Educational Innovator: Acera School
Test Innovators believes in the power of educational innovation to shape the future of our society. Our Educational Innovator series highlights a program, school, or individual that is contributing to the advancement of education in a unique way, whether through groundbreaking curriculum, technological innovation, or other revolutionary projects.
This week we spoke with Courtney Dickinson, founder and director of The Acera School in Winchester, Massachusetts.
In 2010, Courtney Dickinson’s son was not achieving his full potential at the local public school. As a high-ability student with a hands-on learning profile, he was not able to maximize his achievement in large, one-size-fits-all classes. Since there weren’t other school options for him in the area, his mother decided to create one herself, and The Acera School was born.
“There needed to be an answer for students who need to do things and make things with their hands,” Dickinson said, “when regular school holds them back and they aren’t able to activate their true potential.”
Acera’s approach to learning flips the traditional model of education. Rather than prioritizing knowledge acquisition, the school focuses on the development of eight core capacities: systems thinking, perspective taking, critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration, creativity, emotional intelligence, ethical decision making, and leadership.
To foster these skills, the school takes a unique project-based and interdisciplinary approach to develop its curriculum.
Some topics come from essential philosophical questions (e.g., What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be free?). Others are born out of the school’s partnerships with “curriculum collaborators,” who could be researchers from schools like MIT or Tufts, industry professionals, or software developers. These curriculum collaborators have crafted units on skin microbiome sampling, gene editing using CRISPR technology, and brand-new programming languages designed for elementary school students, which have been piloted at Acera.
Other subjects spring from student passion. Students can actually design their own curriculum through the school’s IMP Project Process. IMP stands for Inquiry, Making, and Passion. Every week, middle school students spend four hours of unstructured time working on a project of their own design. Specialist mentors are on staff to advise on students’ projects and offer support, but the projects are completely self-designed.
Last year, students Raphael Yamamoto and Nick Colvin became interested in psychology and virtual reality (VR) technology, and used their IMP time to build a Virtual Reality Training Program. They designed a VR application, a successive series of interactions for a user wearing a VR headset, aimed to desensitize an individual to the fear of public speaking. Though neither student had a background in psychology or technical skills in VR, they were able to develop a project plan with their mentor and learn the necessary skills—coding in VR and using professional industry tools—to create a final application.
Yamamoto and Colvin worked all through the school year and were so motivated that they arranged with their mentor to continue to work on the project throughout the summer. The students presented the app, along with their research and development process, at the LearnLaunch Conference in Boston this February.
This deep exposure to complex technology is a defining characteristic of Acera’s approach to learning. Beyond virtual reality, students at Acera become intimately familiar with all sorts of tech throughout their nine years: computer science and coding (which begins in kindergarten), lab work, engineering, woodshop, and the electronic arts. Such deep STEM learning at the early grade levels ensures that Acera students do not become intimidated by difficult subjects, and instead become fearless learners.
Acera’s quick growth as a school in the past eight years may be due in part to the director’s experience outside of the education space. Before Acera, Dickinson worked briefly as an associate teacher at a private school, then moved to a high-growth software company as a Culture Architect. She ran workshops and taught leadership development and team effectiveness for five years before starting her own management consulting business, which she ran for ten years before starting Acera.
She describes The Acera School as a “bootstrap startup” which is now entering its 8th year.
“We’ve been building the engine while we fly the plane the entire time,” Dickinson said.
The Acera School is an independent school, which means that the families who benefit from it have the luxury of choice in their children’s education. By contrast, innovation in public schools, which benefits a greater number of students, is more difficult and takes more time to implement.
“It’s a systems problem,” said Dickinson, a proponent of public schools who aims to make an Acera-style education accessible to every student. “Acera School is a microcosm of what could be happening in every school. That’s our vision.”
To benefit the greater public, Acera School offers after-school enrichment programs and day camps during the winter, spring, and summer breaks. These are open to everyone. Additionally, the school sponsors professional development sessions for public school educators on the topics of creating affordable makerspaces and electronic arts programs.
“[They’re] the beginning of the kinds of things that we want to be doing,” Dickinson said, referring to the school’s efforts to widen the impact of curriculum collaboration, pilot testing in classrooms, and accessible makerspaces. “Our goal down the road is to launch a whole center for innovation in education…. We’re just trying to make education better.”
You can learn more about Acera School and its programs at https://aceraschool.org/.
