Matchbook believes that the key to effective learning lies in effective teaching. Widely published research shows that a student receiving a highly effective teacher 4 years in a row will completely eliminate the achievement gap.

Our unique value proposition lies in personalizing TEACHING. We believe that if we personalize the experience for professional high-quality teachers—in other words not just focus on the teacher’s capacity to customize daily instruction via technology, but also and more importantly enable a teacher to have autonomy, mastery and purpose over their profession and daily execution—this will lead to students who experience autonomy, mastery and purpose in their learning which in turn will lead to higher student motivation and performance. Technology and the hybrid model become the enabler and not the end goal.

How will Matchbook create personalized teaching in our hybrid schools to turnaround their performance? Personalized teaching consists of many facets that we group into two broad categories that represent Matchbook’s two core competencies: i) hybrid design and ii) hybrid coaching.

Matchbook’s hybrid design refers to all the elements of our hybrid school that make it a school even before the first student is received and the first class is taught. This would include assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the existing staff, recruiting and retaining new staff, cultivating the unique ability and goals of each faculty member, assessing the current learning capacity of each student and developing trajectories to monitor and manage within cohorts. Our hybrid design would also include calibrating school policy, school calendar, and school budget allocations to align to Matchbook’s hybrid themes of personalized instruction. Our hybrid coaching will create daily, weekly and monthly data reports upon which our coaching can be provided for customizing lesson plans and real time intervention, creating space and time for teachers to collaborate, students to collaborate and other peer to peer opportunities for learning, community development and capacity creation. Our hybrid coaching creates teacher training and assessments based on where on the continuum a teacher currently resides in their ability to personalize instruction for the students they are responsible for and scaffolding them to higher levels of performance and mastery.

We believe that most hybrid and turnaround models completely ignore these aspects above that we feel are critical to unlocking the potential of each and every student because they largely only indirectly improve a teacher’s performance by bypassing them altogether in favor of the student. Matchbook seeks to deploy hybrid solutions by deeply engaging teachers in the process of personalized instruction leveraging BOTH technology and a teacher’s unique motivations, abilities and capacity for the benefits of each and every student.

We seek to apply our hybrid school model in either a “Turnaround” or “Restart” model under Race to the Top and School Improvement Grant Guidelines. Matchbook’s pledge is to build the capacity of the turnaround schools under its leadership, NOT by creating charter schools or permanently replacing all staff, but rather building the capacity of the schools’ teachers and principals to customize our hybrid design to fit the unique needs of their students, faculty and community leveraging marketplace ready options for learning management systems and online curriculums, all the while focusing on building the capacity of the adults in the building to manage the technology as a means to an end (all students progressing at grade level) and not an end in itself.