Courage to Grow: How Acton Academy Turns Learning Upside Down by Laura Sandefer

Author:Laura Sandefer [Sandefer, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Acton Press
Published: 2017-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Assessing ourselves: our weekly survey of Acton families

We have made transparency one of our key school values, and the Acton Academy families are well practiced in giving us regular and honest feedback. One of the most controversial practices at Acton Academy, at least from the eyes of some traditional educators, is treating our families as valuable customers, whom we are delighted to serve. (The word “customer” riles up some people in very interesting ways, I have found.) While our relationship at Acton is, of course, far deeper than a transactional one, we never forget these parents are paying us to deliver on our promises. We need and want to know how they think we are doing in our service to them, so that we can continually improve.

To that end, each weekend, we send out an anonymous survey for our parents and students to rate us on their week at Acton. We ask them to give us comments on how we can improve. I open the results every Monday morning. I then send them out to the families so everyone gets to see how everyone else thinks we are doing as school owners.

These surveys help us to remain in a continual state of learning and improvement, just like each student and parent. We’ve been able to take what our parents and Eagles suggest and implement it when it fits into our mission.

My favorite requests were to add in more time for core skills work (children asking for more work time!) and a parent’s request to be allowed to observe Socratic discussions so they could learn how to have them at home (children teaching adults!). Because of our commitment to student-driven learning, we can turn on a dime and change when they come up with something better that we believe is worth trying.

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