Read the full transcript of Episode 33 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features a discussion about a school model built around student agency for young learners. Host Tim Fish speaks with educational entrepreneur Orly Friedman about her successful journey as the founder of Red Bridge School, an innovative educational setting for young learners that centers around student agency and autonomy.
Tim Fish: One of my favorite thought exercises when exploring the future of schools is to wonder: What would I create if I were part of a small team designing a new school completely from scratch? What would our team put at the center of the design? What would our mission statement be, and how would we live into it every day? What trade-offs would we be willing to make? How would our school look like existing schools, and how would it be completely different?
On today’s episode we’re talking to an educational entrepreneur who created a school from nothing and opened it in September 2020. She put her commitment to agency at the center of everything. And as you're listening today, consider what aspects of your mission are being lived every day in your school, and what aspects could be lived out even more? Enjoy this next episode of New View EDU.
Orly Friedman is the founder and head of school at Red Bridge, an innovative demonstration school in San Francisco, California. Orly, I am so excited to have you here today. Welcome to New View EDU.
Orly Friedman: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Tim Fish: So let's start with your journey. How did you end up founding Red Bridge? What was the, what was the journey that got you to start your own school?
Orly Friedman: It actually started when I was in fifth grade. My family had taken a trip to Japan, and this was before the days of iPads, and I needed something to do on the long flight home. So I went to, you know, the airport gift store, and there was this book called Toto Chan.
It was pretty much the only book in English at my reading level. And so I took that with me on the plane. And Toto Chan is the story of a young girl who has a big personality and is a bit of a misfit in the schools that she attends, and keeps getting kicked out, until finally her mother finds this school run by this eccentric principal in a railway car. And she just loves it there. And this principal welcomes kids of all backgrounds and really makes school this magical place. And this is actually a true story. The little girl grew up to be a famous news anchor in Japan. And when I read this, I just felt like, wow, if I can do that for kids one day, if I can create this school that they love coming to, that's something really worth doing.
But I kind of figured I would do it when I was an old lady. So fast forward to college, and I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do after college, and as many people do, I ended up joining Teach for America, because I figured I had this long-term vision of one day opening a school, so I better get some teaching experience. And I ended up teaching in DC Public Schools. I did my two years with Teach for America and I continued teaching for five years in DCPS. I taught kindergarten, second, and third grade, but I held onto this dream of one day opening a school of my own.
So after five years in the classroom, I actually went to business school, which isn't everyone's natural choice when you want to open a school. But I actually thought that it made a lot of sense for me as the next step in my journey, because I wanted the management and leadership training to support me in launching a school. And I also just wanted to take some time to reflect on what the school I wanted to open would look like.
In particular, I wanted to come to the Bay Area to be around some of the innovation happening in the classrooms in this region. And so that's what I did, and I put together my ideas for what the school I wanted to open would look like while I was out here. And I was particularly interested in designing a school that responded to the ways that technology has changed the way we work and live.
And in the process of putting those ideas together, I just shared them with whoever would listen and got feedback and had many conversations. And one of those conversations led to an introduction to Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy. And it turned out he had a five-year-old son and was looking to open a school of his own, a brick and mortar school. And our ideas were similar as to what that school would look like. And so I ended up joining the founding team of the Khan Lab School in Mountain View, and really was able to have a blank slate to test out different ideas of what school could look like there. And it was there that I started being very interested in this idea of student agency and, and that ended up being the founding idea behind Red Bridge.
So after four years with the Khan Lab School, I left and took a couple of years to really research and dive deep into this concept of human agency and then think about what that would look like in a school setting, and used that design then to open Red Bridge. And Red Bridge launched on September 1st, 2020.
Tim Fish: What a great time to launch a school!
Orly Friedman: Exactly, exactly. You know, I quit my job in 2018 and I thought, you know, how long will it take to launch a school of my own? And I thought two years sounded right. And I also loved 2020. I thought Vision 2020, that sounds so nice. It'll be perfect. And little did we know what 2020 had in store for us.
