Who We Are
Crossroads Education was formed as the result of 15 years of experimenting with what is possible in education. Dr. Kevin Berkopes, the Founder and CEO of Crossroads, formulated his pragmatic approach through coupling degrees from top 30 mathematics departments of Purdue University (#28) and the University of Texas-at Austin (#14) with years of public and private teaching experience. Whether it was teaching in the high density urban areas of Chicago or the rural towns of North Carolina, Dr. Berkopes learned that it takes much more than passion to achieve scale and achieve equitable success in education.
These experiences provided the blueprints for how Crossroads Education intends to disrupt the current tradition in education. We leverage innovations in technology to improve the logistics of educating students at all levels. Our methodology, including parsing first-access and second-access to content, builds collaborative learning spaces that shift the responsibility of learning to the collective rather than just on the classroom teacher or professor. Our proven models for learning centers at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI): the Mathematics Assistance Center (MAC) and Statistics Assistance Center (MAC Stat) are industry standards for how to achieve an equitable scale of quality content and support. This was achieved through Crossroads Education's partnership with Indiana University through the Spin up program.
What We Do
Crossroads Education is here to provide clients with a customized approach to improving the logistics of their education system. We achieve this by:
Learning Spaces Audit: Using design thinking to solve complex educational challenges, we empower educators and administrators to understand themselves, their processes, and their relationship to the learning spaces in which they work and build with their students.
Learning Commons Build: We support the design and implementation of the Learning Commons (LC) model design and build in both physical and virtual spaces. We provide ongoing support for training and developing your team to implement the collaborative culture of the LC model.
Educational Technology: We built the technology we needed to ensure that our models and our methodologies were scalable. Our tech is offered as a stand-alone suite of products or can be part of our collaboration to build innovative learning spaces in your educational setting.
Our Technology Suite
Compass: Analytics and Tracking LCManage: Office Suite Nexus: Virtual Learning Spaces
What is the Learning Commons (LC) Model?
“Passionate teachers are not enough to improve education. We have always had passionate teachers. We need to shift the logistics of how we operate learning institutions, to better position educators to work collaboratively with each other and students in positive ways.”
The Learning Commons (LC) model shifts the logistics in our most traditional educative settings. With an LC, students are able to gain equitable access to content and teaching by decreasing the reliance solely on the work in the in the formal classroom with your classroom teacher. Formal work with the teacher/professor is important, but should no longer be recognized as the sole mechanism for providing students with access to content. We propose to shift the paradigm, by locating many of the existent resources in the surrounding community that are currently considered second-access and embedding them into the school, community center, or university culture and mission. You have brilliance in your educative setting, its time to utilize it better.
The heart of our model is the open-access Learning Commons (LC), or the open-access learning center that drives the culture for collaboration in your educative setting. For the first time, we engage professors/teachers, students, and community stakeholders to work together to create a safe, comfortable culture that combats the debilitating high-stakes culture of our current world. Our results suggest that when students feel empowered, they learn more and are even more successful in their education.
"Let's return the humanity to education"
LC Modeled educational settings improve the work of both teacher/professor and student
FOR STUDENTS
Lecture is not the driving force anymore, collaboration and individualized mentoring is:
Students will gain first access to content in the classroom where teachers and students will discuss the content in conceptual ways-- discussing the whys, not just the hows. Second-access is where the rest of the learning happens. Students will collaborate with other teachers, other students, and peer mentors. Through hard-work, all students can achieve success.
Stop the troubling methodologies that enable students to believe they are not brilliant:
As a society, our education system needs to heal. We work with our clients to provide learning environments where students want to be. They can be social, and also work diligently on their knowledge and skills. Our models have been shown to improve students efficacy as well as their academic performance.
Build TEACHING into our learning models:
Students will have the opportunity to teach at the LC, providing content based tutoring and mentoring for their fellow students during the school day. Everyone would agree that teaching is one of the best ways to learning something well. But currently, our system does not use this widely accepted fact. Students in these environments never stop using their knowledge, so they do not lose it.
Education is not boring, in fact it is the opposite:
Students will no longer be required to go from course to course without any interruption in the tedium of lecture. No one thrives in this environment, not the teachers and not the students. So, let's stop..
FOR educators
We help to remove the weariness of educators being, sometimes, the only quality adult in their students' lives:
The LC model distributes the responsibility for education throughout the school and community. Stakeholders work collaboratively through a combination of first-access and second-access to content that better utilizes the brilliance existent in your education setting.
We have a workforce CRISIS. Our paradigm is happy teacher = high performing school:
Through design thinking we help educative settings improve the work and work environment of the teacher. We find the trend of turn-over in the teaching profession troubling, and work with our clients to develop learning environments that retain the brilliance that is in our educational settings.
No more closed doors:
Through design thinking we help to build professional development and upward mobility into the context of our clients educative settings. Teachers that collaborate, as part of their job, share insights from years of experience working with young people around content. The also help develop the abilities of the students and community members that work as peer-to-peer content mentors in their setting.
Education is not boring, in fact it is the opposite:
Teachers work days will no longer consist of delivering the same lesson 6-7 times to different cohorts of students isolated from the rest of the school community. No one would thrive in that environment, not the teachers, not the students. So, let's stop.
Check out the LC at IUPUI
Concept Studies
Blending two types of proven professional development programs, concept studies are a means to support teachers or future teachers as they seek to better understand the mathematics that they teach. We have always had passionate teachers in education, Crossroads Education strives to provide passionate educators with the content knowledge necessary to transition that passion into positive student outcomes.
AT THE UNIVERSITY
Crossroads Education has partnered with Boundless Education to produce digital courseware for Mathematical knowledge-for-teaching (M4T) courses at the university level. We believe that students should study the mathematics that they plan to teach as teachers, rather than as doers of mathematics. The theoretical work behind this (Berkopes, 2014; Davis & Simmt, 2006; Renert & Davis, 2013) frames that teachers and future teachers can develop what they know about the mathematics they teach and it will impact the ways they develop mathematics with their students.
Professional development
Whether working together in the LC model, or in any public/private educative setting teachers need the opportunity to share their expertise with each other.. Crossroads Education has partnered with Boundless Education to produce digital courseware for Mathematical knowledge-for-teaching (M4T) professional development programs in K-5 settings. We also offer services for 6-12 and tertiary level educator development. We believe that all teachers have expertise that needs to be shared, elaborated on, and developed collaboratively no matter what level of experience or expertise.
“We have developed something special, something intuitive, yet never tried before. Why rely on ancient technologies to educate students of today? Why not think differently about what is possible, how the collective intelligence far out paces the individual? Don’t take my word for it, listen from those that have worked with us and learned with us at our proven centers. Their voice shows the power in this intuitive work.”
“I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed Dr. Berkopes and his approach to our undergraduate math course. He focuses less on what we do (let’s face it— we would not have been admitted to the university if we couldn’t already do elementary level math!) and more on why we do it. He has the courage to question his own perceptions at the same time and really projects a nice atmosphere of learning. I have enjoyed the chance to focus on thinking rather than doing and wish there were more professors like him. He has changed the way I think about learning and I will be forever grateful. ”