From Passion to Profession: Sage Oak's Oakschool Program Provides a Personalized Learning Path

Exploring the Growth and Impact of Oakschool with Katie Tuttle

In this episode of Sage Studio, host Tiffiny Webster talks with Katie Tuttle, a new student service clerk for the Oakschool program. Katie shares insights about her role, the structure of Oakschool, and the various classes offered. Oakschool, a part of Sage Oak, provides over 100 live online classes each quarter, focusing on both core curriculum and enrichment. Katie discusses the benefits of the Canvas platform used for classes, the growing enrollment, and the positive feedback from students, parents, and teachers. She also highlights special programs like career pathways and in-person art classes. The episode encourages parents to explore the Oakschool catalog and emphasizes the community and personalized learning experience Oakschool offers.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:32 Meet Katie Tuttle and Her Role
01:57 Overview of Oakschool
03:32 Canvas Platform and Class Structure
04:44 Class Offerings and Enrollment
06:03 Student and Parent Experiences
11:01 Teacher Perspectives and Community
14:15 Enrollment Process and Final Thoughts

 For enrollment information, visit the Sage Oak website at www.sageoak.education.

Thank you for listening to the Sage Studio podcast presented by Sage Oak Charter Schools and hosted by Tiffiny Webster, M.A.Ed. We invite you to follow the show and leave your review below. Sage Oak Charter Schools is an independent study nonclassroom based TK-12 personalized learning public charter school serving students in Southern California. Visit sageoak.education for more information.

