A key reason for increasing accessibility to public microschools is to provide students with more flexible and personalized learning environments. The more these lean away from traditional approaches in favor of more “21st-century” ones, the more likely they will prepare learners for an uncertain future. Given this, your school’s academic model—including curriculum, instruction, and assessment—is critically important. 

Guiding Questions

• What do we want teaching and learning to look like?
  • What instructional approaches best serve the needs of my student population, my school’s vision, and my staffing model? 
• What materials must we create or purchase to meet our learners’ needs? This includes, but is not limited to, learners with special needs or English Language Learners.
  • What state funding or philanthropy exists to support our vision?
• What curricular materials are available for free through my system and beyond?
  • To what degree do they align with my school vision and state/system requirements?
• What are my state and system’s instructional, curricular, and/or assessment requirements?
  • What, if any, waivers or exceptions exist?

Action Steps

Determine non-negotiables for curriculum, instruction, assessment, and exemptions. Research your state’s minimum expectations (including mandating testing or vendors), which vary from state to state. Alongside your understanding of exemptions and waivers, this information will establish guardrails around your planning.

Seek free programs and materials that align with system expectations and your school’s vision. This will enable you to maximize your budget and your time. Many microschool providers value online learning platforms; you may want to explore whether your school system can provide you with free access to one or more.

Identify additional materials to support your learners and your vision. Create new materials, leverage free materials from vetted sources, research state-funded programs, or find the funding to purchase something new (either through your existing budget or through fundraising or philanthropy). Be sure to consider the unique needs of your student population.

Determine instructional approaches or models. Ensure that these take into account your student population, your school’s vision, and your available staffing capacity. Instructional approaches and models encompass the types of experiences learners will have that support their growth and learning, bringing value to students in and of themselves.

Seek inspiration. You don’t need to start from scratch, and there are existing resources to draw inspiration and ideas from, including the Innovative Models Exchange.

Plan your approach to assessment, progress monitoring, and feedback. Your students will likely have to take mandated state assessments. Especially if your instructional approach is deeply innovative, you must ensure learners are prepared to engage with these assessments. You will also have to plan how to assess students, monitor their progress, and share feedback along the way. There are many innovative ways that learners can demonstrate their learning and track their own progress, which you will likely want to consider.

Tips and Examples

• Consider digital resources: Digital resources offer a range of benefits that can enhance the effectiveness and flexibility of microschool environments. Here are some key advantages:
• Personalization: Learners can work on different standards and topics at their own pace, catering to individual learning needs and speeds.
• Support for independent work: Provides teachers flexibility during class time, enabling them to engage in more focused, one-on-one support with learners who need it.
• Access to diverse curricula: Offers engaging and standards-aligned curricula in areas outside the teacher’s certification or expertise, enriching the learning experience.
• Space efficiency: Ideal for microschools that operate in borrowed or compact spaces, as they do not require physical storage.
• Flexibility for families: Supports hybrid learning models, accommodating the needs of families who require greater scheduling flexibility.
• Consider how to utilize any required materials that do not align with your learning vision. Many schools are required to use system-approved materials, but the way they are used can vary. If the materials don’t suit your school’s primary focus, consider using them to build projects or as supplements, rather than as your core approach.
• Consider leveraging partnerships to enhance your curriculum. For example, you can partner with a university or business to provide college or career-embedded offerings. This may impact how you design your schedule to enable learners to participate in “off-campus” learning.
• Put students in the driver’s seat of their own learning. This is the best way to promote active self-direction, a 21st-century skill that will benefit learners for the rest of their lives. A public microschool is the ideal setting for this because its small cohort size will prevent learners from falling through the cracks.
• Communicate with families and caregivers. Especially if your approach is remarkably different from what learners have experienced before, it will be essential to be transparent and communicative about it. You should provide ways to understand innovative approaches, especially those related to learner progress. For example, if caregivers are accustomed to traditional grades but are tracking competencies, you may need to find ways to translate your approach to a schema they can understand. You may want to use some assessments or materials that are more familiar to families so that, however innovative you are, you have a way to communicate their child’s progress.

Opportunity and Access

A helpful way to factor opportunity and access into your planning is to ensure that your academic model is designed to meet the needs of all learners. You can explore Transcend’s Leaps for 21st-Century Learning, Getting Smart’s Design Principles, and Learner-Centered Collaborative’s Learning Model as inspiration for how to think about the shifts you want to make in teaching and learning. All of these models describe the types of learning experiences that we believe prepare all young people to thrive in and transform the world. We strongly recommend exploring these resources and using them as a foundation for your school design.