Happy Wednesday!
Out of more than 100 OpenEd Podcast episodes, I don't hesitate to say that if you are in the program – or thinking about joining – this is the one I would send you first.
My guest was Andrea Fife, OpenEd’s Chief Academic Officer, and she answered the questions new families ask us most.
Andrea taught fifth grade for 10 years before she came to OpenEd as a homeroom teacher. Her first job was reading the learning logs families sent in every week, and within a couple of months those logs gave her “a little bit of shock.”
“Wait, what? You can do that? Baking is math??” she remembers thinking.
Now she tells parents, “You guys, baking is math. Get in the kitchen with your kids; go do some fractions.”
She says those families changed how she teaches, how she parents, and her whole philosophy of education:
“I tell people now that when I first started at OpenEd, I would tell you that I believed in choice in education. The reality is I believed in my choice in education.”
“That was a hard lesson for me to learn,” she says, and she learned it on the teacher end of weekly learning logs. It is why she calls them her favorite part of the OpenEd program, and why she now trains OpenEd’s teachers to picture themselves “sitting in the passenger seat of the car.”
The family drives. The teacher on the other end of every learning log is there to keep you company, hold the map or, after a rough week, “hold the steering wheel for a second.”
If you’re feeling frozen by the number of curriculum options, her advice is to try one: a risk-free pick from your library, the thing a parent you admire already uses, or a recommendation from an OpenEd curriculum specialist.
If you hate it, you have learned something quickly, and the list gets shorter.
“You don’t need to try everything in the first six weeks,” she told me. “You don’t need to try everything in the first year. You don’t need to try everything ever.”
That is just one of 14 of Andrea’s answers to frequently asked questions from new families.
Others include: Where do I even start? What are learning logs for? Do we have to take state tests? What if my kid won’t do the work?
Listen on…
Prefer audio? Listen on Spotify.
In the episode:
The question she asks families before she recommends a single curriculum
How to beat decision fatigue without testing dozens of programs
Why short, two-sentence learning logs are completely okay (and what happens on the other end)
How to handle state testing without the stress or panic
How to teach multiple kids at different ages without burning out
If your child is struggling, the OpenEd Parent Handbook lists the resources Andrea’s team offers, including how to book a consultation with them.
That’s all for now.
– Ela
P.S. Mid-year enrollment is now open. If you’ve been thinking about joining, or know a family who missed the fall window, here is the application page. And if your family switched to OpenEd mid-year in years past, we’re looking for a handful of parents willing to share how it went. Just reply to this email.
