"Lights-on"
in Denver after school

Chris Myers ’80

Founder and CEO, OpenWorld Learning

“The children keep exceeding our expectations of what’s possible. They keep pushing us to develop a more advanced and more challenging curriculum in order to keep up with them.”

When Chris Myers ’80 describes OpenWorld Learning, the education nonprofit that he founded seven years ago, his smile and excitement are infectious. OpenWorld Learning (OWL) is an after-school program for children in grades 3 through 5 that combines learning about computer programming with peer teaching. Chris launched the program “to give back for what [he] was given, by giving something important to other children.”

A scholarship student at Milton coming from a Boston elementary school, Chris observed that “At [his] previous school, concentrating on learning while dealing with the challenging social environment was difficult. At Milton the intellectual stimulation, the peer culture, and the social and emotional components of learning made it a wonderful, influential place.”

More than 500 children in the Denver Public Schools experience creativity, leadership and ownership through OWL. “I want to make the fun and challenging education that I’ve seen available for affluent children available for low-income children.” Over 80 percent of OWL students qualify for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program, and over 90 percent of OWL’s students are Latino, “the most appreciative group of students and parents you could ever dream up,” Chris says. “They are thirsty for knowledge, excited to learn, and grateful for an opportunity to be part of a good learning environment.”

Chris graduated from Harvard with a degree in Latin American history, eager to apply his enthusiasm for Latin American language and culture to a career. In 1989 he moved to Denver, Colorado, and began teaching elementary school, which he admits “is not a common career path for some-one with a Milton and Harvard degree.”

Chris taught at the Stanridge British Primary School: a progressive private school “based in the belief that education should tap into children’s creativity and imagination and give students ownership and choices in their own learning.” Chris then taught fourth grade at a traditional, wealthy private school called Graland. “There again,” he explains, “I was faced with the stark differences between private and public educations.” With this in mind, Chris led the establishment of the British Primary Program in the Denver Public Schools, teaching the British Primary model to Latino children in an inner-city Denver neighborhood.

While teaching, Chris was introduced to a book called Mindstorms, written by MIT professor and now OWL national advisory board member, Seymour Papert. Chris believes that the book, written in 1980, and Papert’s vision were 30 years ahead of their time. “Papert explains how personal computers can enhance the way children learn. He writes about LOGO—the computer program that he invented to help children learn math—but also about what constitutes an ideal learning environment. I started teaching his computer programming language in my classrooms, and the children always responded.”

In June 1999, volunteering in a Boys and Girls Club computer lab that was equipped but not fully used stimulated some ideas for Chris. He began to think about a scenario where low-income children came to learn voluntarily, where he was not absorbed in discipline issues, and where he could use Papert’s model and LOGO in a computer-filled classroom.

Within six months, Chris had founded OWL and recruited Denver venture capitalist Steve Halsted as his board chair. OWL has since grown to include work in nine Denver public schools. “The program has a ‘lights-on’ effect,” Chris says. “We’re turning the lights on to all this existing infrastructure. We’re working with children 12 hours a week in school buildings without having to pay for the space, and our public school partners contribute $10,000 each year to the $40,000 operating cost. Our pitch to foundations and corporate donors is that their dollars are being efficiently invested in leveraging existing resources.”

OWL’s teaching environment relies on discovery learning. “Few of our teachers have a background in computer programming, but they’re brave and they’re learners,” Chris says. “Our program involves making mistakes and noodling things out. Some-one asked me once, ‘How do you develop a culture where the students aren’t afraid to admit they don’t know what’s going on?’ and I said, ‘Well, they see their teachers lost some of the time, too.’ But children know that a peer or adult teacher in the program can answer their questions.

“Most schools use computers as communication tools, but they don’t teach computer programming, most often because they don’t know how. We’ve learned you can teach computer programming by putting 9- and 10-year-olds in charge of the teaching, with teachers learning alongside them. With LOGO, students invent, design, build, create, problem solve. They make mistakes throughout the process, they get error messages, they scratch their heads because what happened doesn’t match what they thought would happen, and they have to revise their theory and test something else.

“Watching our students learning from and teaching their peers is a wonderful thing for us. In selecting our student leaders we look for curiosity, determination, creativity, a love of learning, and a passion for helping others—the same qualities that employers look for, that we all look for in trying to solve the problems of our country and our world.”

With OWL thriving in nine Denver public schools, and plans to expand to 15 in 2007, the program’s leadership dreams of its becoming a national and international program. “We have a lot to do to realize that dream. We need more great leaders, great teachers and great funders, but we believe in the program, and we’re getting startling results. Our students are learning things that I wish I knew at their age. I hope that with help from our organization and others, our students will find themselves able to take advantage of other equally positive learning environments.”

www.openworldlearning.org

Erin Hoodlet

 

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