Emaginos - Engaging Every Child Through Customizing Education
 Call us at: 571-222-7195
info@emaginos.com

Emaginos - Frequently asked Questions
It sounds like Emaginos is providing the technology and the curriculum.  How will being a part of the Emaginos program affect teachers’ ability to participate in conferences and professional associations and bring new ideas into their classrooms? Since there are two parts to the question, we will answer it in two parts.  
  • Teachers, administrators and school board members will continue to have the ultimate responsibility for what occurs in the classrooms in the district. They will be encouraged to attend conferences, subscribe to hard-copy and online professional materials and to be active in professional associations. If they come up with innovative and effective learning resources and build quality lessons upon them, they will immediately be able to use and validate them in their classrooms. In addition, they are encouraged to submit them to the Larick Discovery and Innovation Research Center (LDIRC) for further validation, acceptance and distribution. Staff members at the LDIRC will either validate the lesson or work with the submitter to ensure it meets educational and quality standards. At that point, the lesson will (with the submitter’s permission) be added to the Emaginos national database of educational resources and made available to all teachers on the system. (Emaginos is reviewing ideas for rewarding submitters whose lessons are accepted for distribution.)
  • It is Emaginos’ goal to provide a comprehensive technology-rich learning environment in every classroom/building. Some technology will be available in every room while other technology will be available as a shared resource within the school. If a school/teacher finds a new technology or a new use for an existing technology that is either not available or not in sufficient quantity to meet the school/classroom’s needs, the teacher/school will contact the LDIRC with a description of the innovation. The LDIRC will make the technology available and establish a research project to monitor the effectiveness of the innovation. If the innovation proves effective, it will be placed in the Emaginos learning resource database and made available to others (with the innovator’s permission).

How will Emaginos meet its commitment to continuously improve its curriculum?  
  • The Curriculum research unit at the Larick Discovery and Innovation Research Center (LDIRC) will be constantly reviewing the curriculum content looking for opportunities for improvement. If they discover a need, they will either look for an existing third-party resource that can be adapted to meet the needs, or they will look for an outside organization to collaborate with them in the development of the resource. In addition to discovering needs or issues on our own, we will encourage students, teachers, and administrators to provide suggestions.  

I’ve heard that the curriculum makes extensive use of small group project work. How will my child’s individual accomplishments and learning be measured?
  • In the Emaginos curriculum we make extensive use of scoring rubrics and teacher observation to complement the traditional measures of student learning. The rubrics are based upon Bloom’s taxonomy and allow the teacher to observe different levels of mastery based upon a list of criteria and student behaviors.  
  • In addition to the traditional assessments of content mastery, we also measure the students in a number of high performance skills such as innovation, creativity, communication, teamwork, leadership, reliability, and responsibility.
  • Each project is associated with a number of multi-disciplinary educational standards. The assessments ensure that every student’s performance is measured for every standard.  

We don’t have a computer at home. Will my child be at a disadvantage as a result?
  • We address this issue in two ways. The first is our longer school day and school year. These provide students more school time to have access to the computers we have at school. Our curriculum and schedule are designed to allow students to complete their schoolwork before leaving for the day. If a student is working on a project and wants to do extra learning at home, the school has portable laptop computers available for checkout and home use. 
  • Because we refresh our classroom technology every three years, we will have computers available to be refurbished and made available to students who apply for them. The district portal will provide an Internet connection to those homes as needed and qualified. 

If you don’t use textbooks, how do you ensure that the students cover all of the material?
  • First let’s dispel the myth that textbooks ensure that you cover all of the material. In any given year and subject, most teachers are lucky if they are able to cover even 80% of the materials in a textbook. Teachers are required to teach to the curriculum. The textbook is selected because it contains the material covered by the curriculum, and much more. As a result, teachers select those parts of the textbook that fit their curriculum requirements.
  • In the Emaginos model, we follow a curriculum map in every class. The curriculum map shows all of the disciplines on a single graphic, indicating where the interdisciplinary projects overlap. Each semester has a topical theme such as the environment or politics. The curriculum development team then selects the educational standards for each grade level and discipline that fit well into the theme. The projects and associated lessons and learning resources are then built to ensure that the students have the opportunity to master all of the standards. (The standards appear right on the map where both the teachers and students can see them. The maps are posted in every classroom so everyone knows what is expected. 
  • Textbooks have some well known limitations; the most often cited is that they go out of date. In today’s eco-friendly world, they “kill” a lot of trees. They are also very expensive. Unfortunately, most people are unaware of the most significant and yet insidious problem associated with their use. Textbooks create generations of passive, dependent, and bored learners.  
  • In the traditional educational setting, the school provides a textbook for each subject. The textbook tells the students what they will learn, provides the information for them to learn and then provides tests to determine if they have learned it. When a student graduates and is facing a problem or project in the real world, who will tell them what they will need to know to solve the problem? Who will tell them where to find it?  