Tim Fish: Wow. So you launched the school, you opened it in September, 2020. Did you literally open it in that, at that time? Like how did that all work?
Orly Friedman: We did. So we were going through our first admission season, 2019 to 2020, and we sent out our admissions offers exactly the week of lockdown, shelter in place. And so it gave everyone just enough time to worry about the future, to not want to sign their kids up for a brand new school.
We told families, you know, if we have one student in September, we will open school with that one student. We are very committed to opening September 1st, 2020. And for a while we did just have one student. And then the summer came along and people were sort of figuring out what, for a lot of them, kindergarten was going to look like for their children. And many people really did not want to send their child to Zoom kindergarten. And because we were a new school and so small, we were able to open for in-person instruction, and we actually ended up being the first school in San Francisco to get the waiver to open for in-person instruction. And so we did open September 1st, 2020 and I don't know if you remember, but this was also the time when there were really bad wildfires in California, and there was this day when the sun just didn't come out because of how bad the smoke was. And we, for a while, thought we would just do outdoor school, but then because of the wildfires we had to pivot again.
So we launched our first year with 12 students in the equivalent of kindergarten through second grade. Last year we grew to 21 students, and this is our third year. And we now have 30 students between the equivalent of kindergarten through fourth grade. But as you know, we don't group students by grade level.
Tim Fish: That's one of the parts about Red Bridge that I find so fascinating. So, you know, your mission statement,and I love your notion of agency. You know, we've now done 30 episodes of New View EDU, and agency is the one concept that has come up in almost every single episode in one way or another.
It's a, it's a center point of what I think of as the purpose of school, and I think you and I are very aligned on that. And so your mission statement, at Red Bridge, is to develop a sense of agency in every child as a foundation for academic and life success. And when I read it, I was moved and inspired by it, as I am by many different mission statements. And in fact, it doesn't sound that different from what you might see in a mission statement from a lot of different independent schools.
But then you and I had a conversation and started talking about the way you actually live that on a daily basis at Red Bridge.
Orly Friedman: Whenever I tell people our mission statement, I always follow it up with our definition of agency, because agency is such a buzzword and we have a very particular definition of what it means to us, and we use that to define everything we do. So our mission of agency is the ability to set meaningful goals and have the will and skill to achieve them.
And that definition comes from the research of Stanford professor Albert Bandura, who has since passed away. He studied human agency and came up with these four characteristics of human agency generally. And after reading his writing, I realized that you could really apply that to a school setting. And so that's where our definition comes from.
And so this idea of agency being the ability to set meaningful goals and have the will and skill to achieve them is what we use to guide all of our practices. So if you think about the traditional structures of school, the way we group students, the way they're graded, the role of the teacher, all of those are really designed to reward compliance. We don't talk about that design principle very often, but if you're in a traditional setting, everything really encourages compliance. In our model at Red Bridge, what we've done is we've taken those structures of school and we've redesigned them to support students in developing agency. And so our teachers, the way we group students, the way we grade students, is all about giving them more ownership over the learning experience, so that they're able to set goals for themself, and build the skills to achieve those goals, as well as the work habits and reflection practices. And so each of those structures of school has been redesigned to do that.
Tim Fish: One of the things I love about Red Bridge from the way you just described it, is that you have a mission to develop a sense of agency in every child as a foundation for academic life success, and you now are using that mission to design every element of school, right? It's not just a nice to have, it's not just a lovely aspirational statement.
In fact, it is the thing you use to hold a, you hold it up to everything you do about how you organize students, how the day runs, how the year runs, how you assess students. Everything is held up against that. And on your website you have some definitely different things you do. You are highly differentiated as a school for very young children, all the way up through fourth grade at this time.
And so first of all, tell me about this idea of no grade levels, what you call, you've invented something. First time I've ever heard about it, something called autonomy levels. And you use autonomy levels to group students, as opposed to age. Tell me more about that.
