Meg Pileggi spent six years as a Marine Corps officer before she founded Collective Leadership Academy, a hybrid microschool for homeschool families in Kinston, North Carolina. In this conversation she describes a program built around relationship first. Monday learning days happen out in the community: at the barn, on Meals on Wheels routes, on family field trips. Older students teach younger ones. A student-run foster closet supplies local families in need. And a lot of the growth she pays attention to shows up on the playground, in how kids treat each other, not on any test.

We talk about the kitchen-table moment that reshaped how she thinks about homework, why she cares more about how a child treats their neighbor than how they score, and what it looks like to keep families together instead of sending kids away for thirty-five hours a week. Part of What We See, a conversation series on what learning actually looks like across indie education: microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs, in their own words.

Lacy Manship co-founded ALC Mosaic, a self-directed school in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has been a key leader in the early childhood program there for 13 years. Today she holds the space for reading and writing across the school: a Reader's Workshop where kids from five to teenager choose to come in and work on literacy while kids climb trees and dig in the sandbox right outside the door. In this conversation: what a ten-year-old gains by waiting to learn to read, why identity is the hardest thing to teach back, and what gets lost when writing becomes a rubric score. Fair warning: if you've only encountered literacy on the prescriptive timelines of conventional schooling, some of this conversation may challenge you. Lacy has spent decades watching kids come to reading on their own terms, and she describes what that actually looks like. What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. What learning looks like, in their own words.

What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. Microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs talking about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss.

Justine Wilson spent seventeen years in conventional schools, teaching and then leading buildings across Ohio, Colorado, Egypt, Brazil, and Qatar, before founding Curious & Kind Education in Sarasota, Florida. Now in its third year, Curious & Kind is a forest school that homeschool families choose one to three days a week, on a campus with a creek, a mud kitchen, and a well-loved rope swing.

Justine walks through a typical morning, from the stump circle where the whole group co-plans the day to the offerings kids drift between, and she describes what she watches kids build in themselves that a report card was never designed to hold.

One of the lightest moments is about a hamburger, and why one student swore it was the best cookout she had ever been to.