What Are We Up To?

John Danner

Co-Founder

With Flourish, we are going to bring AI to classrooms and figure out what works. By "works", I mean that kids and parents love it, kids learn the non-cognitive skills which are going to help them be happy, productive adults, and our academic results should be great.

Notice that I put academics third. I believe that all of the skills we take for granted in schools like perseverance, agency, teamwork, empathy, will be the ones that help us navigate the age of AI most effectively, as opposed to narrow academic pursuits. We are a project-based learning school, engaging children in projects which require those social skills without losing the academic rigor we had at Rocketship. We've built a "Coach" which is basically a robot with no screen, that talks to students as they work.

Our thinking is that this is the onramp to allowing for small-dose remediation as students work. We think that is going to be sufficient to help students get unstuck and figure out what they need to do 80-90% of the time, just as we adults do when we are working. When it becomes clear that more than a small dose of remediation is needed, we will set aside a separate time to do that without ruining the flow of the student’s work.

And we are building this as a for-profit network of schools. We are a public benefit corporation so that we can hold our mission of making learning joyful with the same importance as we do returns to investors. One thing I learned about non-profits is that they are anti-scale. They are amazing when you start out, but once they get bigger, they are so hard to grow. Fundraising is 10x harder, great executives much harder to find, a constant pressure to sacrifice growth for quality, when the real answer is to balance the two correctly.

We are hiring our first Operations Manager (https://lnkd.in/gDYiTxRd) and our first Guide (https://lnkd.in/ge82f8cG) as we speak for our August opening. If you know some great people who want to leap over tall buildings to create a great learning environment for kids, please let us know!