Emaginos© provides a More Meaningful Way to Learn

  • In an Emaginos© Discovery and Innovation school setting, textbooks are not provided to students. Instead, the learning follows the pattern below:
  • A problem or project is assigned. 
  • The student’s first challenge is to determine what he or she needs to know to solve the problem.  
  • After that is determined, the student needs to figure out where that information is and how to access it.  
  • The student then determines which information is relevant and valid and which is not.  
  • The next step is to analyze the information and draw some conclusions.  
  • The last step is to present those conclusions to the rest of the project team and the teacher.  

  • In the Emaginos© Discovery and Innovation process the students learned the same content as they would have from a textbook, but because of the way they acquired and used the information, they will be better able to recall and use it later if they need it. Equally, if not more, important, they learned and used a set of learning and problem solving skills that prepared them to deal with projects that aren’t in the textbook but are in the workplace.
  • Students who have transferred into an Emaginos learning environment from a traditional textbook oriented classroom setting voice an interesting observation. They comment that in their old school, when the chapter ended, the students had to move to the next topic. They like the fact that with the Internet, there is no limit on their learning.  

What does a typical classroom look like?
  • When you look in on a typical Emaginos classroom, you will see students engaged in learning. The key word here is “engaged”. In a traditional classroom, the students are sitting passively being lectured to or answering questions directed to the whole class. In the typical Emaginos classroom, the students are working in small groups discussing questions and solving problems. There is a lot of unofficial peer tutoring going on. With the traditional peer tutor, one person is the tutor and another is the student. In the Emaginos environment, that is a more dynamic relationship wherein the roles of teacher and student shift with each question. As a result, all students have access to fellow students to tutor them when they need it. On the other hand, all students serve as tutors assisting their classmates if they are struggling.  
  • There is a lot of activity taking place so the classroom is not a silent place. But it is not noisy, it is busy. The teacher (and at the elementary level the aid and the volunteer) moves from group to group observing the group interactions and doing continuous assessments of each individual students level of mastery of the information. The student groups accept their responsibility to each other’s learning and work as a team to ensure that everyone in their group understands the materials. We have integrated many children with special needs right into these groups and the children thrive. Unless they are profoundly limited, the small groups provide excellent support for their classmates. We have even integrated students with vision and hearing challenges successfully. The parents of these children have exclaimed that their children are doing better in our setting than they did in the traditional school where they were pulled out for special services. The parents greatest joy comes from seeing their child feel like a normal part of the class, not “special”.  

You say that the students will receive “customized” education. Does that mean that every child in a classroom will be working on something different?  
  • The customization comes not from working on different things, but from working on the same things differently. In the small group, project-based setting, there is room for each student to use different resources to master the same content. The teacher has a wide variety of teaching/learning resources available to provide individual students as needed.  