Orly Friedman: Sure. So if you think about traditional grade levels, they are very passive for the student. So you sit in a seat for 180 days and you move on to the next grade level when you show up in September and there's basically nothing you have to do to make that happen, other than have good attendance. It doesn't even really matter if you've learned everything you need to learn, you move on to the next grade, you can move on with a D. Very few students are retained. It really is more about obedience and being present. And so if you want to flip that and turn it into a system that supports agency, then you need to put the promotion process in the hands of the students.
But before we get to the promotion process, just to describe a little bit about autonomy levels, instead of grouping students by age or their academic ability, we group students based on their work habits. And so we have eight categories of work habits that include things like time management, focus, initiative, collaboration, self-knowledge, and others.
In each autonomy level, we have certain sub skills within those work habit categories that students need to demonstrate consistently in order to move to the next autonomy level. So it's up to the students to recognize when they are consistently demonstrating those work habits and approach their teacher and let them know that they think they're ready to move on to the next autonomy level.
We have two points in the school year where students can go through that promotion process. And sometimes students try and are not successful, and other times students don't advocate for themselves when we think they might be ready. But that's fine either way, because what we've done with autonomy levels is we've decoupled them from academics.
So in a traditional setting, if you're in fourth grade, you learn fourth grade content, you might be in an advanced fourth grade reading group or a remedial fourth grade reading group, but the content is really dictated by your grade level. With autonomy levels, academics are completely separate. So we group students for academics based on their ability in each subject area, and we assess that multiple times during the year so students can be regrouped as needed. So your autonomy level doesn't dictate what academic pace you're moving at, which means that if a student isn't quite ready to move to the next autonomy level, they can still get the academics at the level that is right for them.
Tim Fish: I love that. So you're, so basically you could have a student who has very high ability to think at an abstract level mathematically, and could be doing complicated advanced mathematics from a sort of traditional age-based assessment, who also maybe struggles with some executive function planning, self-management, et cetera. And so that student might be in a lower autonomy level and doing significantly advanced mathematics.
Orly Friedman: That's exactly right.
Tim Fish: And you could have it the other way around. You could have a student who has a lot of self-management skills, who also struggles with some mathematical concepts, might have some reading, may need some extra time with reading, maybe receiving like OG—Orton Gillingham support with reading, et cetera. But has a lot of self-motivation, so who might be in an older quote unquote now, older is not even the right term. A higher level of autonomy, a higher autonomy level, and also a different academic level. That’s a fascinating concept because right now the only thing that dictates sort of what quote unquote autonomy level you're sort of in, or your mathematics level generally is your age. And what you're doing, you're saying, you're saying, age just doesn't matter in this whole sort of journey through the experience. Correct?
Orly Friedman: Yeah. And students don't get too off. As we've created our work habits curriculum, which define the autonomy levels, we created it with developmental milestones in mind. So for time management, for example, we know that five year olds cannot conceive of what a month feels like, so for managing their time, we keep it to an hour a day. We're keeping it within a day. In autonomy level two, when we talk about managing their time, they might be looking at a week at a time in terms of making schedules. In autonomy level three, they might be looking at a couple weeks at a time, and so we build that out along with what we know of child development.
So there is this progression. So we don't have strict age cutoffs for each autonomy level, but students do tend to cluster around, I would say, a two to three year age span in each autonomy level. So our autonomy level one students are generally five to seven years old. Level two is generally six to nine years old. Level three is generally seven to 10 years old and so forth.
Tim Fish: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have, you'll have some sort of flex, movement within that. So now I want to think a little bit about what we classically think of as a teacher, right? So if you're not teaching second grade in the same way, you've got students in your space that are of the same autonomy level, but at different, certainly different places in terms of their academic skills.
What is the role of a teacher? How do you conceive of “teacher?” What does a teacher do in this agency rich model as well? How might it be different?
Orly Friedman: So just as we've decoupled academics and work habits or executive function skills from the grouping system, we've also disaggregated the role of the teacher. And so we have, at this moment, two kinds of teachers on our team. We have learning guides, and then we have content specialists. And so the learning guides run each autonomy level. And the nice thing about breaking that role apart is that we can narrow the job description of each type of teacher, and we can also recruit more effectively for people that are particularly skilled in different areas.
