Fargo’s newest way of learning: Self-Directed Academy

Right now, we live in a time of great experimentation for how school systems should be run. One of the new systems being tried by Fargo Public Schools is the Self-Directed Academy (SDA) for middle school students, held in the lower level of the Agassiz school building.
At SDA, students have a greater level of responsibility to guide their own education, such as planning out what they want to achieve each day and how they’re going to achieve it. Teachers are more like advisors to help guide them as needed and to teach important context, but the students are encouraged to take initiative for their projects and be “self-directed.”
When it comes to assignments, students primarily do Project-Based Learning, meaning that instead of being handed a worksheet to fill out, they’re actively building skills in multiple areas with bigger projects designed to foster critical thinking skills.
“I’m sure you’ve been in a history class where you sit there, you lecture, you give out a worksheet, you have a quiz on Friday, but then you get like one project a month, right? You do a research paper, or something else, that you get a little voice in. [The projects] are every day here,” said Michael Hiltner, a social studies teacher at SDA.
Having started in August of 2024, SDA is still in their beginning stages of what they’d like to achieve with their curriculum. They currently have three teachers, one English, one science, and one social studies, supplementing math and reading with a system called Exact Path, which teaches students at their own pace based on where they are in those skills, instead of where the rest of the class is. The plan as the academy grows is to eventually add teachers for those subjects, but for the moment, they’re working with what they have.
Part of being self-directed is treating the students as the capable people they are and working with them instead of just telling them what to do. Eighth grader Kay talked about how she felt SDA made her feel like an equal, “The school I went to before was more like students and teachers, and here I feel like it’s more of a community, and I feel more connected to my teachers.”
As well as being treated as an equal, sixth grader Aubrie said she feels like SDA makes her more confident. “I’m able to express myself here, and I can be open about things I need to share. The teachers and the students are really accepting,” she said, later adding, “I feel like it makes me more confident. I feel better knowing that people accept me the way I am.”
Earlier in the school year, SDA participated in the Bill of Rights Day Student Contest, a competition where students from fifth to twelfth grade in ten different states can submit an essay or an art project about the importance of the Bill of Rights, and a right that they feel should be included.
SDA seventh grader Shay took first place in the art submission for seventh and eighth graders with her poem “Echoes of a Clean Tomorrow,” which talks about how people have the right to live in a clean environment, but the Earth is slowly decaying. “Everyplace you go, should be clean, gleaming with green, a world pristine. … think about the people affected, they should be protected, but yet, they are still neglected.”
Shay spoke about how she feels SDA builds her up by working with her needs. “I’d say one of my favorite things is how flexible everyone here is and how much they meet my needs. If you have something you have an issue with, they would find a way, most of the time, to work around it,” she said.
By giving students autonomy to learn how they do best, and to get their work done on their own terms, it builds important skills for kids to take with them even after they graduate, like internal motivation. However, SDA might not be for everyone.
“It does take a certain kind of student. If you want to come to Self-Directed Academy, you need to be able to not just take care of yourself, but also advocate for yourself. To be able to look at your planner and say ‘this is what I need to get done today, the teachers have laid it out. This is due then, that’s due another time,’ you know?” Hiltner said, also going on to say that in an ideal world, those skills should be taught long before middle school.
The way school systems are run has been evolving recently as students and teachers alike have expressed their discontent with the old ‘one size fits all’ way of learning. Schools like SDA take a different approach with the hopes of helping students have options to learn and grow the way that works best for them.
It will be interesting to see how the education environment continues to expand over the next years to accommodate more learning styles and to give every student the opportunity they deserve to show they can do incredible things.