The Modern Classrooms Project

Every student's learning needs are unique, and the one-size-fits-all model fails to meet them. Students who are ahead grow bored, students who are behind fall off pace, and students who are chronically absent miss out altogether. Teachers burn out and learning suffers.

We give educators a research-backed instructional model, informed by our own experiences as classroom teachers, that helps them respond to every student's needs. Our teachers record their own instructional videos, which students watch at their own paces, and require students to master each skill before tackling the next. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University studied teachers we've trained, and their students, and found "overwhelming positive support" for our approach.

Over 25,000 teachers from 140+ countries have enrolled in our free online course, and we've empowered thousands more through intensive virtual mentorship. Our model works in any classroom, anywhere. We're ready to meet EVERY student's needs!

Most K-12 classrooms operate under a flawed premise: all students, regardless of educational background, are expected to learn at the same pace as their peers. This one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. Teachers have little time to differentiate instruction, and external pressures push students along regardless of mastery. In classes that inevitably move too fast for some and too slow for others, students become discouraged, fall further behind, or drop out, while those who graduate often lack essential college and career skills. Burned-out educators leave the profession, especially in vulnerable communities where learning gaps are greatest. One-size-fits-all classrooms may be convenient, but they cannot meet students’ diverse individual needs. Only by replacing this model will all students be able to achieve their true potential.

In the wake of COVID-19, students’ learning needs are greater -- and more varied -- than ever before.  Some students have stayed on track during virtual learning, while others (disproportionally minority/low-income students) have fallen further behind.  All have missed out on a year of human connection and social-emotional growth.  Teachers returning to the classroom this fall will need a method to meet each and every student’s unique needs, while also relating to students on a personal level. 

We empower educators to build classrooms that respond to every student’s needs, leading a movement of educators worldwide implementing a research-backed instructional model that leverages technology to foster human connection, authentic learning, and social-emotional growth.  Our educators transform their classrooms around three core practices:

• Blended Instruction:  Teachers create high-quality instructional videos to replace in-class lectures.  This allows students to learn at their own paces, and frees up teachers to provide targeted individual and small-group support in class.

• Self-Paced Structures: Teachers design self-paced classroom structures, which allow students to control their own learning while meeting essential learning objectives and deadlines. This builds student self-regulation skills and ensures that each student always has appropriately challenging material to learn. 

• Mastery-Based Grading: Teachers create “mastery checks” for each lesson, which give students credit only once they’ve demonstrated full understanding of content and skills. This prevents learning gaps from forming, while helping students build self-confidence and grit.

This method works in any subject area, grade level, or school, and is not dependent on any particular platform or tool.  Instead, it provides an "operating system" that lets teachers leverage existing tools more effectively.  To date, over 25,000 educators have enrolled in our free online course.

Our model was created by classroom teachers, to meet the needs of the students we served every day.  As we've grown, we continue to serve these two essential populations: teachers, and their students.

The direct beneficiaries of our work are teachers.  Teachers are overworked and under-supported; they burn out quickly and leave the profession in droves.  What they need is a better method -- we give them an approach that makes them more effective and less stressed.  Research from Johns Hopkins University indicates that, compared to their colleagues, Modern Classroom teachers are significantly more likely to report that they can differentiate instruction to meet student needs, that they can manage their classes effectively, and that they are growing as professionals.  They are also significantly less likely to report class time as stressful.  Teachers recognize and appreciate that our model is designed to meet their individual needs as well!  We also involve teachers deeply in our continuous improvement efforts, conducting surveys and focus groups year round to find ways to improve.  It's no wonder that 95% of the teachers we've trained would recommend our training to their colleagues.

The ultimate beneficiaries of our work are students.  One-size-fits-all classrooms are leaving too many students behind: this is evident from test scores and dropout rates worldwide.  What students need instead is a more personalized approach, that treats every student like a human being with individual needs.  This is what our teachers provide: compared to their peers, students in Modern Classrooms are significantly more likely to report that they can teach themselves new content and skills, that they are learning how to use technology, and that they enjoy learning.  Every student has potential, and every student deserves an education that responds to their unique needs.  When students are in classrooms where they can truly learn, there's no limit to what they can achieve.  

This is why the Johns Hopkins Study cited above found "overwhelming positive support for The Modern Classrooms Project from the perspective of both students and teachers who participated in the program during the 2019–20 school year."