In a traditional setting, we ask teachers to be good at so many things. They have to be great mentors and coaches, and build good and strong relationships with students. They also have to be content experts. And if you teach elementary school, most likely you have to be an expert in math, science, reading, writing, more. You also have to be really good at data analysis and giving assessments to figure out how your students are doing. And we also want teachers to be great project designers. And those four skill sets are totally different. And so when we can narrow the job description and hire specifically for particular traits, instead of all of those in one person, I think that we're more likely to find people that really fit the roles that we're looking for, and also provide a more satisfying job for teachers to do.
And so our learning guide role is really on the coaching and mentoring front. The learning guides are the ones that lead our morning meeting and our closing meeting. They teach Character Habits, which is our social emotional curriculum, and they teach our work habits explicitly as well. And for all of our students in autonomy level two and up, the learning guides meet with every student for 30 minutes, one-on-one, each week. So every student is known deeply by a teacher. And during those 30 minute one-on-one check-ins, the learning guide is talking with the student about anything that's on their mind.
It could be their friendships at school. It could be how they're progressing in those work habits and strategies they might need to get their work done more effectively. It might be an academic issue that's coming up. It might be coaching a student on how to talk to one of their content specialists about getting extra support in an area. You know, it's really up to the student and what's on their mind. And so the learning guide role is this very special role that is all about the relationship between teacher and student.
And then our content specialists are the ones that lead small group instruction in a content area. So for math or reading, or whatnot.
Tim Fish: One of the things I find really interesting about that is that you are able, I love that notion of how you're able to hire to those specific skills. I also think, if you think about the sustainability of the teaching workforce, one of the things we talk a lot about is sort of the next generation of great teachers.
And one of the things that teachers often talk about is how isolating teaching can be, this idea—I know I started my career as a fourth grade teacher, and I would literally or metaphorically close my door. And it was me and those kids, and I pretty much had the whole experience in many, many ways for those students. What I'm hearing here is a much more interdependent team that surrounds the individual student. So there's multiple adults in that student's life who are coming at the journey of that student as a learner from multiple different perspectives. Have you built in times when the team really shares insights on those individual students?
Orly Friedman: We have, and our school is a highly collaborative setting. Even physically, we don't have classrooms in that traditional setting where like, this is my room. The students know that they can use our breakout rooms as needed, and they move between the rooms to talk with different teachers. Even the teachers move between the rooms. So physically there's a lot of collaboration. And then also, we do provide time for teachers and the whole team to get together to talk about what they're seeing with students. And we also have a lot of backend documents that are shared between teachers, where we can drop notes about what we're seeing, things to follow up with.
And every Friday we have our whole team meeting where we get together, and every few weeks we'll do something we call Kid Talk, where we identify a couple of students that the whole team is keeping an eye on and taking notes on throughout the week, so that we can come back together and share our reflections.
Tim Fish: Yeah. So as an educator that isolation is not part of it at all. You're, you're highly immersed. And, and the other side. If you want to be a teacher that has a room and has a lot of control over your environment and works, I worked with one school called University Child Development School in Seattle, and I remember Paula Smith, the head of school, said to me, we don't want anything to do with what she called the superstar teacher.
And I was like, what do you mean by that? Because most schools, that's all they want is superstar teachers. And she said, no, no, no. We want superstar teams. And so if you really want to be autonomous, this maybe isn't the place for you. And I imagine the same is true of Red Bridge.
Orly Friedman: Yeah, I, I completely agree, and I think that was something I had to learn in my early days with hiring, that you really aren't looking for the person who wants to be the hero of their own classroom. You really do want that superstar team, like she said.
Tim Fish: You really want that team. All right, so now if you've got these autonomy levels, you're thinking about content mastery differently. You've got a team of adults who are working with each individual student. How do you end up reporting that out? I can imagine a traditional report card is not going to do the job here.