How is the learning customized to meet my child’s needs?
  • The process begins with the interview and evaluation that every incoming student goes through upon entering the program. Individual strengths and weaknesses are identified at that time as well as a preliminary assessment of each student’s learning level in each discipline. We have found that the competency level in mathematics is the best initial indicator for grouping the students. Students are placed in classes with other students working at approximately the same level. This allows the teacher to conduct some full class activities with a minimal risk of frustrating or boring students who are either ahead of or behind the rest of the group.  
  • The groupings are dynamic and a student may move from one group to another or one class to another depending upon how slowly or quickly he or she grasps the material.
  • Most of the classroom activities are done in small groups. At the elementary level, each classroom has a teacher, a paraprofessional and a volunteer assigned. A typical elementary class will be divided into four groups with an adult working with three of them. The fourth group is students working individually but assisting each other as needed. Whenever a child assists another child, both of them learn the topic better. The teachers move from group to group, spending time with each during every class. If the class size is 30 then each group is 8 or fewer students. Within that small group environment, the teacher can find time to work individually with every student on a regular and frequent basis. When asked, students working in this environment unfailingly state that they have personal time with their teachers and the teachers truly understand their individual skills and needs.
  • In the upper grades, the students work together in learning teams within each classroom. At times the teacher will teach a traditional class following accepted best practices for the lesson. At other times, the students work together in teams and the teacher moves from group to group observing and participating in the work. This allows the teacher to spend individual time with students who need extra guidance and direction.
  • Most students with moderate special needs, including physical and learning disabilities can be integrated into these classrooms. In fact, they frequently thrive better than in a traditional classroom because our environment encourages peer assistance. As a result, the special needs students have many available resources to assist them. 

The school day and year are both longer than the traditional school. How is the additional time used?
  • In a traditional setting, some students go home from school and find a parent waiting to encourage and assist them with their homework. Other students may get home in time to care for siblings while their single parent works two jobs. The longer day includes some organized study time. This allows most students to complete their learning assignments during the school day. As a result, the disparity in home environments becomes less of an equity issue. Latchkey kids
  • The additional time also allows elective courses that focus on giving the students more opportunities to work on their high-performance skills. The arts are subjects that encourage creativity, leadership, discovery, and innovation – all characteristics highly valued in this globally competitive world.  
  • The third trimester allows the high school students to take additional courses – either at the school or with the local college or university. The school pays the tuition for the local junior college. We will have a senior this year that will get both her high school and Associates degree at the same time.
  • The longer day and year are particularly valuable to working parents who previously had to provide some supervision and activities for the children who got home before they did. It also reduces the cost of sending them off to “ summer camp”. Most importantly, the time between the end of one year and the start of the next is short enough that students don’t need to spend a couple of weeks getting back into the rhythm and habits of going to school.

If you don’t teach to the test, how do you know they will do well on high stakes exams (No Child Left Behind)?
  • By building our curriculum around the standards and then designing the projects and lessons to ensure that all of the standards are covered, we can be sure that everyone gets the chance to learn the materials. When you follow that with comprehensive standards-based assessments, you can know at any time which topics each individual student has mastered and which ones each of them need to work on. By working with the students in small groups and individually as needed, the teachers have a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each student. The Emaginos administrative software will allow the teachers to identify appropriate remedial learning resources to help students grasp concepts that are eluding them.  

How do the students in the program compare to their peers in the traditional schools in the community?
  • Students who start with the Emaginos program at an early age thrive in the environment throughout their K-12 careers. Students who transfer in from traditional schools in the 8th grade or above have often developed bad learning and discipline habits that take time to change. As a result, our test scores reflect those influences. The average API score for a student in the Tracy School District is 710. The District elementary API average is 685, while the Tracy Learning Center (TLC) – the Emaginos laboratory school) average score is 891. The District middle school average API score is 729. The TLC middle school average API score is 812. The District HS API average is 686 and the TLC comparable score is 680.  There is a measurable difference between students who come up through the Tracy Learning Center earlier grades and students who transfer in to the TLC from other schools. 

  •                                  English      Algebra       Geometry      Biology
  • District transfers       318            293               291              312
  • TLC promoted          364            333               309              340

  • As you can clearly see, one reason for the API scores in the high school not being as outstanding as the lower grades is the lowering effect of admitting transfer students from the traditional programs in the district. This effect was true for transfers at all high school grade levels. However, after a year in the program, their performance improves dramatically. Much of that behavioral change comes from peer mentoring and counsel. The student veterans of the TLC system are so pleased with the way they know things that they correct the inappropriate behaviors and bad habits of the students who transfer in.

