What does that do? How does that shift our student thinking? How does that shift our educator thinking? Was that fun? Was that not fun? Did that work?

Did that not work? Right. And just being able to start to experiment with those things. And for each of us as we as we change one little thing, that’s how we create change. And that’s how we move forward. We’re talking to Tanya Shekli. She’s the author of a new book Rebel Educator Create Classrooms Where Impact and Imagination Meet. Tanya, chapter four, really the heart of your book for me, it’s where you talk about engaging learners. That’s the progressive pedagogy that

we’ve been talking about, and it’s this commitment to inclusion. And so I love that chapter in the way that you described engagement for all. Is that really what you’re trying to do at Upacademy? Absolutely. I mean, as I mentioned, it was designed initially for my daughter who had cerebral palsy. And so much of what we see now is still separation of students with IEPs into special day classes or into special pull out groups. And really, when we create

universal accommodations within the classroom and provide sometimes even just small amounts of additional support, all of those students can thrive together in an environment. And we find that and lots of research has shown that when we do that, and when we include everybody together, everyone learns more and everyone learns better. And there’s a story that I like to share with a she’s a friend of mine, she’s currently on our board of directors, but our first day of

kindergarten, Eliza’s first day of kindergarten, and Eliza was walking in, I would hold on to her shoulders and she could support her weight and take steps, but she needed support. And so it was clear she had significant disabilities. My friend Susan, her daughter was already reading, already doing math, coming into kindergarten advanced, she was excited to see her progress and to see how well she did in school. And she took one look at my daughter and just went, Oh, no, there’s a child

with disabilities in my daughter’s class, she’s going to be distracting, she’s going to hold everybody back, the rate of learning is going to slow. And there’s, you know, all of these ideas that we have when we see others with disabilities. And frankly, I mean, before I had my daughter, I would have looked at it probably the same way. You know, growing up special education was a dark corner in the school in a place where we just didn’t go. Everything was separate. And so much now is still

separate. But what happened in the classroom was, our kids became best friends. They discovered that they both liked soccer, they both liked shopkins, they both liked to play dress up. They both like the same books. And, you know, Eliza was reading by the middle of kindergarten, they were in the same math group together. And so it just became this, this understanding and definitely the friendship between the two girls, but also with their families that when we do include all the students, not only

do the students with disabilities thrive, because now they’re being given expectations that all students have. But all of the students who are quote unquote, typical students also thrive because they’re learning all of these different ways to work with people who are different than them, to communicate in different ways, to understand, to have patience, to have empathy, and all, you know, all of these and it works both ways, right? The neurodiverse students are learning the same

things about their neurotypical peers, like, how do I communicate with this person who doesn’t think like me? But we see this wonderful melding of inclusion. And when we can also create small class sizes, where an educator can really have the opportunity to build strong relationships with every student, and help to build those interpersonal relationships, both between the students and between the educator and the student, we really see this magical sphere of learning happening.

How else to describe it? In chapter seven, you talk about the difference between a good student and a good learner. What is the difference? When my daughter first started public school, they did parent education training. And one of the parent education training activities, they had someone come up and they had them give all the labels of a good student. He sits quietly, raises his hand to ask questions. He, you know, doesn’t leave the room to go to the bathroom

unless he’s been given permission. He’s not disruptive. He helps his peers, you know, all of these things that we think of when you picture, I’m picturing Charlie Brown’s school, right? All the students are in rows at their desks and they’re listening to their teacher. And so when we think of good students, that’s often what we think of. But what we really need as a society and as a planet is good learners. And these are the people who are curious, who have a burning desire to know

the answer to a question. And how can we as educators and facilitators of learning really help our students to find the paths to the answers to the questions that they seek? And so how, how can we help them to do research? How can we ask them help them to ask the right questions? How can we help them to find the authority figures or the thought leaders or the experts in the field so that they can really ask those questions and get interesting and thought provoking and in-depth

answers? So versus a good student who is able to regurgitate what a teacher said on a multiple choice test, a good learner has taken this question and explored it in different facets and is able to come up with an opinion of what they believe an answer or a solution might be. Just a couple more quick questions, Tanya. Were there one or two people on this journey and particularly as you put this book together, as you developed your school that were really important

to you and helping to shape your views as a learning leader? Well, you know, as a person and family, none of it would be possible without the support of my husband and my family for sure. As, you know, as an educator, my father-in-law has been instrumental in sharing his life’s work and research with me and with us as a member of our board and is helping us to create the education that we have. My board member, yes, yes, Barry. My board member, Ann Marie Roberts,

Roberts has been with me from the beginning, helped us to write out our articles of incorporation and get our 501c3 status and really launch the school. She also develops a lot of our social-emotional curriculum, trains all of our educators. She’s instrumental in creating the methodology and the culture of what we’ve created at the school. And I would also mention Marina Vasserman, a good friend locally who has also started a school and is about four years ahead of me

in her journey of school leadership. And so having someone locally who can be seen and used as a mentor and a friend for those times when I just need a question answered about running a school specifically or I need to vent about something that’s happened that, you know, it’s just something that other, it’s always good for us to have other people who do the things that we do and to have that that belonging and that connection. And she has been that person for me both in school development

and in personal development as a school leader. All things considered, would you now recommend to other people to consider starting a new school and if so, give us one or two tips for people thinking about starting a school? That’s a loaded question coming out of a pandemic. But absolutely, I mean, it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s all encompassing because it’s not

just developing curriculum and it’s not just working with students and it’s not just, you know, talking with families, but it’s doing all of those things and sharing all of the, all of the wins and all of the successes of everyone involved, but also having to have all of the difficult conversations as those challenges come up and arise. It’s extraordinarily rewarding. I’m excited to go to work every day. But I can’t tell anyone that it’s easy.

They want to learn more about opening a new school. Give us a couple tips. Sure. So I think, you know, there’s a few things, you know, looking around and having a good familiarity of the schools that are around. How, what do you want to create that’s new and different from what’s already there? You know, there’s, I kind of put a port into two buckets. There’s the business aspect of, you know, the financing of the school, the creating the school, the business licenses, the

for-profit versus nonprofit, the corporation structure, all of those pieces. And then there’s the education piece. You know, who are you going to be? Who do you want to serve? What is your pedagogy? What is your methodology? And so having an outline and overview of those two pieces, you know, how are we going to structure how am I going to afford this? Is this a logistically feasible thing to do? And how am I different? Who can I serve? What’s the greater good that I can

serve? And creating those pieces. And then starting to move forward from there. Another thing people considering starting a school could do is read Tanya’s new book. It’s called Rebel Educator, Create Classrooms, Where Impact and Imagination Meet. Tanya, thanks for your life’s work. Thanks for Upacademy and for this new book and for joining us on the Getting Smart podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Tom. Thanks to our producer, Mason Pasha and the

whole Getting Smart team that make this podcast possible. Till we see you next week, keep leading, keep learning and keep innovating for equity.