How do Alpha School workshops develop personalized learning and AI tutoring?

Traditional school is broken. It's outdated, full of busy work, and sadly for our kids, often a waste of time. But what if I told you there's a school where students focused on academics for only two hours a day, but still easily outperform their peers in traditional school? What if I told you the school has no teachers, and students learn academics through an AI tutor, on AI apps that give each student a one-to-one personalized mastery-based academic journey that guarantees success? My name is Mackenzie Price, and I'm the co-founder of 2-Hour Learning, a revolutionary new learning model that is transforming education as we know it. In the next few minutes, I'm gonna dive into this concept of 2-Hour Learning, showing you how it works, and the academic results you can expect. We are going to use data from Alpha School, the flagship campus that first implemented 2-Hour Learning. At Alpha, we commit to parents that their child will learn twice as much in two hours per day as they would in six hours of traditional school. Before we begin, I want to start with a couple disclaimers. First, some people are looking for a magic software ed-tech solution. This is not it. We believe that ed-tech is only 10% of the solution, while 90% is having a motivated student. We don't have academic teachers with 2-Hour Learning. Instead, we have guides, and they spend their day motivating and supporting students as they become self-driven learners. The other key to motivation in 2-Hour Learning is that we give students their most valuable resource back, time. They spend only two hours in school doing academics, and the rest of the school day is spent developing life skills, like leadership, teamwork, public speaking, financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and socialization, by doing engaging, active workshops. Second, this system doesn't work for everyone. We find it works great for 80 to 90% of kids. Let's jump into the results. These are phenomenal results that often lead to some skepticism, and I will dive deep into the how so you can understand how it works. We are going to start with our standardized test results. MAP is a nationwide standardized test that millions of students take. This is the third-party test we tell parents to use to hold us accountable for K-8. We use SAT and Advanced Placement Tests for high school. This MAP report is for grades K-8 for the 2023-24 school year. This shows how we did at each grade level and in each subject. If you look at the Spring Achievement column, which measures how much a student knows, you can see that most of our classes are in the top 1% for every subject. Amazing results for a school with no academic teachers. Here it is in another format. One of the first questions we often get is how do you measure 2X learning? We use MAP as our third-party grader. MAP measures how much students learn each year. At Alpha, we will double those scores. Let's take a couple examples. As you can see in this grid, the 50th percentile fifth grader goes up four points in math in a year. At Alpha, that student will go up eight points. Or the 99th percentile seventh grader goes up seven points. At Alpha, that student will go up 14 points. That grid is for all grades, all percentiles. Here is an individual student. We take these MAP tests three times a year to track learning. Let's segment this MAP data to show different cohorts. This first one is by achievement. Our average student was just over 2X learning. Our top two-thirds averaged 2.6 times, and our top 20% averaged almost four times faster learning. How do advanced students do at Alpha? This is a chart of students' age grade level versus their knowledge grade level as determined by MAP. We put the student in the highest knowledge grade where they are still in the top 10% in the nation. These results are unbelievable to most parents. All we can say is your child is capable of so much more than they are doing. They just aren't given the material in traditional school. With an AI tutor, students can move as fast as they are capable of learning. The sky's the limit. What if a student is behind? Our model excels at taking children who are behind and enabling them to catch up. Here are the results from a group of seven boys who were two years behind and needed to catch up. They learned 4.6 times faster and completed two entire grade levels in six months. What about low SES students? Alpha has a campus in Brownsville, Texas, which has one of the poorest school districts in the country. Our low SES students there learned 2.1 times faster. Here's the thing about an AI tutor. It doesn't care if a student is white, black, or brown. It doesn't care if a student is rich or poor. It doesn't care if a student is in the 15th percentile or the 85th percentile. It is infinitely patient. We are often asked if kindergartners can really use AI tutors and apps. When we started Alpha, we didn't have a kindergarten class because we thought they were too young to learn via apps. We found out we were wrong and our youngest learners excel in this environment. These are the MAP scores for our kindergarten class at the end of the year. As you can see, almost all of the students are in the top 1%, both in how much they know and how fast they are learning. I know we are focused on kindergarten through eighth grade, but I want to spend a little bit of time on high school. These are our students who have been using two-hour learning the longest. In some cases, they haven't had an academic teacher in 10 years. In high school, MAP is not as relevant. SAT and advanced placement are the standardized tests we use. Our average SAT score is 1470. 90% of our students get fours or fives on APs. We had our first graduating class this year, only a dozen, and we discovered that colleges love these self-driven learners. They were accepted at Stanford, Vanderbilt, USC, UCL London, NYU Shanghai, the University of Texas, University of Austin, Howard University, Northeastern, and FIT. Half were national merit scholars or commended scholars. Five were AP scholars with distinction highest honor. These academic results across K through 12 are amazing. And the next thought is, wow, you must burn these kids out with tons of class time and tons of homework. Well, here are the actual number of hours that Alpha students spend each day on their academics. As you can see, the average is less than two hours a day. On the left side, you see that some students are over two hours, but not one is over three. Those students over two are either catching up or getting way ahead. This is where the crazy disbelief hits. How can they be learning so much and doing it in so little time? Our experience as parents and the schooling that we went through makes this seem impossible. So that leads to the next part. Why and how does this