Experiencia

After a meeting with Mayor Daley in which education was the primary topic of conversation -

- Charlie toured Experiencia, an "an educational company that delivers unique, Immersive Learning programs providing exciting classroom curriculum, teacher training, parent involvement and all-day simulations in a state-of-the-art learning laboratory where students learn by doing." Experiencia's facility in Chicago (in an older industrial area) has two different programs, ExchangeCity and EarthWorks. Both involve a weeks-long curriculum that students' teachers carry out in their own classrooms, and then culminate in a day where they run a simulated city or shepherd a fragile ecosystem through various natural disasters.

Charlie met with Howard Tullman (Experiencia's Board Chair), Elaine Mondschein (Experiencia's President and founder), Craig Benes (Principal at Talcott Fine Arts & Museum Academy, part of Chicago Public Schools), Manny Sanchez (a partner at Sanchez Daniels & Hoffman LLP), and Marc Schulman (CEO of Eli's Cheescake, who also provided snacks, including the cake that Eli's developed specifically in support of Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics).

Experiencia is unique because it mixes kids from different schools, parents from different communities, and leaders from the civic, corporate, and nonprofit sectors in order to co-create effective learning opportunities. They've demonstrated the impact their programs have on ever-important standardized test scores, but of equal interest to us is the way in which they've created a sustainable environment for learning that's unbounded by traditional systems but interfaces successfully with them.

  

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