What should the MVP for a school look like?

Prototyping our way to the next best step.

Hi all,

Part of my vision in starting the School of the Possible was to create a culture of trial-and-error, learning-by-doing, a culture that can tolerate lots of bumbling and mistakes along the way, something that is purposeful and playful at the same time.

Back in the days when I worked for a newspaper, I had the privilege of interviewing the late Bob Cassilly, who created the City Museum in St. Louis. The museum hadn’t opened yet, and it was still in many ways a construction site, but there were already kids running around.

Sometime I will share the whole story of that amazing visit, but one thing Bob said to me that I will never forget is this:

“The illusion of danger is essential for any kind of adventure.”

Make no mistake, we are on an adventure together. The School of the Possible is a construction site, a work in progress, as many of you have already discovered. It is a pot-luck, pop-up school. We have no backers and no funding, as yet we don’t even have teachers or classes! All we have is a collection of people sharing a common dream. Well, that was true but that’s changing today.

I hope that the School of the Possible will always be unfinished, under construction. I want people to know when they join us that this is a space with no railings, a place for risk-taking, part of the underground, like an abandoned building that has been repurposed as a School.

The metaphor in my mind for what we are doing is a line of people walking through a dark forest at night, feeling their way, holding hands, and calling out to each other as they go. An adventure, a walk from the edge of the known into the unknown.

But I digress. Back to the topic of this note, the Minimum Viable Product.

If you haven’t heard the term MVP before, it stands for Minimum Viable Product. The idea of an MVP is that the best way to learn about what customers value is to design an experiment to test and validate your value proposition.

If you were starting school in your neighborhood, what would you do? My guess is that you would tell all your friends and neighbors you were having a class, and invite them into your living room (or kitchen, or garage, or garden, or the neighborhood community center, or an abandoned building, depending on what you wanted to teach), and you would just start teaching. Am I right?

So that’s what I have decided to do. Starting on October 10th, I will be leading our first course.

I say leading, not teaching, because we are learning as we go (no railings!). What is the course about? It’s going to be about developing your course. A course for course creators, creating courses, of course!

It will work like a creative writing workshop. If you decide to enroll, you will join a cohort of people with a shared commitment to develop and launch our courses in a six-week period. We will workshop our courses together, test our ideas, map our learning territory, and develop our learning journeys. We will test our gear and tech, figure it out together, and build each other’s confidence along the way.

It’s not free, and that’s by design, because in this first cohort I want to work with people who are committed enough to put this on their calendar, show up, and follow through. But it’s not going to break your bank either. The early-bird discount is $100 if you sign up before the end of September, and after that $200. It’s a filter, that’s all. If $100 is really more than you can afford, do send me a note privately and tell me. Cost should not be a barrier for this, and if you want to be part of it we will find a way.

The course will start on Tuesday, October 10, and run for six weeks. That means that in mid-November we will be announcing our first slate of courses in possibility!

I hope you will join me in this experiment. I don’t know if there will be five of us or five hundred, but I’m looking forward to it either way, and excited to see what comes next.

Enroll in the course creation course.

Until next time,