Innovative Measures of Microschool Impact Contest

What are the original and innovative ways you like to demonstrate your microschool’s impact? The ones rooted in your mission and in the reasons you do what you do? The successes you want to be known for?

Microschooling can offer so much more insight to a child’s growth than simple standardized state tests, with their intrinsic inequities. Meaningful measures of impact allow you to measure what’s important to you, to the child, and to your families. It’s crucial that the conversation around effectiveness of educational settings start to shift to make room for a variety of thoughtful, pertinent impact metrics, for example:

• Learners’ and families’ satisfaction with different aspects of your programming they value;
• Growth on dimensions of social and emotional competence;
• Number of diversified professionals and experts a child has interacted with;
• Contributions to group discussions;
• Goals met (and similarly, goals not met and ways a child reflected and changed their goals or work habits);
• Happiness, confidence, awareness of strengths and passions.

And others which capture elements of exactly what your families value most about your microschool.

We want to highlight the amazing work you are doing and drive the conversation about multiple, meaningful measures of impact! That’s why the National Microschooling Center is holding our first-ever contest centered on the original tools you designed and use to measure your impact! Entries will be reviewed by a panel of experts and prizes (cash, learning licenses, and more!) will be awarded to some of the entries as determined by panelists!

Please submit your entries here that describe these original, new innovative ways/tools to measure impact aligned with you mission:

• WHAT you are measuring meaningfully and WHAT does that tell you (this can be academic or non-academic learning)?
• WHY are these measures meaningful?
• HOW you are ensuring integrity and fidelity of measurements, and HOW does this measure inform your program?
• WHEN do you collect data points?
• WHO you are measuring for each data point to ensure all kids count?

Also, please include samples of any tools you have created to use in this measurement (for example, surveys, goal setting sheets, etc.)

Please submit your application before end of day Friday, February 24. Please direct any questions to kathryn@microschoolingcenter.org. You may submit more than one entry.

Entries will be evaluated by a distinguished panel of education authorities committed to innovative learning. Prizes will be awarded for different categories as determined by the panel of experts. 

The tool/form of measurement that you’ve created will remain yours. We encourage you to give us permission to share the measures you submit with other microschooling leaders that may want to utilize the measures you’ve created, but we do not require it.