Students can't learn if they aren't engaged.  Yet students who can't access instruction because they're behind, or absent, or have special needs, are hard to engage!  

Our model makes learning accessible to ALL students, whether they're in school or not.  It brings teacher-led learning outside classroom walls (teachers make their own videos), allowing parents to participate in the learning process.  

Our solution also supports teachers in improving their pedagogy and individualizing learning... but not just for remote/hybrid settings.  It makes classrooms respond to the needs to every student, regardless of background or location.  A Modern Classroom is an equitable classroom.

We began by training 8 educators in DC in Summer 2018, then 25 in Summer 2019.  Since the start of 2020, we have:

• moved all of our training online,
• empowered 1,000+ teachers through our Virtual Mentorship Program ($495/teacher), with another 25,000+ enrolling in our free online course, and
• grown our staff from two to 13, with another 60+ educators serving as our Expert Mentors.

This summer, we will train another 1,300+ teachers through our Virtual Summer Institute, and we expect to reach another 50,000+ with our free online course.  In 2021, we expect to earn ~$2.5m in revenue (~$1m from paid partnerships) against expenses of ~$2m.

We are in the Growth phase because we still rely on philanthropy for ~50% of our expenses, but we believe we can be fully self-sustaining on partnership revenue by 2024.  Our program has been validated by research and we're ready to scale!

As educators, we know the most effective instructional innovations occur in authentic collaboration with the educators who actually implement them.  Unlike top-down, whole-school reform efforts, we go directly to teachers, without forcing our approach on any educator.  Instead,  we support any teacher with an appetite for change and the work ethic to take on a pedagogical shift.  And unlike e-content creators like Khan Academy, we make it possible for educators to create and deliver their own video content, tailored to their own unique students and situations.

Our educators can implement our methods immediately, and spread them freely.  Our approach is unique because we empower any teacher, in any school and subject area, to transform student learning experiences.  The educator is the most important agent of change in any classroom,  so we aim to build a teacher-driven movement that enhances, rather than replaces, teacher authenticity. 

We currently have 25,000+ teachers from 140+ countries enrolled in our online course.  We've surveyed enrolled teachers and estimate that, conservatively, teachers who have taken our course have used our model with approximately 1.2 million students during SY 2020-21.  This estimate does not take into account the fact that, on average, teachers in our course know 2-3 other teachers using our model; if teachers who have been exposed to our model but have not taken our course are included, the number of students reached is significantly higher.

Because we're growing so fast -- we had 500 teachers in the course in March 2020 -- it feels difficult to give a clear estimate of future impact.  But even assuming linear growth from here on out, our model will reach over 2 million new students one year from now, and 6 million new students in 5 years.  (Remember that a student in a Modern Classroom is typically there for one year; the next year, those Modern Classroom teachers empower a new set of students altogether).  If we continue to grow exponentially, the numbers could be much higher than that.  

In any case, it is not a stretch to say that, over the next few years, there are millions young people worldwide whose day-to-day educational experiences will be enhanced by their teachers' exposure to our instructional model.

We study the teachers who take our courses extensively.  They complete surveys before and after the course, and we continue to survey them -- all of them -- twice per year after that; once in October and again in April.  These surveys receive hundreds if not thousands of responses and provide us with a clear picture of the impacts we have on educators.

Studying students is harder, due to data privacy guidelines, but we have partnered for the past three years with researchers at Johns Hopkins University, who have surveyed thousands of students and found "overwhelming positive support" for our model.  As we grow, we are pursuing federal research grants and exploring additional research partnerships with other American universities.

This program evaluation is essential to our continued development and at the heart of what we do.

Full-time staff: 14

Part-time staff: 2.

Contractors: 80+ Expert Mentors, 2 Senior Advisors, assorted other specialized firms.

My co-founder and I never set out to lead a movement of educators.  We were teachers who discovered effective techniques to challenging problems, put them out there for the world to see, and saw a movement grow organically around us.  We are well positioned to help teachers become more effective because we have done this ourselves!  We know exactly how hard it is to transform teaching, and exactly what it takes to do so successfully, because we did it first.  This is one of our strengths.