The Tracy Learning Center (TLC) is a charter school.  Most charter school students perform better than those in the traditional public school for a number of reasons. What makes the TDILC different from or better than other charter schools?
The TLC is both like many charter schools and at the same time significantly different. It is like many other charter schools in the following ways:
  • Students (and their parents) have to choose to attend the school. As a result, we have the typical strong parental support you would expect.
  • Within some regulatory limits, the school has more opportunity to be creative and innovative than the traditional public schools in the way it delivers its educational programs.  
The TLC is different than most other charter schools in the following ways:
  • Everything we do at the Tracy school has to be capable of being replicable and scalable to the point that the total system can be delivered to every school in the country.  
  • Having parental support and making the best use of it are two different things. The TLC program includes a number of communications and participatory activities that build a strong sense of community between the students, teachers and parents.
  • The program must be capable of being delivered within the existing budget for the local school district. (The per-pupil cost must not exceed the same cost of a student in the public schools.)  
  • Other than the actual testing required for NCLB, the TLC does not consider or focus on preparation for the high-stakes tests. We focus on providing a broad and deep learning experience that assures every student masters all of the academic content standards. As a result, the students score very well on the tests without ever “preparing” for them.  

Just because the program works in a charter school, what makes you think it will work in a public school?
  • We are using a converted old public school building with retrained public school teachers and staff, working within existing local school district spending constraints.  
  • The students represent a diverse cross section of the local community with many of the same academic and social issues.
  •   What makes our program work so well is not that it is a charter school. It works because the comprehensive system of services and pedagogy empowers teachers and students to work together to learn. The teacher professionalism is remarkable. It exists not because we chose exceptional teachers, but because the system teaches, enables, and encourages those behaviors and then rewards them. (Of course we selected the best teachers from the pool that applied, but so does every school.)  
  • Our ultimate goal from the beginning has been not to just transform a single school, but to transform every school in the country. With that in mind, everything we have done in designing and building the system has as one of its constraints that it must be implementable in every public school.

How can you transform the school and pay the teachers more within the existing budgets?
  • It is no secret that there is a lot of redundancy and administrative overhead that does not directly effect what happens in the classroom. We will reduce the redundancies and manage much of the administrative activity more efficiently.  
  • We do not use textbooks – saving a lot of money.  
  • By taking over the entire technology infrastructure for the district, we can provide a better level of service for less money.  
  • But the biggest source of revenue will come from reallocating many of the categorical funds that presently fund special programs for a small percentage of the student population. We can provide a customized education to every student for slightly more than the typical district spends on special education today. (The profoundly challenged will still require more intensive attention and resources.)

What will the technology look like?
  • Every classroom and learning center (libraries, media centers, science labs, etc.) will have a computer for every two students plus a teacher’s desktop computer.  
  • Each school will have a number of carts with laptop computers available for lessons where all students in the class need individual access. These laptops will also be available for checkout by students who want to work from home but don’t have a computer.  
  • Each classroom will also contain a multifunction printer, scanner/copies as well as a projection system, digital still and video cameras. Everything will be networked and the students will all have storage on the server.  
  • Students will have email accounts (as will all the teachers and staff) for communicating. Internet access will be available everywhere the network is available. All of the technology will be refreshed every three years.  
  • “Old” computers will be refurbished and given to a local foundation set up through the district’s Citizen’s Community Council for distribution throughout the community based on criteria set at the local level. 

How will every student have free access to primary healthcare? (Part of a future phase)
  • To be successful both as a student and beyond into adulthood, an individual needs a quality education and good health. Many families are either uninsured or underinsured. The result is that many children delay getting treatment for ailments until they become acute. Earlier treatment might have been simple and inexpensive. As a result of the delay, the problem was exacerbated and the cure is more traumatic and expensive. These same families cannot go to a primary care physician because they cannot afford it. As a result, they end up in an emergency room where the treatment is much more expensive. Providing all school children access to primary healthcare will improve the availability of timely, quality, affordable, primary healthcare. Emaginos© addresses this issue in three phases. 
  • 1.Phase 1: Health and Wellness – Built into the Emaginos© curriculum is a series of health and wellness projects. These projects begin at the elementary level and continue throughout their academic lives. In addition to learning the lessons, the students also practice what they learn. They eat nutritious meals and get appropriate exercise.
  • 2.Phase 2: Expert System Diagnosis – Any student suffering an ailment can go online to the diagnostic expert system (assisted by the Emaginos-trained operator if needed) and answer a series of questions that will identify the possible cause of the problem and recommend a course of treatment. If the condition is determined to be too serious for a simple remedy, the recommendation will be to contact the school nurse.
  • 3.Phase 3: The School/Community Nurse – This phase will be implemented in three steps.  
  • a.Step 1: School nurse – Working with staffing experts, we will determine the optimum number of nurses required to serve all of the students. These nurses will be located strategically at call centers in the district. Schools that do not have their own on-site nurse will have access to the nurse via a telemedicine system connected to the Emaginos© backbone. Sites with the telemedicine system will be staffed by a trained operator. 
  • b.Step 2: Community healthcare – The program will be made available 24/7 to the entire community to provide service to anyone needing after-hours nursing care. Staffing will be designed to meet the demands as determined by usage. For example, the facility may be staffed from 8:00AM to 11:00PM. After 11:00PM there will be a telephone number that will reach an on-call service provider who will meet the patient at the nearest available nurses office. If needed, a telemedicine consult to the nurses on duty will be made.
  • c.Step 3: Third party billing and services – If the ailment is beyond the scope of the traditional school nurse function, the patient will be connected telemedically to a doctor on call at some remote site. This service will be billed to a third party medical insurance provider.

