Chelsey Harrington co-founded Evergreen Academy, a nature-based microschool in Conway, Arkansas. In this conversation she describes what learning looks like there.

Two crawfish in a creek become a two-week investigation that quietly moves through biology, habitat, and seasonality, with the younger kids out hunting for crawfish chimneys and the whole group ending up sculpting clay models; one catalyst, and the learning spreads across science, observation, and art without anyone naming a subject.

A jump-rope craze that starts with one girl and a piece of string becomes a study in how kids learn from each other: they practice at home unprompted, they cheer the kid who gets one jump as loudly as the kid who gets forty, and eventually they take over turning the rope themselves, no longer needing an adult to hold the other end.

None of it was assigned, and none of it would fit on a report card. There's no test for whether a child cheers for the kid who got one jump, no rubric for two weeks spent on crawfish. Chelsey's case is that you can't compel this kind of learning with the perfect curriculum; you build the relationships, you invite it, and you wait.

In Episode 02, I sit down with Iman Cassells Alleyne, founder of Kind Academy in South Florida and creator of Launch Your Kind, a program that has helped 90+ microschools get off the ground. Iman's K–10 program spends the first two weeks of every school year without touching academics, and parents are stressed. By the end of the year, her neurodiverse learners have grown over a full "grade level" on 30 minutes a day of focused academic work.

We talk about what's actually happening in those first two weeks, why staging Hamilton with nine-year-olds teaches more history than a textbook, and what it took for the data to finally catch up with what she's been saying for a decade.

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.

In Episode 01, I sit down with Lauren Yacht and Sarah Lavezzo, founders and directors of Scholé Center for Innovative Education in Northern Virginia. We talk about what learning looks like inside a hybrid micro-school, why student ownership shows up in everything from service projects to school plays, and a moment in writing class that changed how a middle schooler saw himself.