work? First of all, a disclaimer. This has been a process that we've been working through for the past 10 years since our first school opened in 2014, and we are presenting it as super crisp and clean, but it is a messy process. We tell parents to expect results, not polish. I want to set expectations that two-hour learning is leading edge, and there are hiccups in the technology, but we deliver the results you have just seen even when the tech glitches. Thousands of learning science papers have been written about how students can best learn. Benjamin Bloom's Two Sigma Problem is a seminal paper. His research came out 40 years ago when I was in grade school. All of these papers describe how students can learn two times, five times, 10 times faster. Unfortunately, all of these papers start or end with, this doesn't work in a standard teacher in front of a classroom model. This is the core of how we work. You have to take the teacher in front of the classroom out. No one has ever been willing to do this before. Can you imagine starting a school and saying, we aren't going to have any academic teachers? Well, we did, and hundreds of Alpha Austin parents were willing to make their kids guinea pigs for the past 10 years, which is what enabled this to happen. Thanks to them, your child can take advantage of this. Let's take two learning science examples. We will use ones from Bloom's Two Sigma paper. Individualized tutoring and individualized learning plans. Example number one of why the teacher in front of the classroom model doesn't work. 80% of a standard school classroom, especially post-COVID, does not have the same background knowledge. Some students are behind, some are at grade level, and some are ahead. A teacher can't possibly give individual lessons to each kid when they have a group of 20 plus students, but an AI tutor can. For example, we had a new eighth grader join the school who was behind academically, though she and her parents weren't really certain how big of an issue it was. But if we put this student in eighth grade material based on her age and year in school, it's going to be too hard, and the student will quickly feel stupid. Instead, the AI tutor was able to assess where she should be and put her in fifth grade material. Putting a student in the right level of material and providing them with an individualized learning plan instills confidence, shows they have the ability to learn, and with one extra hour of work, can catch up to grade level. This student was able to move up quickly from fifth grade, and by the end of her first year at Alpha, she was academically ready for high school, which saved years of struggle for her. Mastery, example number two of why the teacher in front of the classroom model doesn't work. Mastery learning is a well-known learning science concept that boils down to don't put students in material that's over their head. If you haven't mastered the basics, don't do the advanced. This requires that you give the student as much time as required to master the material before moving them on. Unfortunately, a standard teacher in front of the classroom model can't handle that. The teacher has to teach a lesson plan each day, moving on to new concepts as the school year progresses. If some students don't understand or sort of understand, the teacher still needs to move on. This leads to students who only understand 70 to 75% of the material being pushed into more advanced lessons, where they get stuck and discouraged. If you can only get 70% of division problems correct, you're gonna really struggle in fractions, which require mastery of division and multiplication. So that is the learning science theory behind why two-hour learning works. By learning with an AI tutor, students receive individualized learning plans that allow them to learn at the pace and level that works for them. They learn a mastery. Now, let's get real tactical and detailed. How long does it take to learn a subject? In standard school, there are 180 school days, usually an hour a day in class plus homework. Here's an alpha chart of the number of lessons in each grade, how long each lesson takes, and total time by students. As you can see, third grade language has about 100 lessons. You also see that the average student only takes 16 minutes to do each lesson, and the total number of hours to do all the lessons is 40 hours. Now, I can tell that some of you are in the fast math group. You wanna point out that it should only take about 25 hours, not 40 hours. Why are they different? Well, when students get stuck in a lesson, the AI struggle detector will help the student by giving them some easier lessons that help them through their stuck points. So students end up doing more than the minimum lessons, and some days a student might not be focused. They're messing around, they're distracted, just not feeling it. But on average, they can finish the entire grade level in 40 hours. Let's break that down. If we used one hour classes, the students would be finished in less than two months. We only use 30 minutes, so it takes 80 days for the student to finish. There are 180 days in the school year, so a student needs to finish a grade in 90 days if they're going to do two grades in one year. 80 days fits comfortably in the 90. Take some test days and absences, et cetera. You can see, it's doable. And once they master third grade, they can move on to fourth grade for the second 90-day period. And there are 93 lessons that take 15 minutes each. That is how students can easily learn twice as much in only two hours a day. Let's now dive into when it doesn't work. First, if the student doesn't have the fast math needed for more advanced material, if they haven't memorized addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division tables, they can't learn in two hours. They will have to go back and memorize them. If a student is in our program, they will automatically be given lessons and time to memorize these concepts. This is often something new students learn, that the fastest way forward is to go back, master the basics, and then when they have a strong foundation, more advanced work goes faster. Second, if the student doesn't engage with the app, if the student refuses to use the app or uses it incorrectly, like typing D-D-D-D into the math problems, then our system doesn't work. We see this as a motivation problem, and that is what guides do all day. Motivate and emotionally support students. They will work to find ways to motivate your child to engage. Third, and probably the most challenging for two-hour learning to overcome, if parents are not philosophically aligned with the model, this can cause issues with the student engaging. That is why we believe it is important for parents to get educated about how two-hour learning works and to see results so that they can determine if they are excited about supporting their child