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Transcript

0:14

Welcome to another episode of Sage Studio. I'm Tiffiny Webster and today I am joined by Katie Tuttle. Katie is one of our new student service clerks with our Oakschool program. I'm so excited you are here on the podcast today. Katie, welcome to our podcast. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here to talk about Oakschool it has been a incredibly fun program you've part of with such a great group of teachers, parents, students. It's been a really positive asset in my life. So I'm very excited to talk about it. And we're going to talk about that today. but I really wanted our community to get to know the name and the face behind Oakschool so that when they call and they have questions or they send an email in, they know exactly who is there to support them. Tell us a little bit about your role in supporting our families who enroll in Oakschool So there is a team of us. if you have ever emailed our Oakschool team, most of the time it'll be me replying, but a lot of times there'll be other people jumping in as well. but we are, yes, I'm the face behind that, Oakschool email that you'll be getting if I'm responding with helping you drop, helping you add, getting more information about the programs, trying to help find the best program that would fit for your student. more of my role behind the scenes. I'm doing all of the new enrollment platform that everybody has been using this year that hopefully it's been a positive experience. We are continuing to grow it. We're continuing to learn with it, expand it and make it so user friendly for families. So that's been more of my passion project right now. Also doing all of the Canvas classes, getting them online, making them more personalized for each class. make it more class specific, having it very customized for the teacher, for the student, making it more interactive, making it something that's really a good tool they can utilize during classes. That sounds so good, but I want to back it up for just a minute for anyone who might be new to Sage Oak and Oakschool I want to make sure that we're catching everybody up to speed here. So let's go ahead and just kind of do a quick recap of what exactly is Oakschool and then talk to me a little bit about how you just were saying about the Canvas class and how does that play a role into it? Absolutely. So Oakschool, this is our third year of this Oakschool program. Right now we are offering over 100 classes per quarter of live instruction online teaching. A handful of those may be in person, such as our classes or outdoor school, but most of those are online instruction offered Monday through Friday. So when a student enrolled in these classes, what they'll expect, they'll have about eight to nine weeks of classes that will be once to twice a week. Again, depending on what the program is, they will log into their Canvas account. that's our online platform that has all of the class information in there. It has any of the class syllabi. It has the class zoom link. You can join the class. When the class begins, the teacher will open that Zoom link, and invite all the students to join, and then all the students will be together in this live instruction process. It's such a great experience for students, especially distance learners, online learners, that they can interact with not only the teacher, but all these students that share the same interest and the same learning goals that they share. so that is one thing that makes this program unique to the other programs that Sage Oak has to offer. It's also open to both Personalized Learning and Virtual Learning students. so it's bringing in both programs together to make one whole school interaction. So good. Okay. Just a quick recap there. The Canvas platform acts as like little individual online classrooms. And so when students sign up for Oakschool, and they get access to that particular class, or that particular classroom, when you log into Canvas, that's where you're going to find all of your resources for that class. Did I get that right? 100 percent perfect recap. Yes, you'll get all of your resources for that class. You'll have your weekly schedule in there, any assignments that you may have, Projects even fun, different applications where you can post some of your own pictures of your projects that you've been working on for the class. One of my favorites is we have cooking classes and we could actually see the students and results of their cooking classes of the different things that they created. They'll post their different items on there. It's really fun to be able to look at. I love that. If you were signed up for that one, your student was signed up for there. They'd go in there to get all of their information. They could even post about what they're working on. And then if they were taking maybe like an art class that would be in a different location, a different Canvas classroom where they would find all of that information there. 100 percent yes. So each class has their own Canvas account. So if your student is enrolled in five different classes, they have five different Canvas accounts, different class assignments that they can go into and it'd be personalized for each class. Okay, perfect. All right. So let's get back to the part where you said there was like 150 different options. Talk to me about some of the classes that are being offered. does this take the place of like their regular core curriculum? Is this just extra? Is it a combination of both? So can you kind of speak to both those things? Yes, absolutely. So it's a combination of both depending on the classes that you pick. We do offer some classes for core curriculum and it does state that in enrollment of what will apply and what doesn't. So there are certain ones and those ones are year long courses. So those ones are offered for the full school year. We also have other courses that are quarter, we call them quarter by quarter and they're offered quarterly. Some of them are progressive. So for example, like Spanish, you can enroll in all four quarters and it's a progressive course, or you can do just the one quarter. right now for quarter one over 100 classes, we are continually evaluating our class capacities and our wait list to see what students are interested in. And we are continually adding for the rest of the quarters. Right now, our 1st quarter, we have over 2300 enrollments for quarter 1 alone. that has grown. probably by at least 500 from last year. and we're continuing to see enrollments rolling in as I speak, I'm getting alerts on my phone right now that we have more enrollments coming. So that's incredible. I mean, I cannot believe