I'm Mark Gross, School Loop's founder and CEO. I founded School Loop in my classroom in a San Jose, CA high school. As a new teacher working in a small learning community, I was blown away by the potential of what we hoped to do for students and by the reality of teaching International Relations to 150 inner-city 9th graders.
Where did the time go?
I decided that if I was going to make this happen, the students would need to help, so I organized a daily homework newsletter published by students for all of the students in our core (I shared a group of students with the English, Math, and Science teachers). The newsletter doubled as a discussion group, so not only did all students get all the homework in an email, but they could discuss it.
The newsletter was quite popular, and the students competed to be on the publishing team. Also, since I’m a dad, I thought that maybe the parents would like this newsletter too. So we began distributing the homework newsletter to parents.
Small gets big boost
It was fantastic. Students found that they were better organized, better prepared, and better able to cope. Parents had the information they needed to connect with their students and to help keep them on track. My colleagues and I found that students turned in more complete assignments on time and that the “why did my kid get a D” conversations with parents dropped off. On the learning community front, we knew what we each were up to, and were better able to coordinate and collaborate. And best of all, the students did all the work. Sweet!
Things were rolling along when the district decided that they couldn’t afford our small learning community anymore. They tore up our master schedule twice, eventually adding 1000 extra students to the school. My colleagues and I were devastated. How could they do this to us?
From tragedy, an idea takes flight
For me, personally, it was a huge blow. I had left a 20-year career in publishing and Internet development, capped by serving as President of the online division of one of the world’s largest technology publishing companies. We took the company public during the Internet boom, and I cashed out. I got into teaching because I always had a passion for education, and I felt that I could take my experiences developing collaborative technology and marry them with teaching content, helping students gain real-world, 21
st
century skills.
After fighting my way through the credential process, I took a job with a 100-mile commute because I fell in love with the idea of learning communities. At the time, we were a small learning community, the essence of which to me was that all students matter and that no one should be anonymous in a school. I saw our core as the education team devoted to the success of all our students. Today, professional learning communities are another important flavor of the same basic idea: Teams, sharing information and working together, are the best way to ensure that all students learn.
So in the Spring of 2004, I took my little homework newsletter, the observation that time is the scarcest resource in schools, my passion for learning communities, and my hurt over the loss of my SLC, and founded School Loop. Miraculously, I found a genius systems engineer, co-founder Tom Burns, and we went to work. We launched the service in three schools that fall.
Getting big, staying small
Today, School Loop serves nearly 1000 schools and many of California’s largest districts: San Francisco Unified, Long Beach Unified, and Los Angeles Unified among them. Beyond California, we have spread to serve districts in fourteen states. Throughout this rapid growth, we have remained true to our vision that the benefits of learning communities -- SLCs, PLCs, you name it -- should be extended to schools, regardless of their structure.
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