"Our students are the teachers, and our teachers are the advisors"

Tonasket Choice High School sits in a small rural town in eastern central Washington. Its a microschool with only 26 students, and it runs on the Big Picture Learning model. For the unititiated, that means personalized learning plans, real-world projects, and exhibitions instead of tests.

We sat down with Chelsea Freeman, an advisor at Choice, to talk about how she and her students use Unrulr. Here are the highlights:

How Choice uses Unrulr

Capturing Project Progress. Most posts at Choice currently document progress, i.e. students reflecting on what they did or learned that day. Chelsea's goal is to push further into process by having her students capture the planning and vision of a project, even when things are ambiguous.

Reflection In-the-Moment. "No one possibly has the ability to remember what you were thinking and feeling every day throughout an entire semester." When students reach the end of a term, they can scroll back through their posts and see the full journey as it unfolded.

Storytelling. Chelsea models this herself: she makes her own learning plan, sets her own goals, and documents her progress in Unrulr alongside her students. "You can visually scroll that journey and see those pictures and it's super gratifying."

Frictionless Exhibitions. This was a big one. When her senior Xander documents his projects (currently, terracing a hillside in the school garden using recycled tires) as he goes, he doesn't have to write a page-long reflection or build a slideshow at the end; he just opens Unrulr and walks through what he already documented.

What's changed this year

Chelsea has noticed a shift. Her students stopped writing surface-level posts ("I went to this class and wrote a paper") and started explaining their actual learning. Greater detail makes reflection even more effective— when you go back to a post, the caption/media tells you what you learned, not just what you did.

"I don't know anyone that loves their job more than me… I wouldn't use [Unrulr] if I didn't think it was great. And I hope that over time I'm gonna continue to see even more buy-in — students using it to document that process, not just progress." — Chelsea Freeman