that the program is growing that much and that you're already seeing this many enrollments right at the start of the year. Why do you think our Sage Oak families are loving Oakschool so much? What is it about it that makes it so special? One thing that I do think is these progressive classes that I had mentioned is now that some students who maybe took the first level last year can now go to the second level this year. That's something that is very unique as we are now entering our third year. In the first years, we were not able to offer that. So I think part of that is actually seeing the growth of the student and the parent is liking how the student is growing in that environment. I think with all these new students joining, they're seeing from their teachers how beneficial this has been for other students and have been really positive response. I think the interactions have been incredible I've dropped in on a couple of classes and watching the students interact with each other via, the chat and zoom, and they'll type it to each other and they chat at each other and say, cool, that was a neat project. Cool. And like that neat answer. And then when we have things where they'll post, they say their art project and they can leave each other positive responses and saying, Oh, that drawing was great. It's just such a neat way for them to interact in a virtual environment and still feel very connected to their community and be able to make them foster these friendships that again we've seen year after year. Some of these kids are actually taking classes together year after year in the same programs. Another one that's really neat, an area that we offer is we have on Fridays, a college intern program. So this is interesting where these classes are actually taught by college interns and they're more geared to the middle school students, but that's also been getting around and people want to start taking these career focused classes. These are CTE classes of career pathways. so a lot of our middle schoolers have been talking about that and wanting to join Wow, that's incredible. So I really love the wide range of class offerings in that students and families can choose. Do they want to take something that's just for enrichment and for fun and something that the student is passionate about learning? Do they want to take some classes that help them, you know, gain some momentum academically? Like you said, with these new progressive pathways, that's Sounds like a great option. it sounds like there's a lot of, effort being put towards some career, classes too, I think that's another great way for our students to just kind of start thinking about the next step and the next level. so I can definitely see why these are so popular. I know that the parents really enjoy this too. What do you think it is about Oakschool that the parents are really loving? I think the parents love the idea of being able to pick something that their students interested in and only committing to maybe a quarter and say, okay, let's give this eight weeks. I have so many different interests, so many jobs, different areas. I would have loved an opportunity like this to be able to explore throughout my elementary, middle school, career to see, is this something I'm really interested in? Where can I develop the skill further? Is this something I can see myself doing as a hobby or a career in the future? And that's what we're promoting. And I think that is what the parents are recognizing in their students is seeing their ability to explore their ability to try something and then to know if this is something they want to continue or if they want to go through a different path. I think that is really a special part about it is just that exploration. Now for the core classes, language arts or math classes. Once a student is enrolled in a core class, is the parent or the student totally hands off at that point is all of the instruction happening during that Oakschool time and with an Oakschool teacher or how would that work? Not necessarily. there will be a lot of assignments that are provided by the teacher. And then we do provide for those specialized year long classes that are for the core curriculum. We do provide that curriculum So that's something for a family to think about. They'll have the assistant instruction from those teachers along with that core curriculum. But the parent is still involved. The teacher of record is still involved. The teacher of record is also in these classes as well as an observers. They can help guide the student to make sure that all of the standards are being met and all of the testing requirements. it takes what would have just been curriculum and adds this extra element of this live Sage Oak teacher to now go along with the curriculum just to give even more support to the family. Correct. And kind of give them a guide and kind of more of a structure because it can be overwhelming having all that curriculum at one time and trying to figure out exactly what you want your students to be reviewing and how to best go about that best practices. This is another great resource to use to help assist a parent in reaching those educational goals. Now, when it comes to these Oakschool classes, are students required to attend live? Are there recordings that they're watching? How does the attendance side of it work? Yes. So all of these classes are live. yes, they're expected to attend live at the time of the class, the day of the class with their cameras on and be interactive. It is an interactive session. most of the classes are live. Okay, good to know. So when you're signing up for the Oakschool class, it really is important that you're looking at the time that it's offered, the frequency that's offered, so that you can make a commitment to make sure that your student is there and participating and engaging in the class. Correct. It's all about that community. It's all about being there together and making sure that everybody is where they are going to be. Yes, exactly. Okay, so I know that our students are loving these classes. I know that our Parents are loving these classes, but tell me a little bit about the teachers. I know the teachers are having a lot of fun with these. What are you hearing from the teachers? The teachers love this. The teachers love having those interactions. with the students. They love having every day. They look forward to it to being with the kids. They miss a lot of that live, instructions in person. This is a great outlet for them. One of my favorites. I love hearing when teachers run into some of these students at socials or other Sage Oak events. And they get to see them in person and have that special connection. And