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.

 Welcome to What We See, conversations across indie education with micro schools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss.

I'm Tomis Parker, and this is the introduction to a conversation series called What We See. Here's what it is: Over the next several months, I'm going to be sitting down with people doing some of the most interesting work in education today; micro-school founders, homeschool parents, hybrid school educators, people who've left or maybe never even joined the conventional education system and are building something else, something they believe in, something hard to capture in conventional terms.

I wanna know what they see in their work, what learning actually looks like when you're paying attention to a kid for hours every day, week after week, year after year. What surprises them, what changes their mind, what they wish more people understood. And I wanna do it in a way that lets the work itself come through, not a sales pitch, not a manifesto, just real conversations with people who are doing the thing.

Here's why I'm making this. I've spent the last 15 years in micro schools and self-directed learning environments, mostly with Agile Learning Centers, the network that I co-founded in 2013, and I've spent the last decade working with ALC Mosaic in Charlotte, watching kids build lives full of learning that no test could measure and no transcript could fully capture.

What I really believe is that learning can't be proven by tests or grades. Learning happens everywhere, and it's revealed by people who witness it and experience it. The conventional education system has spent a century convincing people otherwise, and families and educators all over the country are increasingly seeing through that, leaving conventional schools and building something that looks much more like what learning has actually always been.

The thing that's been missing is a way to communicate the value of all of this. Tests and grades were built for a model that these folks have left behind, so work that's happening in these microschools and home schools and pods and hybrids is rich and real, but it's hard to make visible to the broader world. The people doing this work end up underestimated. The movement ends up underestimated, and the truth about what's happening gets reduced to political talking points or anecdotes, or worse, comparisons to the very system that this work is trying to leave behind. That's the gap that I've been trying to think about, and it's the reason for these conversations.

I want this series to be a place where the breadth and depth of what's happening in our movement gets seen, where practitioners can speak in their own voices about what they're doing and why, where listeners, whether you're a parent considering this for your kid or an educator thinking about leaving the system or a funder or a policymaker trying to understand what's happening or just someone curious about how kids actually learn can hear directly from people doing the work.

Episodes are conversational, hopefully about 25 to 30 minutes. New episodes every week or so. We'll see. If this resonates with you, feel free to subscribe wherever you're listening. Share it with someone you think will enjoy it. Thanks for listening, and enjoy the first episode.