You need a different way of thinking about communicating learning progress to families.
Orly Friedman: Yeah. I'll tell you about a couple of the ways that we communicate with families, and this goes back again to our definition of agency being around teaching students how to set meaningful goals for themself. So from day one, we're teaching students what a goal is, and in each autonomy level we have what we call goal trackers. And in autonomy level one, at the beginning of the year, we have a goal tracker that is a poster at the front of the room that has two goals that everyone in the group is working on that have been selected by the teacher. Usually a character habit goal, and a work habit goal. And students are reflecting whether they accomplished that, that day, or not yet. And the point of it is not to say yes every day, but the point is to encourage honest reflection and just know what it feels like to have a goal that you're keeping in your mind throughout the day.
Later on in autonomy level one, as students have been in that group for a while, they have their own paper version of that goal tracker. In autonomy level two, they have a paper version that mid-year turns into a digital goal tracker, and the reflections that students are asked to do become more complex. And in autonomy level three, that digital goal tracker has more goals on it for longer periods of time, and students are writing out thoughtful reflections on how they're doing and approaching these longer term goals. And that goal tracker is something that parents have access to. And so students are commenting on their own performance in there. And parents can leave notes each week, of encouragement, or whatnot. But that's one way that we show what students are working on, but that also supports this idea of agency around goals.
In addition to that, we have progress reports that we send out twice a year that allow us to track their academic progress and relate it back to grade level norms so that parents do have a sense of how their child is progressing against how the rest of the world might evaluate them. And then in addition to that, we have digital portfolios. And the digital portfolio is a place where we store authentic examples of student work, often through video of students explaining their thinking or demonstrating their reading ability, or even talking about how they resolve a conflict. We might have photos in there, we might just have quotes from students, and that's how we ensure that the work students are doing really is authentic.
Tim Fish: Yeah, so, so this, this notion of what, one of the things I see in that whole process, that notion of deeply embedded reflection. That on a daily basis the student is saying, how did I do today? Was I able to, and what I love about that is that sort of metacognition of the notion of what is, what does progress look like? And was I successful in that? I don't think I really gained that ability until way into my twenties or thirties, or maybe I'm still learning it today in many ways, I think. So to think at a young age, that notion of, of personal reflection around my journey, I think is one thing that's incredibly powerful.
The other piece is, I think what you're getting at, is this key concept that you talk about, which is we're learning how to learn, as opposed to just learning content. And, and what's embedded in that reflection, in that feedback, in that communicating of learning is, I would imagine you've gotta be seeing students that are learning, in fact, how they learn and how to learn.
Can you speak a little bit about what kind of progress you're seeing with your students as they've been with you now for a few years?
Orly Friedman: I agree. One of the things that is very special about our program is the deep level of metacognition that students are gaining. And that is one of the things I'm most proud about our school model for. And you know, when I taught in Washington DC, there would always be a couple of kids each year who were a little more challenging and harder to develop a relationship with and motivate. And you would spend a lot of time thinking about, how do I work with this child and what do they need? And, and it would take usually a few months and then you would get into a rhythm and, and figure out how to help that child be successful. And then it would be June and you would pass the child off to the next teacher, and you would just cross your fingers that they would figure out the same things and be able to support the child in their learning journey in the same ways.
But with what we're doing at Red Bridge, we are really teaching students how to know themselves well enough and develop the habits of self-advocacy to be successful in any environment. So students know, like, this is where I need to sit. These are the tools I need to have around me to stay focused, to get things done. Like, this is what it feels like when I don't quite understand something and I'm going to need to ask for help. And you know, I feel comfortable going to adults or even to my peers and I know which peers to go to. So we're teaching them, and we're seeing them, really demonstrate all of those habits. And so I don't worry who their teacher will be in the future or what happens if they go to another school, because they know themselves well enough and they have enough experience going through that learning cycle and setting goals for themselves and making a plan and working through it that they're going to be successful anywhere. And, and really I think that is the result of what we're doing, that we're creating more flexible learners.
