Thought Leaders in Online Education: Stephen Spahn, Dwight Schools Group (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I understand your positioning. It sounds like you are taking these areas where you have quite gifted people pursuing a certain track. You’re giving them a more well-rounded education. How does a program for a dancer differ from that of a basketball player for example?

Stephen Spahn: They have the same base program. They have a playlist that they can do projects around their area of interest. If you’re a tennis player, you might want to study the physics of it. If you’re a dancer or a musician, you’re going to study the implications of sound and how it’s carried.

You can utilize your interest to go into greater depth and personalize it so that you’re getting something that’s different than someone else. You can also share that with a group so that the good news is that they can also share that. It’s a combination of synchronous and asynchronous learning.

What we found is that with online, we can do a lot of things that we did in the brick and mortar schools. An example is we’ve created a virtual art gallery. All our students can do that.

We have artists come to us and say, “We would like you to represent us. We think that what you’re doing can be an operating business as another means of income for a school.” You can create a virtual art gallery for our students and for young artists around New York.

We’ve also created what we call Spark Tank. We took this startup method of creating an MVP. We started teaching it and having students apply for grants. What we then discovered is that we should make sure that all students understood how they could go through the process of taking an idea, testing it, and creating a viable product.

We’ve expanded that so that the parents are involved as guides. We’ve had hundreds of students who have started their own projects.

Entrepreneurship takes many forms. It can be solving a civic question. It could be a science question. Let’s take the coronavirus virus right now. Right when the ebola virus hit, we actually invited Ann Lipkin, who was an expert on this, to train students and teachers on how to use social media to discover a pandemic and see where hotspots were. We were doing this five years ago.

Today, one of our graduates has a company called Hyperlink that can link students who want massive computer power. We help them to research so they can begin to solve real-world problems. The wall between the outside world and school has melted away. We’re trying to take advantage of that.

Sramana Mitra: How does this work? Do you work with institutions like Juilliard and supplement their programs?

Stephen Spahn: We speak to all of them and they recommend us because they’re not in the job of providing a middle or high school program. Let’s say you have a group of tennis players and they have to travel around the country. The clubs recommend that they work with us.

You have to meet all kinds of standards. There’s the NCAA standards that are required. You have to make sure that you’re doing all of the things that meet their needs. The other interesting thing is you can bring in people that the kids are interested in hearing from. You want to bring in a top mind.

We’ve created Spark Talks that covers different areas. Whatever area you might be interested in, we tend to have, in our parent body or alumni, people who have done this and have created their own successful operations. 

Sramana Mitra: Who pays for your program?

Stephen Spahn: We do it internally as part of our school. This is just part of what we think should be at the center of all schools.

Sramana Mitra: Are the parents paying?

Stephen Spahn: Parents pay a fee to come to school. This is part of what they are getting as part of that.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Stephen Spahn, Dwight Schools Group
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