Blog — Kaleidoscope

What is structured agency?

What is structured agency?

Skills like storytelling may feel magical once you’ve mastered them, but the path to mastery is anything but magical: students build skills through structured practice. At Kaleidoscope, our approach–selecting powerful ideas and skills, then teaching them in a way that students can translate into useful knowledge and action—is intended to cultivate what we call structured agency.

How We'll Use ChatGPT in our Persuasive Writing Class

How We'll Use ChatGPT in our Persuasive Writing Class

Persuasive Writing teacher and award-winning writer Edie Abraham-Macht shares six ways we plan on incorporating the new AI tool ChatGPT into our Persuasive Writing class—including to help students edit their own writing, to provide feedback on student writing, and to assist with an understanding of perspective and voice.

What we learned in 2022

What we learned in 2022

2022 was a year of growth and experimentation for Kaleidoscope. We discuss the biggest changes we made this year, including scaling our approach to teach larger classes; experimenting with interactive async learning and workshop modules; investigating the links between education, democracy, and dynamism; and honing our approach to curriculum design.

10 curriculum changes we made in 2022 to achieve our holy grail

10 curriculum changes we made in 2022 to achieve our holy grail

We discuss 10 curriculum changes we made in 2022 in service of our biggest goal: that student learning will continue to compound after a course ends. Overall, we’ve worked to create more streamlined, engaging and tightly woven curricula that better support students & teachers and reflect our organizational commitments.

What High School Math Could Be: Retargeting Ambition 🏹

What High School Math Could Be: Retargeting Ambition 🏹

Of the four core subjects, high school math has the highest ambitions—but also the most misplaced. The result of our default sequence is that students graduate high school unable to apply math to help them make better decisions across a range of contexts, both personal and professional. In this piece we contemplate what math could be—and why it matters for us all.