And we were able to see this play out in our second year. So in our first year, we were really fortunate. We had 12 students. We were able to keep everybody healthy. And we did not have any cases of Covid our first year.
Tim Fish: Congratulations.
Orly Friedman: Thank you.
Tim Fish: That is a huge accomplishment.
Orly Friedman: Yes. It definitely felt like one. And going into our second year, you know, we thought maybe it'll be a regular year. Maybe we won't have to wear masks, but we did, you know, first it was Delta, then Omicron, and we made it through January, and then we had our first case pop up, I think it was March of our second year. And then in May, four out of our six staff members all had Covid at the same time. And the remaining two team members said, we got it. We'll run school. And we said, okay, well, like I'll check in with you each day to see how it's going. One of these teachers was about to give birth the next week. And so these two hero teachers ran the school without any breaks for four days. And on Friday they were like, we just need a day off. So we shut school down for one day on that Friday. And because we had never done Zoom school, we just told families like, it's a day off. You know, enjoy yourself. We're not going to try to do something online.
And that weekend I received emails from two separate families, unbeknownst to one another, and they both had similar stories, which was, look at what my child did on this home day. They, both students had created schedules for themselves just like they would've at school, and they put on it things they wanted to do. Some were academic, some were, you know, we have a subject in our school called Observation, one of the students planned to do observation at the park, which was so cool. And, and the parents were like, wow, this is so cool. Like, your school's working. And so it was, that was really validating to, to see how it actually played out.
Tim Fish: Well, the thing that's so neat about it is also those two teachers, and they were hero and are hero teachers for sure. They were able to run the school, and because of your agency approach, the school is just more about the students doing than it is the adults. And so they were able to figure that out. And to know that the students wanted to do that, to plan their day, that the habits that you're building, they self-selected to do it on their own is, is really powerful.
You know, I'm curious about this idea then, when you start in, in putting this much agency into school. What I also think is interesting that I'm hearing about is that you really believe in the key ingredient of structure coupled with agency. It's something I talk about a lot, that agency doesn't just mean do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want, at any one time. There needs, especially with young children, to have, help them advance on their autonomy levels and their, and their academic skills, you as adults need to design the experience, design enough structure so that they move through that in the right way and it allows you to give more agency. Can you speak to how essential structure is for you in this incredibly agency rich environment?
Orly Friedman: Yeah. This is definitely one of our challenges in marketing, because when you hear the word agency, people have a lot of different ideas in their head of what that means in actuality. And there's a certain set of people who, when they hear student agency, they really think like kids are calling all the shots and it's, you know, students are deciding what they do all day, what they learn. And that is absolutely not what is happening in our program.
First of all, we ground everything in child development, so we give students the amount of structure and support that they need at each stage in order to grow their own agency, and it is a very intentional process. We are highly structured, and all of that structure is in the background, like you mentioned, so that students can make decisions about their learning, but in a way that remains productive.
Tim Fish: Yes. So that's the part I think that people, I agree with you. People often get that—it's a mistake that folks make when we're talking about agency. They think it's just sort of a hippie dippy, do whatever you want, whenever you want. No, it's kind of the unschooling model, right?
Orly Friedman: Right, which is not us.
Tim Fish: Which is not what you're talking about.
And I have found that in all the successful instances where agency thrives, it is essential to have with it, partnered with it, the right amount of structure. The issue is, right, that it's the designed intentional structure, but it's not about control and it's not about compliance.
Orly Friedman: That's right.
Tim Fish: So I think often in school, structure leads to compliance. I was talking with a school recently that was talking about how their teachers, their middle school teachers were exhausted. Just, just still, and I, I've heard that across the board and I feel it on the part of teachers. This has been an exhausting three years. And I think that the long term effects will linger for a while. And when, but what the head of school said is, I've been trying to find ways to give them more relief, but they won't let go because they don't trust the kids. Right?
