A Generation of Education Innovation Seen Through the Eyes of an Online Education Visionary

An item from a neo-liberal…  This one is an item from a business professor with little direct experience in education, but who believes free market economic principles are the answer to education’s (and pretty much all other society’s social) problems.

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APR 19

A Generation of Education Innovation Seen Through the Eyes of an Online Education Visionary

		MICHAEL B. HORN

Mickey Revenaugh was one of the first people working in education I met after Disrupting Class was published. She helped organize one of the first talks I gave about the book—and was in attendance (along with my parents and wife—then my girlfriend). If you haven’t heard of Mickey before, you’re missing out. As the cofounder of Connections Academy, one of the first full-time virtual schools in the country—she’s one of a handful of education innovation visionaries with consistently constructive takes and insights on where education is going.

After a couple decades of innovation in education, Mickey retired at the end of last year from her formal role in the education space with Pearson. I wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate her career and learn some lessons from her. In this rich conversation, Mickey and I chatted about the origins of virtual and online education, her entrepreneurial journey to co-founding Connections Academy, her lessons learned along the way, and her predictions for the educational innovations to come. By the end of the conversation, Mickey was asking me questions about some of the trends that have us really excited and nervous—and then we started wondering if we’re really just traveling back to the future in education, work, and our social circles in some ways.

As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation above, watch it below, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:

I’m lucky enough to count today’s guest as a friend, Mickey Revenaugh. She’s one of the founders of Connections Academy, which we’ll hear about, who’s been working at Pearson for many years. And then Mickey, you’ve recently allegedly retired, but I think you’re now part of the #amwriting 5 a.m. Writing Club or something like that. So first, it is great to see you. How are you and how are these first few months of not fading quite into the sunset?

Mickey Revenaugh:

It’s been wonderful. I would highly recommend retiring to anybody who can live long enough to get there. And I was really fortunate to kind of work with a retirement coach for about a year before I made this move. And her message was, find something that gives you joy to do every single day and stay active basically. And so I’ve been able to do that in the 5 AM Writing Club. I was keeping UK hours for the last couple of years, so this feels like sleeping in because I am actually getting up at you a little bit before 5:00 as opposed to a little bit before 3:00. So all good. It’s very relaxing.

Horn:

I was going to say that sounds like a big improvement relatively speaking, but it’s still 5:00 am, it’s still dark.

Revenaugh:

It’s 5:00 am, there’s still a few hours before the sun rises, but I have learned the hard way that early morning is my good creative time and a time when my brain actually functions relatively well and then it goes way downhill as the rest of the day goes by.

Horn:

I find the same thing, the best writing occurs in the morning when you’re fresh and coming out of Dream State. But let’s first, before we get into the here and now and sort of Mickey’s predictions on the future of education and all that, I actually think folks would really benefit from hearing your story and how you came together with a couple others to found Connections Academy. I think that was 2001, if my memory’s correct. So it was certainly before I was in the education space, as you know, because you met me just after my first book was published. No embarrassing me yet. But I’d love to hear your own founding story and how you came to with that team, create Connections and you can tell people what Connections is of course, as well.

Revenaugh:

Sure. And I’d like to kind of reel back even about a decade and a half before that because I first got involved with education technology right around the time when they were rolling out Commodore 64’s and the first Apple computers into classrooms in the mid-’80s. So I had been a journalist and working in writing and editing for what was then my whole life, which seems like a little sliver at this point. But I got hired at Scholastic actually to edit a couple of computer magazines for classroom teachers, which was a pretty revolutionary concept in like 1986. And the thing that really struck me then was that the educators that were embracing this were not the young hotshots just out of education school, but instead it was elementary teachers of a certain age who kind of saw this box, this machine as something that would allow them to do what they always thought they should be doing in their classrooms, which was personalized learning for kids, energize it, bring excitement in, but also allow students to go down pathways that are unique to them as opposed to everybody doing the same thing.

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© 2023 Michael Horn