A rollout of this magnitude is logistically impossible. How can that be managed? 
  • Plans are well underway to make such a rollout possible. It is very doable simply because of the years of effort refining the approach and modeling it so that it scales more easily. 
  • Emaginos’ intention is to relay on a global systems integrator managed services provider to deliver, maintain, manage, and support (break / fix) the technology at the local district levels

Isn’t such a rollout program complicated?
  • Yes, it is. In order to begin the transformation with the minimum of resistance, Emaginos will work with voluntary early adopters for the first 500,000 teachers. As the program grows in recognition, it is expected that teachers will come to quickly appreciate this extraordinary learning environment. Incentives will be given to early successful adopters.

Countless commissions and study groups have studied the problems and recommended fixes but the K-12 system remains largely unchanged and continues to become less effective or relevant as each semester passes. What makes Emaginos confident it can address these challenges?
  • Emaginos is working to support the Commission to Transform K-12 Public Education in its efforts to transform all of the schools in the country and customize education for every child. The Commission is not another study group. It is implementing a plan to transform K-12 Education within ten years and within existing budgets.  

Aren’t there many stove-piped, isolated groups trying to fix the problem by implementing a series of targeted reforms. What makes Emaginos different?  
  • If there is one unifying finding coming out of an assortment of recent commission reports, it is recognition that the present K-12 Public Education system is broken and can’t be fixed. The American education system was initially designed for an agrarian economy and modified slightly to support a manufacturing economy. It does a very poor job of preparing students for a global, information-rich economy.  
  • The system has endured many reforms over the years; to the point where it no longer operates as a system but instead as a group of loosely joined programs. The Emaginos solution began with a clean slate and integrated a series of best practices and sound educational policies to build a system tuned to the needs of a 21st century workforce.

How will Emaginos prove it is delivering results?
  • Emaginos has implemented a continuous Improvement process for the entire system. The company will gather information throughout the operations and provide real-time access to information and reports. Its model for empowering the teachers to customize the learning experience for every child is based on the Quality Circle principles with groups of teachers forming the self-managing groups.  

How will Emaginos use this information?
  • To make optimal use of the information, Emaginos is establishing The Larick Discovery and Innovation Research Center. Education research typically occurs at universities and focuses on specific elements of the overall system. Recent independent studies have clearly demonstrated that it is not enough to optimize the individual elements of the system. The education system research center will have nine integrated units.  
The nine units are:
  • Leadership
  • Curriculum
  • Staff Development
  • Centers of Excellence
  • Management Software development
  • Information services
  • Administration and support
  • Wellness and healthcare 
  • Research consortia and business partnerships

The teachers’ unions have been resistant to change. How will you get them on board?
  • Unlike many of the recent reform efforts that imposed mandates on teachers without giving them the controls they needed to succeed, the Emaginos program empowers teachers and creates a learning environment where they can have a direct impact on student performance. As a result, the Emaginos program is endorsed by the teachers’ unions.  

Limited funding is available for additional or new programs. How will Emaginos fund all of these programs?
  • Emaginos will provide all of the suggested special programs for target subgroups to every student as a part of the basic program within existing budgets – at no incremental cost.  
  • The program is designed and proven to operate within existing funding limits – with some regulatory changes to allow some of the existing funding to be used for different purposes.