This is also a strength shared by our team.  Several of our full-time staff are former teachers, and all of our 80+ Expert Mentors are full-time practicing teachers.  As the community of teachers we serve expands, so does our pool of staff and Expert Mentors.  

By design, therefore, we are built to understand, and to meet, the needs of the teachers we serve.  Every single team meeting we've ever had has contained multiple current or former teachers!  Teacher voices are not just represented at the Modern Classrooms Project... they ARE the Modern Classrooms Project.

Many of our staff and leaders come from the education world, which means that we are fortunate to draw from a diverse pool to begin with.  Of our organization's 6-person leadership team, one-half are women and one-third are people of color; of our five most recent hires, all are women and three are women of color.  Our 12-person Board of Directors also contains five women and seven people of color.

Being diverse, of course, does not ensure that we are equitable or inclusive.  To that end, I, my co-founder Kareem, and our Director of Systems & Strategic Operations have developed a comprehensive DEI Strategy that includes whole-staff training, equitable hiring practices, and concrete DEI goals.

Our goal is to improve the educational experiences of every young person in the world, which means that we need leaders and staff who are prepared to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion at every turn.  Fortunately, and as our DEI strategy demonstrates, these are not just buzzwords for us.  They have been woven into our organization from the very beginning and will continue to be major priorities as we continue to expand.

We have a real solution that we know can transform education.  We need help sharing it with the world!  

Funding is nice, but our real need is for personalized support and mentorship, both from experts who've succeeded in social entrepreneurship and also from peers who are in the thick of it with us.  The connections that we can make through this program are unparalleled -- and those are what we hope to forge by applying.

One of our core values is that "there's always more to learn." We are teachers, which is why we relate so easily to the peers we serve... but we don't have training in running or growing a movement of educators worldwide.  We are eager for all the help that we can get!

We're open to any and all partnerships, particularly those that help us measure our impact, share other high-quality resources with our teachers, and ground our work in meaningful DEI practices.

Our work focuses on teacher professional development, empowering teachers to tailor their instruction to respond to every student's unique needs.  Our focus on serving each individual student (and teacher) as a human being is deeply equitable, and we've seen our model successfully implemented in all core curriculum subjects.  Practices like these help students develop not only in their mastery of academic content and skills, but as self-directed learners equipped with skills like grit, problem-solving, and time management.  In the 21st century, this is what our learners will need to succeed in college and career. 

In fact, many of our educators teach career and technical education, and many others use project-based learning.  One of our teachers recently said it best: "Constructing classrooms with self-paced models or project-based learning will provide students an opportunity to develop the skills needed to take them into the modern workplace. However, when combined, they form a powerhouse of student agency opportunities to drive student learning into the 21st century and beyond."

We would be honored to work in collaboration with American Student Assistance to make learning experiences like these accessible in equitable classrooms around the world.

Our model is founded on inclusion: every student is included in a classroom only when that classroom meets every student's needs.  

The one-size-fits-all model disproportionately fails to serve minority and low-income students, who develop learning gaps that grow over time, especially in STEM subjects.  Our blended, self-paced, mastery-based approach -- which was developed in math classrooms at a Title I high school in Washington, DC -- is designed specifically to address these gaps, and to give every student, regardless of background, the opportunity to truly learn.  What our model does is make authentic learning and understanding accessible to all. 

Our model is founded on inclusion: every student is included in a classroom only when that classroom meets every student's needs.  

The one-size-fits-all model disproportionately fails to serve minority and low-income students, who develop learning gaps that grow over time, especially in STEM subjects.  Our blended, self-paced, mastery-based approach -- which was developed in math classrooms at a Title I high school in Washington, DC -- is designed specifically to address these gaps, and to give every student, regardless of background, the opportunity to truly learn.  What our model does is make authentic learning and understanding accessible to all. 

I developed this model of instruction while teaching STEM courses in a highly under-resourced school, and have seen first-hand how powerful it can be in empowering students to succeed in STEM fields.  The one-size-fits-all model disproportionately fails to serve minority and low-income students, who develop learning gaps that grow over time, especially in STEM subjects.  Our blended, self-paced, mastery-based approach -- which was developed in math classrooms at a Title I high school in Washington, DC -- is designed specifically to address these gaps, and to give every student, regardless of background, the opportunity to truly learn.  What our model does is make authentic learning and understanding accessible to all.