Personalized Learning

Interview with Maria Anaya, Director of Curriculum & Instruction at Summit Learning

What is your role at Summit Learning?

I am the Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Summit Learning. That means a lot of things - essentially I complete about 30% personal development and curriculum instruction teams. Our entire team is charged with developing and improving the curriculum that our 11 public schools use as well as our Summit Learning community use in the classroom. Then the PD team focuses on building out the professional development that our teachers and school leaders get trained on in order to implement Summit Learning.

What were you doing before? 

I’ve been at Summit for almost 2 years now; I’ve been in this specific role for almost a year now. When I first joined Summit I joined as the Director of Adult Learning for product development, so more focused on the product-specific role. Prior to Summit, I worked at Pearson Education, leading product strategy and higher education.

I’d like to hear about your own educational experience - how did you end up where you are now? 

I went to public schools my entire K-12 life. I grew up in East Palo Alto, California but went to school in Redwood City. My elementary school, middle school, and high school were all about a couple mile radius from each other. I would say that my schools at the time were not the most academically rigorous and I definitely realized this when I got to college. However, I have to say that they had some pretty amazing teachers who believed in me and pushed me to be my very best. As I mentioned my high school wasn't the most academically rigorous but I did take all of the A.P. courses and everything I could in order to get to college. I was actually the first person to be accepted to Stanford from my high school in over 10 years, so that was a huge accomplishment both for myself and for the school itself. Then I went on to Stanford for my undergrad where I studied chemical engineering, very different from what I’m doing now.  Eventually, I went to grad school at the Harvard School of Education where I got my Masters in Technology, Innovation and Education - that for me was sort of a launching point of my career in edtech. 
But specifically what I think transitioned me into the field of education was this recognition of how much teachers - quality teachers - and education really helped me reach all my personal goals and ambitions. I realize that there were so many inequities within education, some of which I experienced myself and so there was this desire to want to fix those and ensure that every single child has an opportunity for an excellent education.

Can you talk about that geographic area and what it meant to be the first person from your school to get into Stanford?

When my family first moved to East Palo Alto in the early 90s it had the highest homicide rate in the country. It's definitely gotten a lot better, it’s changed. Actually, it’s very interesting to think about how it’s changed over the course of the last 15 years, a lot of that being because of all the tech companies: Facebook and whatnot that have moved to the area. But at the time that I was there growing up, it just was not the safest, best place to be. It was a very under-resourced area. For a long time, there was actually no high school in East Palo Alto. There was definitely a lot of tension within the area; it didn’t have a grocery store, which is hard to believe but that’s sort of how it was in the 90s. What’s really crazy about its location is that right across the bridge is Palo Alto, and so you have this extreme sort of difference between East Palo Alto - primarily low-income families, people of color - and then you cross the bridge and you have some of the wealthiest people in the bay area. So it’s a huge divide, all within literally a couple of miles from each other.

What’s East Palo Alto like now and where is Summit Learning located?

East Palo Alto now has changed a lot; it’s crazy I actually just was out there about a week ago and Amazon now has an office in East Palo Alto, which I was shocked to see. There’s a large IKEA, there's some grocery stores now, there are some markets, a lot of business there. Facebook is literally down the street and so, as the result of that, there’s been a lot of development and a lot of younger professionals moving to the area. While I do recognize that there’s a lot of positive outcomes to that, it’s also really sad to see a lot of the families that have grown up there be pushed out of the area.

And then to your second question, of Summit Learning, so our home office is actually based in Redwood Shore. However, we run 11 schools across the bay area and in Washington state and through Summit Learning we actually are spreading our model personalized learning across the country. Currently, we have about a little bit over 320 schools implementing our model across the country.

What’s a typical profile of a school that adopts this model?

We don’t have a typical profile. What’s really nice is that our vision is really to help different schools adopt this model, but there would be your typical public school of the district, a charter school for charter management organization, a private school. We partner with all sorts of schools. I think that the one requirement that we have is sort of this desire to want to rethink and re-design, to ensure that we are actually meeting the diverse needs of students across the country.

Does Summit Learning work with all k-12 levels?

Currently, we are working with 5th-12th grade, although we are expanding to 4th grade next year. Our own schools are middle schools and high schools. However there's such a demand to bring personalized learning to all levels in the area, that we last year launched fifth grade, and then this year we'll be partnering with fourth grade as well.

I imagine that there were a couple key people who really supported your ambition, your intellectual development. Can you share a little bit about your 3 greatest teachers or mentors while you were growing up?

I'll start with my kindergarten teacher. When I think about her she was sort of my introduction to this thing called school, and she made me fall in love with school because she made it a place where I could enjoy myself and learn so much. When I think back to her she was so warm, welcoming and just created the most inclusive and supportive environment. So I could say that she sparked my curiosity in learning and encouraged me no matter what. I remember she had this little store in her class and I think that we would like to sell or giveaway stickers with stamps or something like that, but I just loved running it and helping with everything that happened within the store. And so she really, I think introduced me to school with this just amazing way. So I'm definitely very grateful that that was my very first impressions of school. 

