Michelle Baldwin is a Lead Teacher at Anastasis Academy in Centennial, Colorado. She believes in inspiring students to follow their natural curiosity and take ownership of their learning through inquiry, problem-based and experiential learning, and the Arts.

 

I’ve known Michelle for many years always meeting up with her at different conferences. When I talked to Michelle at the Digital Badge summit, she shared some exciting things that were happening at her school. So, of course, I wanted to have a conversation with her. Below are excerpts from the podcast:

 

Can you share your background and your family?

I was born and lived in Omaha, Nebraska. I went into teaching as a 7-12 music educator for six years, then I started to lose my voice and didn’t have enough opportunities to see my children. Being a music educator is time intensive, and I found myself at the school all the time. I decided I wanted to see my children grow up too. I went into the corporate world for a while and did some technology training and that’s where I got into all that techie thing. I remember thinking around 2000-2001 that there was so much potential for education. After that, I went into technology staff development and helped teachers use technology in their classrooms. Then it wasn’t long before I missed kids and needed to get back into the classroom. I taught elementary music for a couple of years. At that time (2009-2011), three of our four kids had already graduated high school. All four of our children are now in their mid-twenties. We are expecting a grandchild in December. Three of our children are still in Nebraska; two are in Omaha and the other in Lincoln. Our youngest daughter is in Lenexa, Kansas (works in Overland Park).

Photo by M. Stokes Photography

Then, my wonderful friend, Kelly Tenkeley said: “I think I would like to start a school.” She explained school is starting to take the joy out of learning and how kids are so naturally curious when they come to us. After being in school, they are just going through the motions. So we talked back and forth for a while and I said, “if you build it, I will come.” She did and my husband said, let’s move to Colorado. Colorado is beautiful so it was not a hardship to move here. Even though our children are not here, we aren’t that far away and visit them often.

 

What is the background and philosophy of Anastasis Academy?

Kelly started the school August 2011. We really wanted to start with that piece of each child where you know every kids’ name. Kelly has written many blog posts how she came to think how we would design the school, how she wanted to have it run on a daily basis. It starts with the kids. We don’t do grade levels so we have mixed-age classrooms. The way that we place the children with a teacher is based on where they are social, emotionally, and academically and their peers are. The way that I do it that I have 5 to 7-year-olds. The next class there are 7 to 10-year-olds and so on. We are a K-8 school with five-year-olds up to fourteen-year-old kids. We have a lot of overlap age-wise in classes throughout the school. That’s a big change for a lot of kids. We don’t do homework. Everything kids need to do they do during the school day. We honor the time they have with families and the learning that happens outside of the school. We don’t need to monopolize that time. That again is something different for kids. We are a 1:1 iPad and BYOD school so we have kids who bring in their laptop or whatever device the kids need for the tasks.

Using @seesaw to document our learning about the bean seeds.

 

How do you build the culture and help kids develop the structures?

We call it from day one the first week or month our detox tim...