Like the notion of teachers sitting at the lunch table, the head of school said, I'm trying to let go of some of that. But the middle, they, the teachers won't let go. Cause they're like, we can't just leave these kids at this table by themselves. Like what will they do? They'll be throwing butter patties at each other. Right. And that whole mindset is one where we need lunch table structure because we don't trust the kids to sit at a table with just each other. Right. And I don't, look, I get, it's been a long journey. I'm not, but it's that notion of what do we think of, what is the purpose of structure, right? And your purpose of structure is to create agency as opposed to creating compliance.
Orly Friedman: That's exactly right.
Tim Fish: And I think that's such a powerful differentiator for what you're doing.
Orly Friedman: I think one thing you mentioned, trust is so important and sometimes you have to see it to believe it, that you can step away from the lunchroom if you tell students your expectations and that you trust them. And so I think oftentimes it just takes people visiting our school to see, oh, this can work. But it's very nerve-wracking if you haven't seen it in practice.
I think the thing that is a bit scary also about this kind of a model is, if you are going to give students agency over their success and ownership over their success, you also have to be willing to do that for their failures. And so sometimes you have to give students enough space for them not to be successful.
And that is nerve wracking, especially if you don't have a community of parents that are bought into the model, because you need parents to see those moments as a learning moment as well alongside you. So it is really important for everyone in the community to trust one another in a setting like this, so that students can own their failures, so that they can also own their successes.
Tim Fish: Yeah, you, you have to let that happen. Right? This notion that Jeff Sandefur, Acton Academy's talked about this idea of you've gotta step back
Orly Friedman: Yep.
Tim Fish: And sometimes stepping back means you're going to let someone bump into a wall. And then when they look like they're going to bump into the same wall again, you have to step back again and let them bump into the wall again.
And that can be very hard for educators or parents to do. Right. It's one of the, I certainly know as a parent that's been hard for me throughout the time, raising my own kids. So I'm thinking about how do parents respond? You are very differentiated. Do they get it? Are you finding that people are responding to this model? Are they telling their friends? What's going on with admissions and enrollment?
Orly Friedman: So starting a new school is hard, especially in the pandemic. And recruiting students is definitely challenging, but the families that come to us are very happy. So we have a hundred percent retention of our families other than those who move away for various reasons. So that's the most important thing to me, that, you know, the people that are sending their kids love it. And they are spreading the word. I think talking about agency as a centerpiece is still hard, and it really does take people coming to visit and seeing it in action to understand that this is something that they should want for their children.
One thing that has been interesting is we've had groups of educators visit from Spain and from Switzerland, and both groups told me, you know, this word agency, it doesn't mean that in our country, like, it doesn't exist, this word that you're talking about. And so even, you know, across cultures, describing what it is or having it be something that is valuable is a challenge for us in our marketing to other families and getting the word out about the school. One thing that has been really interesting that I think you'll appreciate is we don't have any particular, you know, we're not looking for a particular type of family or student to join our school. In fact, we want our model to work better for more types of students.
We also have an individualized tuition program so that there's no set tuition rate. Families pay according to their means. And so we aim to, and do have, an economically diverse student body. But the one thread that we have seen in who chooses our school is a lot of educators end up choosing our school. People that have taught, or principals, or are somehow involved in education.
Tim Fish: That's very interesting. Yeah. What do you think a parent has to believe to be true in order to choose or want to choose Red Bridge for their child? What's that sort of core belief that they need to have?
Orly Friedman: I think there are a lot of reasons that someone, or a lot of beliefs this person might have to choose our school. I think a shared understanding of what is important for their child's success in the future is a reason someone would choose our school. This notion that students have to be accustomed to taking initiative and envisioning their own future is something that we teach, and something that is so core to what we do. And if that's a belief that you have, that that will be the most valuable skill in the future, then I think you would want to choose our school.
But there are other reasons too. I think we, our school's actually highly collaborative. That's another tricky thing about the word agency. I think a lot of times people hear agency and they think individualistic, like, I'm going to set my goal. But actually the way our autonomy levels work is, as you move up in autonomy level, the goals become more collaborative.
