In 2012, I was the leader of a team of teachers who developed (before COVID) a successful online school, Tennessee Online Public School (TOPS). While we ended up creating a successful school that was a god-send for many of our students, we experienced growing pains like any other fledgling organization.
I’m the first to admit that I had no idea what I was doing when I was hired to design and lead TOPS. I had never been a principal of any kind before that. I realize now what great faith Gary Lilly had in me even to put me in that position. Honestly, I have no idea what he was thinking, but I’m happy it worked out. I had some strong beliefs about what schools should be, and I had a model to follow for building a school from scratch (even though my own personal distrust of dogmas kept me from following that model with complete fidelity).
Here are some things that I wish I had known before beginning:
Choosing LMS is the single most important decision you will make. We started out using “Moodle” because it was free and because the district had been using Moodle for several years. Moodle, as anyone knows, is a nightmare for end-users and a dream for developers. It was mostly just a nightmare for us overall.
We ended up adopting Canvas our second year, and it made all the difference.
The LMS matters because design matters. Your teachers can’t design well in a poor LMS. The LMS matters because getting to the content matters. The adage we used at TOPS is “We want the content to be difficult; we want getting to it to be easy.”
The more full-time teachers who are dedicated to online learning the better. Institutions don’t like throwing full-time teachers at online learning because it’s expensive. For example, at TOPS, our budget was about $500k. About $300k of that were the salaries of my three full-time teachers and my principal salary. By contrast, my adjunct budget was around $120k to teach the rest of our classes. And while that was very cost-effective, the full-time people were absolutely important to the culture of the school, to the fabric of the overall faculty, and to the overall operation of everything.
Counseling is extremely important. I wish I had been able to convince the district that we needed a full-time school counselor. Many of our students were coming to us with mental health issues, and many were also coming with weird and tricky credit situations. It was way too much work to do for a part-time counselor. Fortunately for the school, through the charity of their free time, the school counselors who worked at TOPS did a great job (even if it did end up being the defense against the dark arts position).
One thing the counselor could have done at TOPS that would have been beneficial to students is helping them build capacity to be successful online. There was some pressure from the district to 86 students who weren’t doing well because they were going to be a drag on the metrics: graduation rate, chronic absenteeism, and test data. And while this was justified if a student was trying to use the online school as a truancy shelter, there were many who just didn’t have the capacity to be successful because they wanted to learn how to be successful the hard way which is by failing miserably first (which is the way of the teenager).I wish I would have sold out more. I didn’t realize how important it was to “be the face” of the school. I did daily announcements (most days) and tried to be present on social media to answer questions. In one of our leadership team meetings, one of my teachers suggested I do some sort of dance (to be relatable to students). I have never liked that sort of “relatable” stuff (a bunch of white people rapping or doing weird handshakes or whatever) because it seems fake (because I took Catcher in the Rye way too seriously) and because I believe in authenticity (because I took Jean-Paul Sartre way too seriously).
I could have done more to sell out to get my school’s name out there. I feel bad that I was just too whatever (shy?) to engineer some sort of tipping point. Honestly, TOPS enrollment should be over 500 at this point. Look at how many students are doing virtual learning during COVID. In just my small district, there are as many high school students doing virtual learning as there are enrolled in TOPS.
I don’t know what I could have done, but what I did do was effective. I just could have done more of it, and I didn’t. Just like having a face and presence in an online class is important, it’s also important for the school to have that in the principal.As a result of that meeting, I did make this dancing video that one of my teachers set to music.
I wish I had known that I was even more right than I knew about the battles I was fighting.
There was just no way to know that I was right about teachers being able to work from home, and that working from home would help them be more empathetic to students working from home.
I wish I had known that offering an asynchronous learning environment with small opportunities for synchronous interactions was an extremely effective model.
I wish I had known how right I was that online instruction is not the same as putting face to face instruction online. I had to constantly fight the battle of “this doesn’t look like what we do in classrooms.”
These are just five small things, but they could have helped me tremendously. There are probably 15 other things I wish I had known, and if I wrote this again, I’d probably come up with a different list of five. I hope this helps someone out there trying to start an online school.