Project Leo
Why the Da Vinci Institute is building a Career Connected Learning Platform
Over the last decade I have scoured the country for opportunities to impact education beyond my classroom. I suffered from the problem that so many people do with dreams of helping in the education space. My ego was constantly pulling me into what seemed like big impact projects where I thought I could fix all the big problems in education.
After graduating from Johns Hopkins and working for Saba Software (human capital management) as a technical consultant I was drawing into teaching and coaching at my alma mater, El Segundo High School. There I launched an engineering program at ESHS and a K-8 feeder engineering curriculum, collaborated with UCLA CRESST, worked to improve science and math pedagogy at dozens of districts through LMU CMAST, launched my first startup Eno Software where we developed the mastery-based grading platform GRASP, and coached FIRST robotics Team 1759 all while coaching football and baseball. Family took me back to Maryland where I launched SEED (Social Entrepreneurship, Engineering, and Design) at one of the top private schools in the country while immersing myself in Project Zero and presenting at WISSIT (The Washington International School Summer Institute for Teaching). As the pandemic took hold of the country in 2019, I homeschooled my three boys and launched my second startup Impact Connections which pivoted to focus on Learning Pod solutions for families impacted by the pandemic. After some floundering as an entrepreneur, I realized I needed more experience and joined on with Spike Lab and Synthesis School as an early employee before joining on full time with 2Sigma School.
I was attracted to phrases like “revolutionize education” and “teach the world advanced computer science.” The hard lessons from all of the successes and failures in my winding journey humbled me and made me look to more local impact. This summer I found myself back where I started in El Segundo.
At El Segundo our goal is to put together an amazing team at with a wide range of backgrounds and complementary skills sets that allowed us to quickly identify the biggest challenges we have of implementing our mission - seeking to improve the quality of life for our students by cultivating a caring culture, building future-ready skills, developing meaningful partnerships, and creating impact in our work to solve complex educational problems.
We have been tracking the Big Blur movement and reflected on what some schools are doing well to prepare every student for whatever path they decide to take, and what we can do better to prepare every student to successfully begin a career as soon as they graduate from high school. We noticed that there is no central location that connects the four key stakeholders (students, teachers, professionals, and school leaders) through the professional competencies that students need to master in order to be successful. We hope to build that central connecting platform by solving one key problem at a time and that this central platform will increase Education Productivity for all. This is what we are calling Project Leo.
Project Leo will start as an internal platform for teachers to connect with professionals and identify the most relevant competencies they need to teach students that are in their career pathway from the latest job data. Professionals will share their availability by choosing from 12 engagement options, while teacher can search these professionals by industry, competency, and availability. By solving this first job to be done for teachers we hope to get a high level of adoption. Teachers will also be able to build projects around professional competencies, which will lead to student completing projects and building portfolios that are built around professional competencies that are in high demand. From there we will build data dashboards that school leaders need and additional features that students, teachers, and professionals want thanks to our unique position of being embedded in a school and having full access to students, teachers, and school leaders on a daily basis.
We believe that every student deserves to be prepared for a successful career without college. Students should have the opportunity to learn the most valuable skills in class everyday while building a portfolio of projects that can lead them to launching their own company, novel research, or career in rising industry. By creating the first version of Project Leo we will do this for every student. The next phase will be to launch Project Leo as an open-source project that any school can access. We don’t claim to have all the answers, but we do have ideas that we think are worth sharing.
I am extremely grateful of every hard-earned lesson throughout my journey in education that will allow me to build Project Leo. I am even more thankful that I have been able to come back to one of the best charter school networks in my backyard and work with the amazing people on Project Leo. This blog will be updated on a weekly basis throughout our journey. We hope you will join us along the way.