By: Brian Swanberg
tl;dr: I was exposed to innovative education systems, and noticed problems with how reading and confidence affect each other. I thought of a way to integrate the science of learning to help people read.
The story of reworded began when I was in 8th grade. I grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, and I found out I would be a part of the first graduating class of a new public high school, Legacy. There, my classmates and I would be “super-seniors.” My administrators viewed Legacy as an opportunity to remake and improve secondary education in the state, and they tried a bunch of innovative ideas. For better or for worse, I became a guinea pig for a fun, eventful roller coaster ride. Our school had different class schedules, different classroom setups, and different curriculum pedagogy than others in the state. After feeling bored in elementary and middle school, I felt more attentive in classes, so I loved the changes. However, the changes at Legacy were controversial, faced much resistance, and had some initial data indicating that prior setups were more successful. These debates sparked my interest in education innovation.
In my junior year, I started working on my school’s monthly news magazine. During my senior year (2016-2017), I remember pursuing a story about a bright high school dropout, Trey. Given my curiosity about education, I began asking internal questions about schooling in North Dakota. Why doesn’t the school talk about what happens to dropouts?
I had some conversations with him before he dropped out of school. Trey was very bright. He loved to take apart and put together computers. Trey knew how to code (a tiny bit), he was big into cryptocurrency, and he loved to write poetry.
Legacy’s semi-independent newsmagazine issue published December 2016
I wanted to understand: what factors led this individual to drop out of school? How has this person's life been affected after leaving school?
The story was sobering. Honestly, I had usually seen the world with unicorns and rainbows all around me. Interviewing and writing the story about Trey opened my eyes away from the traditional means of education and the bubble I grew up in.
Notably, Trey described his struggles with his focus in classes, anxiety, depression, and ambition. Something didn’t add up in my head. Yes, he should have been determined and mature to be a good student. However, Trey was ambitious with skills that should translate to academic success. He did and continues to do cool things.
This quandary opened my heart to how much mental health, psychological conditions, and mentality played a role in student success. These problems are common among students, yet I feel that they are rarely addressed. How could we change education to help improve student confidence and self-belief?
After Legacy, I decided to attend Minerva Schools at KGI (now Minerva University) to be a part of their third graduating class. Like at Legacy, for better or for worse, I would be a guinea pig to a different medium of education.
Minerva students spend their first year in San Francisco before spending the subsequent 7 semesters in other global cities.
Minerva takes a radical approach to education (see this book). To my knowledge, Minerva’s core curriculum was built by Stephen Kosslyn, who was previously the Dean of Social Science at Harvard and is one of the most notable figures in the science of learning.
During my first year at Minerva, we learned all about the science of learning, and we tried to apply foundational skills to concepts to prepare us for ‘jobs that do not exist yet.’
We had to try to read a bunch of material, particularly research papers, before classes. Out of curiosity, I had read some research papers in biomedicine before college, but the literature was challenging for me to get through.
I was very studious at that period of my life. Trying to follow the science of learning, I would often do my readings and take notes about 5 days before class and review them before class. I quickly realized that soon after the classes, if not during the class, I would forget many details of what I had previously read.
This concept was problematic to me. Do I have a reading problem? Reading was not my strength academically. However, I was deemed qualified to be a writing peer tutor (technically Multimodal Communications) at Minerva, and most of my classmates were English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students. If reading was hard for me, then it likely would be hard for them too? I quickly found out that was the case, and I started to ask myself more questions about how I could do better.
In high school, I was a very good student, and my classmates at Minerva were very talented students. If my high school classmates in college had to read challenging texts, how would they adjust? There seemed to be a huge reading level gap to me, and I presumed that many people would simply feel overwhelmed and not do the reading at all. And those were English-as-a-first-language students, let alone all of the ESL students studying at American universities.
During my second semester at Minerva, I realized something: if I pretended to have tunnel vision and focus on a small piece of text at a time, it was easier for me to read research papers and remember what I was reading later. This idea fell in line with cognitive load in the science of learning, but I couldn’t find anything online to do it for me. Years would pass, and I turned the idea of reworded into what it is today.
When I finished a prototype of reworded, I showed the website to my friend, the very same dropout who first opened my eyes to other mindsets on education and life. When using the application, Trey’s eyes lit up. He later told me, “My fear, or anxiety, of studying makes the action challenging. This software has made studying easy for me; it has made reading fun again.”
He thought that if reworded had been there for him in school, he would have never dropped out. I want to help provide the opportunity for others to regain their study confidence. After years of research, ideation, and learning, I want to help students become confident, lifelong learners. I believe reworded can help so many people, and I want to help drive the path to get there.
The first prototype of reworded as an application, finished in October 2020.