Mission
The mission of St. Vrain’s AGILE program is to “provide students with an interactive and individualized education that can be accessed any time, any place, and at any pace, while delivering learning experiences that are engaging, relevant, and challenging to prepare students to enter a globally competitive workforce and be productive citizens in the 21st century.” Founded in 2022 to ensure students in Colorado could take virtual courses with highly effective educators, the AGILE program takes a three-pronged approach incorporating:
Fully remote learning
Hybrid learning
Paired instruction
Demographics
St. Vrain Valley Schools operates in a geographically diverse school district, serving as the educational home to more than 33,000 of Colorado’s students. St. Vrain’s AGILE program engages a diverse student population with a growing representation of Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color (BIPOC)-identified students and girls. In the 2024-25 school year, approximately 30% of course requests came from BIPOC-identified students and 45% came from girls.
AGILE supports students inside the St. Vrain Valley School District who may attend local schools that are unable to offer specific courses due to staffing or capacity by allowing them to take those courses within their hybrid model. Further, AGILE offers flexible pathways for students who may not be able to thrive in a traditional model, such as elite athletes with intense training schedules or students who have commitments or circumstances that require them to frequently travel or change their location.
Experience Overview
St. Vrain’s AGILE initiative includes three components: paired instruction, hybrid learning, and fully virtual learning. The program serves students from across the 411-square-mile district, which includes their own rural schools as well as those belonging to other systems across Colorado. It offers both individual course access and full-time virtual learning to students regardless of their location. As part of the initiative, novice educators can also co-teach courses with mentor educators through AGILE, providing both a training model and an opportunity to better serve and differentiate instruction for students.
AGILE’s blended hybrid learning model is accessible to learners in grades 7-12 from across the state. Taught by St. Vrain educators, students join a virtual class while physically attending their home school. During class time, students in the satellite schools are in person with a group of their peers, allowing for both in-person collaboration and virtual engagement simultaneously. This model significantly expands course access, with options ranging from pre-law, to AP, to workforce credentialing. AGILE also offers a fully virtual option with their LaunchED Virtual Academy for students in grades K-12.
AGILE operates a high-quality hybrid and fully virtual program. Students in AGILE have strong relationships with one another as they regularly collaborate and offer one another feedback on their learning. Teachers actively differentiate instruction with flexible small groups and breakouts, using pedagogy to make learning relevant and effective through the use of one-to-one technology. The program also offers foundational supports to encourage effective self-directed learning by setting strong routines and expectations.
Learning In Action
With AGILE, students have ample choice over the courses they take and the career pathways they pursue, as they can choose to take one course, a few courses, or a full course load. Within each course, students have choices in their pacing and how they demonstrate their learning.
For hybrid courses, students go to an AGILE classroom in their home school, which is set up with a Cisco whiteboard that has a powerful camera and speaker system to display the live instructor in their classroom via WebEx. Each student in the hybrid classroom has their own device while also being supervised by an in-person staff member from their school. Throughout the lesson, students switch between collaborating with one another in person to engaging in virtual activities, such as discussion boards or Writeable activities, as guided by their teacher. Other students in their class may be in person with the teacher or may be attending from multiple schools across Colorado.
Teaching In Action
Teachers use Quality Online Content for Distance Learning along with the curricular units designed and adopted by St. Vrain Valley Schools to provide a strong foundation for students. Using short instructional videos to keep learners engaged, educators also plan ways for students to apply their learning in real-world situations. To better engage hybrid and virtual students, teachers use strategies such as online discussions, choice boards, and check-ins to foster strong relationships and better tailor their instruction.
Teachers heavily leverage technology to build meaningful, blended learning environments. To support their ongoing professional growth and instructional effectiveness, educators regularly collaborate to address problems of practice and interact with one another across school lines. Novice teachers also benefit from AGILE program infrastructure as they can be paired with a mentor teacher (who may or may not be in the same building) to gain additional opportunities to learn, co-plan, and deliver instruction. Early-career educators can benefit from this program over the course of two years, setting them up to lead their own classrooms, in the content area in which they were trained.
Exponential Learning Initiative: Accelerating Understanding via Evidence
The Learning Accelerator (TLA) launched the Exponential Learning Initiative in January 2024 with funding from the Walton Family Foundation to examine how virtual and hybrid school models support learning acceleration. As one of the six sites chosen for the project, AGILE participated in collaborative research design sessions with TLA and the organization’s partner, Mathematica, to deeply understand the strategies and practices core to AGILE that may be driving learning acceleration. This Theory of Change model documents the traits of the learners, the strategies and practices core to the AGILE model, beliefs about how the learners develop core foundational skills, and the outcomes students intend to achieve.
During the 2024-25 school year, TLA will study these anticipated causes of learning acceleration including how students are:
Equipped to learn;
Assisted, encouraged and guided to learn;
Accountable for and show ownership over learning; and
Invested in the learning model.
Conditions for Success
Policies: Students are expected to have their cameras on during instruction, and they should be supervised by an in-person staff member at all times when in a satellite hybrid class.
Learning Materials and Tools: Students learn how to use different instructional tools during orientation, which helps to reduce anxiety when courses start and support students in establishing strong routines.
Professional Development and Learning: Mentor teachers have the opportunity to expand their leadership without having to leave the classroom, offering needed advancement for veteran educators.
- Community and Culture: The AGILE initiative is built around St. Vrain’s culture of foundation and innovation. This approach allows for students, educators, and leaders to take risks to grow and innovate while setting a strong academic foundation that can be scaled.
Other Key Highlights
Families of students participating in AGILE engage in parent-teacher conferences and virtual back-to-school nights. St. Vrain’s AGILE initiative is constantly innovating and growing, and leaders have plans to add competency-based, workforce learning with Cisco, Amazon Web Service, and Salesforce at the start of the 2024-25 school year.
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