Pod Schooling is a personalized form of private education where families register their children as home-schooled, group them together, then hire a teacher directly to instruct and guide the learning.

The Pod School model can be understood as a kind of “Professional Homeschool” in that it combines the per-student personalization and family-like atmosphere of homeschool cooperatives with the professional instruction, guidance, and assessment abilities of a trained and qualified teacher. Pod Schooling is often recognized for its ability to deliver a premium experience and better education outcomes than typical private schools at an equivalent or lower cost to families.

Historically, this model of education has been predominantly limited to affluent families with the extraordinary time and financial resources to organize, fund, launch and manage them from year to year.

Edefy is making Pod Schooling available to communities everywhere by organizing and automating the complex logistics involved.

Edefy limits Pods to 12 students per teacher, because the foundation of Pod Schooling’s effectiveness is the frequency of individual interaction between the teacher and a student. Children are then freed from a predetermined learning progression designed for the collective average and are instead able to learn according to their unique gifts and abilities. While schools everywhere like to say their instruction is “personalized”, as the number of students per teacher inevitably moves beyond 12 and approaches even 16-18 students, let alone the typical 20-30 students or more, teachers are forced to switch from individual student attention back to a standard mass instruction approach.

Pod Schooling’s personalization advantage is reinforced by the teacher being employed by and accountable to the parents directly. Each individual student represents a paying “client” for the teacher. This means the teacher is primarily incentivized to drive the best outcome possible for each of their students. Contrast this to the typical school model, where teachers are employed by the administration of the school and are primarily incentivized to keep the administration happy by following centralized mandates and programming.

While every Pod that forms is unique, the broader benefits to Pod Schooling include:

• Direct Accountability – Teachers who serve families directly are strongly incentivized to deliver quality student outcomes that match parent expectations. The higher trust and fully transparent relationships that form naturally increase teacher-parent communication, feedback, and collaboration around each child’s learning journey.
• Greater Personalization – Low teacher to student ratios (12 student max) enable highly personalized instruction and individualized learning pathways, freeing students from arbitrary one-size-fits-all pacing. Children progress according to individual abilities and needs, allowing a single Pod to effectively serve a range of ages/grades.
• Better Community Relationships – The small group learning environment promotes fast friendships among student peers and participating families, largely reducing the negative peer interactions children frequently experience in typical schooling models.

The most commonly reported effects on students who switch to this model of education include:

• Improved mental and emotional health, social confidence and friendships
• Superior academic outcomes
• Greater joy for learning
• Deepened character formation

Try Pod Schooling on Edefy and get your child the attentive care they deserve.