So it starts off with group goals, then it goes into students really setting individual goals, but then it goes back to group goals, because we don't want to graduate students that are just thinking about themselves and what's best for me, and how do I get there. We do want students to graduate who are thinking about, like, what's best for our community and how can I work to support the goals of our community.
And so I think when people come visit, they see a lot of collaboration happening. And so if that's what you want for your kid, you should also come to Red Bridge. But also, if you just believe that your kids should love school, then you should also send them to Red Bridge because that's also true.
Tim Fish: That's such a great point. It reminds me of a conversation we've had with Matthew Barzun, who wrote a book about, it's called The Power of Giving Away Power, and in it he talks about constellations. And one of the elements of a constellation is that in a constellation, in a group of interdependent people working together on a shared purpose, everyone in the group is seen and known, but they're also needed.
And he talks about the key ingredient of being needed, of feeling needed in the community. And it, I think that that's something that you're clearly building. What are your plans for the future? Do you, do you plan on, you know, scaling at some point within the Bay Area or beyond? Will there be a Red Bridge coming to, to my hometown someday soon, do you think?
Orly Friedman: We'll see. So really the goal behind Red Bridge is to be a demonstration site for this different model of education. So we want to perfect it at our site and grow to be a full K through eight school and, and then make all of our resources available to others, so that if individuals or teachers in their own classrooms, or principals or superintendents want to implement a similar system, they will have the resources to do so.
You know, this system of agency, it can never be a top-down system. So it just would not work for our model to be something that is imposed on anyone. So really, what we're trying to do is set up the resources so that other people can then take it and make it their own. I think in an ideal world it would work something like the way IB or International Baccalaureate schools work, and that community say we want to be IB, and then they implement it for a couple of years, and if they are doing it, you know, in the ways that align with IB standards and they get that, like, seal and can use the brand and whatnot.
And we're a bit of a ways from anything like that. But even this year we have a partnership with Lindsay Unified School District in the Central Valley, and some of their K through two teachers are trying out our work habits curriculum in their classroom and starting to implement some of our other practices, like our deliberate practice block goal setting with their students. And so that's a public school setting where teachers have said, this is something that we want to try. And so we're getting a lot of feedback from them in the process. So, slowly, we’ll build it out.
Tim Fish: I love it. So maybe there are pieces. I love this notion also of putting it out in the world and just letting it sort of inform how we all think about what learning looks like. Because your insights, your way of thinking about it, are incredibly interesting to me.
Fascinating, fascinating work. Orly, this conversation has been amazing. My last question for you is, What are your hopes for the future of school? As you clearly have been an educator, and this has been your work, what are your hopes for the future of education?
Orly Friedman: My hope is that students all get to go to schools that they love being at, and feel a sense of ownership over their work. Close relationships, purpose and mastery. So mastery, autonomy, purpose, and relatedness. And I also hope that that's true for teachers, because it's not going to be true for students if it's not true for teachers.
I hope that every teacher gets to work at a school and feels a sense of ownership over their work and the ability to form close relationships with their peers and students. And then that trickles down just to schools that people want to be at, where learning will happen.
Tim Fish: Well, Orly, I just want to say thank you. I love this notion of, every student deserves to go to school and love school and to have an environment that they love going to. I too would, would love to see and hope to see that we make progress on that. And I know that we are going to need to do some good, hard work along the way to get there because we're not living in that world today, unfortunately.
You know, I am so happy that you wandered into that gift shop in Japan. And I'm so happy you read that book on the way home. And it's clearly impacted you, and you have changed so many lives along the way. And I just want to say thank you for all the work you're doing. Thank you for showing up every day for young people and, and being so bold as to try something quite different from what we've all seen in the past, to give us a model that we can look to and learn from. And being a collaborator with the community of educators, that what I'm hearing from you is not that you have perfectly figured it out, but you're one person and one team out there trying an approach that you're willing to put into the world and share with others.
This has been such a great conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today.
Orly Friedman: Thank you so much for having me. This was great.
Tim Fish: What a gift. Take care, Orly.