Facebook Helps Develop

Software That Puts

Students in Charge of
Their Lesson Plans

By NATASHA SINGERand MIKE ISAACAUG. 9, 2016

Facebookis out to upend the traditional studentteacher
relationship.
On Tuesday, Facebook and Summit Public Schools, a
nonprofit charter school network with headquarters in
Silicon Valley, announced that nearly 120 schools planned
this fall to introduce a free studentdirected learning system
developed jointly by the social network and the charter
schools.
Rather than have teachers hand out class assignments, the
FacebookSummit learning management system puts
students in charge of selecting their projects and setting their
pace. The idea is to encourage students to develop skills, like
resourcefulness and time management, that might help them
succeed in college.
As parents and kids and teachers get access to this type of
learning, I think more and more will want it, Diane
Tavenner, the cofounder and chief executive of Summit
Public Schools, said in a telephone interview.
The Facebookbacked platform is entering the public school
software market when rival tech giants like Googleand
Microsoft have already established big footprintsin
education, in an attempt to build brand loyalty among
students early.

In June, Google said more than 60 million students and

teachers worldwide used Google Apps for Education, a suite
of free products that includes Gmail and Google Drive for
documentsharing. Many other schools use Microsoft
productivity tools and Skype, the videoconferencing tool, in
classrooms. Amazon also plans to soon introduce Amazon
Inspire, a site where teachers can share free instructional
materials.
But the SummitFacebook system, called the Summit
Personalized Learning Platform, is different.
The software gives students a full view of their academic
responsibilities for the year in each class and breaks them
down into customizable lesson modules they can tackle at
their own pace. A student working on a science assignment,
for example, may choose to create a project using video, text
or audio files. Students may also work asynchronously,
tackling different sections of the years work at the same
time.
The system inverts the traditional teacherled classroom
hierarchy, requiring schools to provide intensive oneonone
mentoring and coaching to help each student adapt.
This summer, more than 1,500 educators and leaders of
public, private and charter schools participating in the
program, called Summit Basecamp, attended sessions to
learn how to use the system. Among the 19 schools that
introduced the new learning approach last year, at least a few
educators and administrators reported a steep learning
curve.
There were many points where we werent sure the Summit
Basecamp model was what our students needed, said Claire
Fisher, the principal of Urban Promise Academy, a public
middle school in Oakland, Calif., which introduced the

platform in its sixthgrade classes.

By the end of the school year, however, 31 percent of the
schools sixth graders were reading at or above their grade
level, compared with just 9 percent in the fall. That was a
larger improvement in reading than students in seventh and
eighth grades, which did not use the platform, Ms. Fisher
said.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebooks chief executive, and his wife,
Dr. Priscilla Chan, were the catalysts for the partnership. It is
the couples most public education effort since 2010 when
they provided $100 million to help overhaul public schools
in Newark, a topdown effort that ran into a local opposition.
The FacebookSummit partnership, by contrast, is more of a
groundup effort to create a national demand for studentdriven learning in schools. Facebook announced its support
for the system last September; the company declined to
comment on how much it is spending on it. Early this month,
Summit and Facebook opened the platform up to individual
teacherswho have not participated in Summits extensive
onsite training program.