Thought Leaders in Online Education: Stephen Spahn, Dwight Schools Group (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get a little bit more focused on the things you do. Especially in online education, what is it that you’re doing and what is unique and special?

Stephen Spahn: Because we’re leaders in the international baccalaureate (IB), we’re the first school to test online and work with other schools interested in becoming IB schools. We had to work with them on becoming IB schools.

From there, we looked at what was the best in the country. They said that the best in the country was Stanford. We looked at Stanford and we decided we can do that. We can do it better than Stanford, because they’re looking at it from a college perspective. I’m looking at it from a middle and high school perspective.

We hired the Assistant Dean to work with us. We then designed a program that would mirror what the brick-and-mortar schools were doing. We also brought students in so they can meet their teachers. We also found that there was a need for people that had particular interests. You had athletes. You had dancers. You had Juilliard. You had top-ranking tennis players.

What they were looking was really a first-rate education. How could we deliver that? That became the challenge. How do we make it so interesting that they’re going to want to do this and would take the time to do this around their passion for a particular area.

We started that five to seven years ago. We’ve been improving it ever since. Who is really good at reaching kids and freeing their capacity? The first thing we did was we said, “Probably the best in the world are the Finns.” We took 16 faculty members and went to Finland to see what they were doing.

What we discovered was that we were doing everything they were doing. Again, they actually trusted their teachers. They made sure they had really great teachers. You have to have great teachers in this. The teacher becomes more of a mentor.

You want the students to actually come up with ideas. We set it up where students have goals for themselves. They have to learn how to assess themselves. They have to learn to work with others in study groups because we saw that that was a good technique. We began to introduce all of these into our program.

We then found that our students were doing exceptionally well. For example, Yara Shahidi, a star in Black-ish, needed to be working on her TV program. To have access to teachers so she could do it in her own time allowed her to get a first-rate education. She knew her teachers because she had met them. It wasn’t just online. You would actually see them.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Stephen Spahn, Dwight Schools Group
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