maybe it's a student that they've had year after year and they've watched them grow. It is so fulfilling and it is one of those positions that we see a high return every year. Teachers wanting to come back and keep going. And even with them, the creative outlets, we've had some teachers say, Hey, I'm really good at yoga. Can I do this? And we're like, yes, or I'm really good at knitting. It's absolutely. we get to see their personal side come out a little bit more and see that creativity. Yeah, I've noticed that, too. And I think, again, that just speaks to the Sage Oak community as a whole. One of the things that makes Sage Oak so unique is how each person in the community is so valuable for both their, skills that they're bringing to the instruction, but also, like you said, their personal passions, just who they are as people. And having that opportunity for Teachers to explore that as well as our students to explore that I think it really makes for this winning combination. That's just so authentic and feel so special. I think that is the best way to put it. This authentic collaboration. I think that is 100 percent what Oakschool is. Okay. It seems like you've really gone to a lot of great lengths here to cover all of the bases for our families, which I know they're going to really appreciate. they can go to the website. They can start to take a look at the catalog to see all the different course offerings that are available. We'll be adding classes as we go. We just expanded our art program. So we'll be adding some more classes throughout the year. Whenever we do add classes, we try to send, communications via email to family. So people look out, we try to put it in Sage News. So we are very excited for everything that we have continuing to offer and we're hoping to keep growing and expanding throughout the year. One last thing you just reminded me of when you said art was that I know that there were some in person art classes. talk to me a little bit about what the in person opportunities look like. Yeah, so we have art in the parks all over our regions throughout the year that are scheduled. if the parent wants to see, they can look up their area and see where these art in the parks are being held and what day. We have, about 30 this year that we'll be doing and it's one hour on Friday that families get to get together with an art teacher in person at a beautiful park. What's more inspiring than that? And do a really fun art project. It's a great way for families to get together. It's a great way for kids to interact. And it's also really fun for them to meet those art teachers in person. Yeah, definitely. It is such a great opportunity for other Sage Oak parents to meet one another and see who's in their local area, too. I know that out of that comes a lot of additional play dates or signing up for classes together. So there's a great, , community opportunity there as well. Absolutely. Okay. And just to be clear, these Oakschool classes, they are available for students in all grade levels. they are primarily focused for elementary to middle school. There are some opportunities for older above that, but mostly for elementary and middle school students. Okay. And if our families wanted to find out more information about Oakschool, talk to us a little bit now how someone would find what classes that they're interested in and how to sign up for those and just how to go through that enrollment process. So on our website, on our actual Oakschool website, we do have a full course catalog with a listing for every single class offered for the entire year. So a parent can go in and look at that, read about the description, see who the teacher is, and get more information on what the class would look like. From there, if they decide to enroll, there's a really easy enroll now button. We have a whole new online platform where every family needs to create their own account when they enroll, but that account will carry over for year after year. They can then go and select their classes for the full year. You can go in and do quarter one, pick your classes, quarter two, quarter three, quarter four, and have everything laid out. What's also nice about this is that when you do enroll in those classes, families receive a receipt with all the classes they are enrolled in. They can log back in and check their class schedule anytime they want. They can help with their planning throughout the year. Anything like that. They can learn more about the teacher. There's teacher descriptions in there. they can see which actual days the classes are taking place and the times they can block it out in their calendars. There's just so much more interactive pieces with this new enrollment program that we are trying to make it so much easier, user friendly for families and help them plan a really successful year from the beginning. But quarter one is still open right now for enrollments. If there's some space, we do have a lot of wait list classes, but please parents add your student to the wait list that helps us determine if we need to open a second section. We use this data of enrollment year after year to see what students are interested in, what we need to add and what we need to adjust. So please add, to the wait list, but for quarter 2, 3, 4, we are open. Please get your enrollments and save your spots. All right. Katie, thank you so much for coming on today and talking to us all about Oakschool and about just incredible opportunities that are there for our families. And again, just how much our students are loving it, how much our parents are loving it. How much our teachers are loving it. I just think it makes all the difference when everyone is so invested and, you know, really feeling the impact this program is making. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this time and I'm so excited to see Oakschool grow even more and see more of our students loving and learning so we couldn't be happier. I love it. All right, parents, if you want to check out the new Oakschool schedule, please visit sageoak. education. That is going to be the best place for you to connect to the Oakschool catalog and all of the course offerings. As always, reach out to our amazing customer support if you need any help, and Katie and the team will be happy to help you in scheduling your classes or figuring out which one is the best one for your student. Also, your teacher facilitators are great in that as well. So Katie, thanks again for coming on the podcast and keep us posted as Oakschool continues to grow this year. If you have new course offerings, we want to hear about it. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us and we will see you on the next one.