In high school, I would say that Miss Slater was one of the really great teachers and mentors. She was my high school French teacher, so I had her for four years and she also had my sister years before. I think there was also this connection of - you know my sibling, you know, my family. So I would say she was one of my greatest teachers, not only because she supported me in class and cause I learned French and whatnot. But for me, it was more important that she supported me outside of class. No matter what happened I could go to her and talk to her and she was just, she saw me as a whole person. She’s was very compassionate, very funny, had a great sense of humor and she just knew what to give me when I needed it, whether that was, you know sometimes facing class or just letting me step away or pushing me even to do things outside of my comfort zone.

When senior year came around, I remember her talking to me intensively about the schools that I would be applying to; she wrote so many recommendations and she pushed me to consider schools that I hadn't even considered. In fact, she even arranged for me to travel to the East Coast to visit a couple of schools, and I didn’t have to worry about the cost or organizing anything, so she was just one of my biggest advocates and I’m forever grateful to her. 

I'm going to break away a little bit of your question, and actually talk about professors in college. I think back a lot to Professor Jerry Fuller, and what stands out with him is that he didn’t let me give up. He truly believed in me. I remember I had failed my first chemical engineering exam and I was just totally devastated; I was ready to quit. Because I just felt like I didn't have it in me, I was not cut out to be a chemical engineer. But he pulled me aside and made me understand that I just needed some extra support putting together all the pieces of information that I had already learned in previous courses. And so he convinced me to stick it out and he worked with me for the rest of the quarter on a one-on-one basis outside the class. I remember I would go to his office once or twice a week and he would help me make sense of the week’s work and then sit me down to work the problem sets. I just couldn’t believe that there was this like amazing, very renowned scholar and professor who is willing to sit down with me for that much time and help me make sense of things. I remember him telling me a couple different times that “That’s what we’re here for, we are here to help you learn, we are here to help you achieve whatever you want to  achieve.” So he refused to let me give up and he supported me along the way and I ended up doing really well in his course and I ended up sticking with chemical engineering. I'm just forever grateful to that as well. 

In your opinion, what is the purpose of education?

I would say that the purpose of education is to prepare young people to be lifelong learners and to be able to discover and create a path to fulfill their life's purpose, whatever that may be for each individual student.

Are schools adequately doing that now? What does that look like? 

I don’t think that schools are adequately supporting students and fulfilling this purpose of education because our current systems do not allow for the personalization that students need for their own personal selves, for their local communities, for their context, and for where they are in their social-emotional learning.  There isn’t enough personalization to their actual context and there isn’t enough development of the actual transferable skills such as such as cognitive skills, that are actually the skills that students will need to be able to pull on in order to be successful. 

I do have hope for a future where schools are able to support that kind of learning and that sort of goes back to why I am working at Summit Learning. What I hope that this looks like in five years is that it’s more personalized. I don’t think we are doing a good enough job at ensuring that every single child has the learning experiences that they need to thrive. There needs to be more of a focus on the whole child and I think we’re starting to see a lot more of this. I think as more schools begin to implement innovative school models or personalized learning, I think we’ll have more positive outcomes that will push more people to do such things. My hope, probably selfishly because I’m working with Summit Learning and personalized learning, is that we will have schools that are focused more on developing those cognitive skills that are helping students develop habits for success and discover their purpose in life and how to get there. It's not about mastering these great pieces of content knowledge that I feel when I went to school was like - I’m gonna learn my multiplication tables, I’m gonna learn this vocabulary words, I’m gonna learn this very strict way of writing an essay. This day and age, when knowledge is so easily accessible, we have Google and we have everything at an arm’s length, it’s more about what do you do with this knowledge, how do we apply it to a different context, how do you communicate effectively, how do you work on teams, how do you make and articulate an argument, and how do you make the hypotheses experiment to test that. I think those are the types of skills that we need to be developing more in students. I think we are slowly starting to see that as more people focus on the social-emotional learning aspect of education. My hope is that over time all schools will be personalized learning environments.

What does personalized learning look like in the classroom?

I know there are so many different definitions for personalized learning. I’m going to use the ones we envision at Summit Learning. Our model really focuses on four pillars, so four things that we are building out with students. 

The first one is the cognitive skills - those are the essential and transferable life skills that students need to be successful, and those come through life, through project-based learning. Students work on projects that span 4-6 weeks that are discipline specific but very authentic to the discipline. These are often times done in groups so they get formative feedback from their teachers and their peers that are assessing them on cognitive skills; so not so much your ABCD and your traditional way of grading, but more on how are you developing this skill over time. 

Then the second pillar is content knowledge - and so while I just finished saying that, you know, content knowledge is so easily accessible, it’s still an important aspect of education. For us, it’s understanding - having students understand and know how to apply foundational content knowledge. What this looks like for us at Summit Learning is it’s confidence based progression, so recognizing the students come in at different levels, with different background knowledge, with different prior experiences. Maybe, you know,  you'll come to your life science class and you’ve already mastered everything about mitosis or meiosis so you can easily demonstrate mastery and move on to the things that you need to focus on. It's this idea that different students are moving at different paces and also self-directing their learning. I think for us it’s providing students with all the resources but then also focusing on the self-direction of learning because that’s a skill that's actually going to matter when they get out into the real world.

