Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa Zapalac.
Hi Lisa, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My co-founders and I worked together for over a decade and though we were in positions of leadership at a well-resourced school, we were frustrated by the lack of focus on learning and on students. Everything was about maintaining the status quo and building impressive facilities. We envisioned a school with very different assumptions and a culture that focused on learning, and we designed a financial and leadership model that would support innovation.
Long-View Micro School was founded in 2015 to challenge the traditional, antiquated assumptions and practices of K-12 education. It provides children with an unparalleled education that sets a foundation for a lifetime of learning. We take “the long view” by prioritizing the construction of meaning, asking good questions, seeking connections, and considering multiple perspectives overconsumption of information, rote practice, and shallow skill coverage.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
The Austin community has embraced Long-View Micro School and we are deeply grateful. We have a great deal of interest in the school and a current challenge is seeking out ways to impact more children. The pandemic has accelerated the desire of parents to ensure that their children are spending their time in a school constructing discipline knowledge that is deep and organized, while also spending equal time developing the capacity to solve complex real-world problems, collaborate, communicate effectively, monitor and direct one’s own learning, and develop an academic mindset. To address this challenge, we are working on codifying our model and considering expansion.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Long-View Micro School is located in central Austin, nestled between The University of Texas and an 84-acre wooded urban park, and serves a diverse community of 75 learners in grades 2 through 8. The school has a “focused academic footprint” — that is, we focus on core academics and offer a shorter day and week so that parents can customize the rest of their child’s education (such as music or arts) or maintain a more balanced family life. Our urban location allows us to live out a desire to have “porous” walls and maintain a simple facility. We spend an hour a day at the park for lunch, walk to the university to utilize public resources, and make use of a large creek and grassy meadows for science experiments or poetry writing.
The culture of Long-View Micro School is not built around compliance and behavior-management, prominent elements of most schools. Instead, we work to create a learning community. We recognize that all conditions for learning can’t be set by the teacher; kids must make contributions to their own learning. Kids and adults take responsibility for themselves and others. And lastly, learners operate in mixed-age “bands” — this gives us permission to let go of assumptions related to grade levels. We don’t want kids’ learning put in a box, following the thinking “you are a 2nd grader so you will only learn 2nd-grade math.” There is no artificial “ceiling” on what kids are exposed to at Long-View and this is crucial to their transformation. Academically, we focus on deep learning and thinking and authentic practice within the discipline. We continuously ask ourselves, “What is the hardest, richest version of this idea within this discipline and how can we bring it to the kids?”
On a more macro level, the school’s model supports these goals. Long-View Micro School is a smaller, leaner organization, and, thus more of a nimble operation. We rent a simple facility and do not maintain a playground or lunchroom. We walk every day to the city park near us, Pease Park, and we eat and play there for an hour.
The school operates through a distributed leadership model, uses social media for most communication, and doesn’t have any traditional administrative staff. We are all about being “radically simple” so that the least amount of our time and resources go to running the school and the most time and resources go to supporting all kids in learning at high levels. Thus, we don’t spend money on admissions departments, marketing staff, cafeterias, and fancy facilities. Everything is oriented toward the children and their learning.
Our financial model supports innovation and is highly sustainable. Instead of depending on funding outside of our control, we purposefully designed our financial model to stimulate our team’s creativity, with the goal of nurturing alternative revenue streams from what we created. Our financial model achieves this because we have a gap between revenue and expenses. We work as a team to fund this gap by leveraging what we have created for daily instruction into a product that can be shared. This diversifies our revenue, infuses an entrepreneurial focus into our work, and drives us to be purposeful in all we do.
This also allows us the opportunity to impact more than the 75 children at our micro school. We do this work under the name: Long-View Learning. Through Long-View Learning we seek to address the need for: 1) math instruction that accelerates learning, and 2) optimistic examples of innovation in education.
Our ambitious desire to stay true to our assumptions and to root our instruction in sound research and theories of learning has nurtured mathematics instruction — both content and pedagogy — that is highly unique and has also produced a school that leverages research to provide a transformative learning experience.
Our Long-View Learning team works to support other schools, districts, and education leaders striving to utilize the Long-View model to support transformation in their classrooms. Through myriad offerings — professional development, coaching and consulting, field study days at our micro school, and a subscription-based website — the Long-View Learning team has impacted over 1000 educators and their students across the country from rural Edgecombe County, NC to urban San Francisco, CA.
Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
It is possible to be an educator and an entrepreneur — there aren’t many examples of this in the world so we couldn’t look to others for a vision for how to be both. In the end, this meant we had to be focused, gritty, flexible, and creative. And we had to build a team of impressively talented people who had both the capacity to teach at high levels and skills to round out our team.
I’m very proud that in 7 years we have built an organization that runs both an innovative and unique school in Austin, highly desired by academically-minded parents, and we have created multiple avenues to share our model with other educators. Most schools are very insular but Long-View was built to have an impact on both its own community of students and those at other schools in Austin and across the nation. One lesson we’ve learned is how extremely important it is to invite more collaboration from within the education sector — we need to spread ideas and collaborate on behalf of the children in our schools more than ever.
Hard work pays off. We were selected as one of 36 models from across the country as a source of inspiration for other innovative educators. Transcend Education (with funding from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) has developed a free, searchable library called The Innovative Models Exchange.
This Exchange is designed to support school communities to create and spread extraordinary, equitable learning environments. We are proud our model was selected among this inaugural set of innovative designs, and we were only one of three models selected for mathematics. In fact, of these three models, one is a tutoring model and another is adaptive technology. Ours is the only mathematics model selected that relies upon a discourse-rich environment that might be found in a classroom.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.long-view.com
- Instagram: @long_view_atx
- Facebook: @longviewmicroschool
- Other: www.long-view-learning.com
Image Credits
Long-View Micro School
