The K-12 education marketplace is emerging with virtual schools now entering the world of bricks-and-mortar schools creating a new kind of “blended school”, each of which touts their own blend and brand of now the current “holy grail” of public education reform: personalized learning. Does this represent a new era of technology enabled super-powered school that we should openly embrace or cautiously enter?
Most direct-to-consumer virtual-come-blended school models build their value proposition by directly engaging students via a computer. However, where’s the emphasis on building the capacity of the classroom teacher? The research points to the quality and engagement of the teacher as the primary mechanism for improving student learning. It appears that these hybrid models are designed to relieve or release the teacher from many aspects of their job today but what about helping teachers improve their craft?
Matchbook was created to fill this gap. Matchbook believes that the key to effective learning lies in effective teaching. Widely published research shows that a student receiving a highly effective teacher 4 years in a row will completely eliminate the achievement gap.
Our unique value proposition lies in personalizing TEACHING. We believe that if we personalize the experience for professional high-quality teachers—in other words not just focus on the teacher’s capacity to customize daily instruction via technology, but also and more importantly enable a teacher to have autonomy, mastery and purpose over their profession and daily execution—this will lead to students who experience autonomy, mastery and purpose in their learning which in turn will lead to higher student motivation and performance. Technology and the blended model become the enabler and not the end goal.
At Matchbook Learning our goal is not personalized learning. Students learning in a computer lab with no physical teacher can accomplish that but not necessarily much else. Our goal is college readiness for every student, which we believe, flows from effective personalized learning, which flows from effective personalized instruction.
