Giving Compass' Take:

· San Diego's Thrive Public Schools focus on precision teaching and learning for each individual student. In an interview with The 74, Thrive founder and CEO Nicole Assisi explains the purpose of focusing on project-based learning and how it instills students with a sense of achievement and ownership over their education.

· What is project-based learning? How is this strategy effective?

· Every student learns differently at their own pace. Read how a big school is making learning personal for students.

At the Juanita Street campus of San Diego’s Thrive Public Schools, the day begins with a high-five and a warm greeting at the visitors’ gate.

The charter elementary school currently occupies a handful of compact, semi-permanent buildings and a blacktop in a hilly stretch of the City Heights neighborhood. Its electronic gate is still pretty new; when Juanita Street first welcomed students in the fall of 2016, it was short of a few amenities that families typically look for, like play structures and a performance space. Almost two years later, the campus resembles a forward operating base more than a traditional school.

But if the raw materials look like they were just dropped off an IKEA truck, the educational vision behind them is deliberate and assured. The purple modular classrooms that roughly 200 kids filter into each morning are festooned with student artwork and pictures of world leaders like Gandhi and Barack Obama. The outdoor stage facing the main office was constructed by the students themselves, part of Thrive’s philosophy of project-based learning.

The ad hoc look at Juanita Street reflects the dizzying growth of an organization still in its gestational phase. Thrive opened its first campus about a mile north in 2014, serving an initial class of 45. Today, the network’s three schools enroll about 640 children from TK (transitional kindergarten) through high school. A new TK-8 campus will open this fall in the city’s Linda Vista neighborhood, and Juanita Street’s fifth- and sixth-grade programs will be absorbed among the other schools.

Read the full article about Sane Diego's thrive schools by Kevin Mahnken at The 74.