to become a self-driven learner or if they prefer a teacher-led approach. How do we spend the 120 minutes in two-hour learning? We use the Pomodoro technique of four sessions of 25 minutes each in math, science and social science, language and writing, and reading. The additional 20 minutes is predominantly spent on math, but includes additional learning concepts, learn-to-learn, test-taking strategies, and depth-of-knowledge exercises. One note, science and language take up about half the time that math and reading do. Once a student is finished with their science-language material, we give them history, social science, and writing lessons. There are breaks, including recess, in the two hours. What is the student's experience during these two hours? Students go onto their individual computers and log into a dashboard called Dash. Here, the student can see a visual representation of the lessons left in a grade level for each subject. The Jenga Tower shows the lessons the student has learned and which ones they have left. Dash also allows a student to set long-term goals and see the daily goals that need to be met in order to achieve these long-term goals. This gives students a sense of ownership and control. Parents also have access to this. Dash allows a student to see if they have finished their daily work via the daily rings. During two-hour learning, students are working in adaptive apps for each subject. In addition to working at the exact level and pace for the student, apps also provide multiple ways to present information by having auditory and video supplementation. This can be especially helpful with younger learners and students with learning differences. The AI Tutor guides students on how to use the apps to learn, helping them when they encounter challenges. It is constantly assessing and monitoring how a student is progressing through their lessons. How do parents know what is going on? The great thing about using an AI Tutor is that we have incredibly detailed data on what your child knows and doesn't know, far more than traditional school. Parents are finding that trusting a teacher or school to self-grade leads to rampant grade inflation. In fact, 90% of parents believe their student is at grade level when standardized tests show that less than 50% of students are. Parents are often surprised by the low PSAT, SAT scores of their A student and end up hiring tutors to compensate. Oftentimes, this is too little, too late. Here is the learning plan that is available to each parent and student at Alpha. It is updated every day. It's like a CAT scan of what your child knows and doesn't know. In the top, we have age grade and knowledge grade. Age grade is the standard grade based on your child's age. Knowledge grade is the grade level of the material your child is in. When students transfer into Alpha, they often have holes in their knowledge from prior grade levels. They need to go back and learn or relearn this material to establish their strong mastery foundation. As you move right, you have the chart that shows how many lessons they have completed in that grade level and how many they have to go to finish the grade, i.e., what percent complete are they? Then it shows how many weeks it will take them to finish at their current pace. And for those who want to finish faster, it shows how many weeks it will take if they do one hour of extra work a day. This makes finishing a grade tangible and actionable, which allows a student to visualize achieving the goal. The next section is the test results and contains the two different standardized tests we use to gauge progress. First, the math test. To remind everyone, this is the third-party test we tell parents to use to hold us accountable to the 2X learning commitment for K-8. This shows the student's percentile achievement, which measures how much they know relative to every other student their age. It also shows the percentile growth, which is how fast they are learning. It then shows the times growth, which is how fast they are learning versus a student in traditional school. This should be 2X. The second set of test results are the standardized tests used to show mastery of a grade level. These tests vary by location. In Texas, we use the Texas STAR test. In Florida, we use the FAST test. We are also adding grade level ISEE and SSAT, which are national tests for parents who want to benchmark against those. Students have to score a 90% on these tests to be finished with a grade level. This is our mastery standard, which is far higher than the state or standard school requirements. The final section focuses on learning efficiency, which is critical to teaching kids how to learn in just two hours a day. The first section is number of minutes per day. This shows how many minutes the student spent in each subject each day, as well as the percent to target. Are they putting in more or less time than is required? For most subjects, this is 25 minutes per day. The next section is accuracy. This is a quality control check. If a student is consistently above 95%, they are not learning because the material is too easy. If it is consistently below 70%, they are not learning effectively because it is too hard or they're just guessing at answers. The final section is the waste meter. This is the percent of time the student is wasting. Our AI tutor watches the screen and measures if the student is wasting time or not using the apps correctly. This can be things like not being at the computer, typing in D-D-D-D into the math answers, not reading the explanations after missing a question, rapidly guessing at answers, et cetera. We teach students that they have to use the apps correctly if they want to finish their academics in just two hours per day. For students who are spending more than two hours a day, they often have waste scores above 50%. We have a set of metric-oriented parents who consider this screen the reason they send their child to Alpha. It lets them understand what their child knows and doesn't know at a level of detail unavailable in the standard teacher-in-front-of-the-classroom model. As we've seen, two-hour learning at Alpha School isn't just about accelerated academics. It's about giving students the tools to become lifelong learners, critical thinkers, and well-rounded individuals. By mastering their studies in just two hours a day, our students have more time to develop crucial life skills, pursue their passions, and enjoy their childhood. We understand that choosing the right school for your child is one of the most important decisions you'll make. Your child has unlimited potential. We have the tools to unlock it. Join us in redefining what's possible in education. Thank you for considering our two-hour learning model and the schools that leverage it to revolutionize education. We look forward to partnering with you in your child's educational journey.