The third pillar is habits to success - we focus on building outlines, mindsets, behaviors to support wellbeing. These are mindsets like brilliancy and academic tenacity. These are behaviors that will support a student in being able to be successful later on in life and a lot of these habits are actually developed through one-on-one mentoring. A part of our model is that students have mentors that have these weekly, up to daily, conversations with students, who really check in and see how they are doing and progressing on their own goals. I think back to your first question Nati, about the teachers, and often times what makes a difference in the child’s life is that connection with a mentor or being able to talk through their goals and where they are hoping to get and get that sort of direction that sometimes doesn’t happen elsewhere.

And the fourth pillar for us is a sense of purpose - this is helping students develop self-awareness and pursuits of interest and goals. This is the one that we are trying to figure out about how best to allow students to demonstrate this, but currently, this happens through these one-on-one mentoring conversations that students have. I know I didn't answer your question fully just because a day at Summit Learning looks very different depending on what aspect of the learning model you happen to walk into. It may be project-based learning, it might be students working on content knowledge at their own pace, they might be having a one-on-one conversation with their mentor to figure out what are their goals for the week, how they achieve them, or how do they adjust their plans so they do achieve their goals. I guess that the theme in this is that this isn’t your standard day. I feel like there’s no longer the day when you walk in and you expect to see rows of students, the teacher at the front doing, you know, talking at the students. You would always expect to see that in the classroom; now it’s like you walk in and who knows what you’ll find. It may seem like chaos but students may be working on something, the teacher might be supporting a small intervention; it looks very different now but the point is that every single student is getting what they need to meet them at that point in time.

If you could change one thing right now about our education system, what would you change?

I would make it more equitable. I would allow for success to happen for all students and that students would have access to learning experiences that are best suited for them specifically. I think that now there’s a lot of assumptions or just forcing these cookie-cutter ways of doing things onto students, but not adapting to their communities, to their backgrounds, to their individual needs.  would make it so that local communities could create their own systems that work best for them and that students would have access to whatever learning experiences are best suited to help them pursue their goals. I mean right now there’s just so much inequity in terms of, you know, amount of dollars a school district receives or even access to internet or technology, quality teachers. It varies so much from state to state or city to city that, I just, I wish I could change it so that everyone has a menu of - here's all the learning experiences and things you have, great, you can choose what best fits your needs. 

How does technology fit into this goal of personalized learning?

Great question. Technology is definitely a component of how we are able to effectively implement this model of teaching and learning. We’ve been fortunate enough to partner with the Chan Zuckerberg  Initiative. We first partnered with Facebook and so they provided us with a team of engineers and designers and researchers to help bring this model of teaching and learning to live within a tool. Now that work has transitioned over to the CDI and so together we’ve been building out a platform that students and teachers use to implement Summit Learning. All the curriculum is found online, all the projects, all the confidence based progression content - it’s all found online. Every single pillar that I talked about earlier is supported through the platform. The idea is that this makes it easier for both the student and the teacher to be able to communicate with one another and to keep track of progress and monitoring that the intended outcomes are being achieved. This is a constantly developing platform and for me, going to Harvard and focusing on technology and education, was specifically wanting to look at how we best utilize technology to ensure that learners are getting access to quality learning experiences. And even more so, how do we then evaluate and ensure that these technologies are actually meeting the intended outcome? That was the reason I went into this program and, quite honestly, I believe that we've only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible with technology and education. I would say for us at Summit Learning, yes the platform is a key piece to our model, but it's sort of, it’s in the background because as I mentioned the 4 pillars and in and of themselves - it’s a different approach to learning and teaching. Technology is a tool to help make this easier for teachers and students.

What projects are you working on outside of Summit?

I’ve got so many passions, Nati. I spend a lot of time dancing; I’ve been doing Mexican folkloric for over 15 years so I do performances all around the bay. I think arts and education are extremely important. I often times do performances at the elementary schools, at middle schools, to really ensure that students are getting access to the arts. Other than dance I’ve also been trying to pursue some of my own ideas with a really good friend of mine. We are trying to find some way to merge two of our loves into some ed-tech idea - the two ideas being technology and the Montessori. I think in a lot of ways the Montessori approach to education as it right. We are trying to see how we might blend the two ideas in a sort of innovative way to make Montessori more accessible to anyone. Right now a lot of those schools are extremely expensive and not accessible to some of your lower income families. Even the knowledge of Montessori schools is not that common. 

 Where can people find you?

You can find me on LinkedIn - Maria Anaya. I am always eager to talk with folks who are passionate about education, passionate about making a difference in children’s lives, whether that be social-emotional learning or technology specifically. And if you want to chat about some ed tech ideas, I can definitely talk your ear off about that, definitely feel free to reach out to me.

Maria Anaya

Summit Learning

Summit Public Schools

 

Music: www.bensound.com