February Parent Roadmap

By Sora Schools

At the February 2024 Parent Roadmap, Sora parents spent time together with faculty and staff and learned about some exciting updates!

Sora Expert, May Hong

May, a High School Humanities Expert, shared that she is interested in teaching literature, linguistics, and art history. Some of the expeditions she has designed and taught include: “Dreamscapes,” which is about exploring the art and science of dreaming; “AI in Film and Literature,” in which students grapple with the moral implications of AI through art; and “Gained in Translation,” where students translate poems from different languages they know or are studying into English and vice versa, to build linguistic and cultural awareness.

May also shared her favorite parts about working at Sora.

“The first thing that always comes to my mind when people ask me this is the unprecedented creative freedom when it comes to designing curricula,” said May.

“It also often pushes me outside of my intellectual comfort zone because I teach across the entire humanities discipline, so I’m constantly learning new things.”

Sora Trends in Education 2024

Risto Lahdesmaki, Chief Product Officer, shared about the recently published Sora Trends in Education 2024. We conducted research and received feedback from faculty, Sora parents, and industry experts. We are grateful for our community’s support in creating this report and sharing our ideas and thoughts about what’s trending in the education space.

Sora Home Updates

Holly Kinnamont, Product and Platform Specialist, shared some Sora Home Updates.

• Guardian Settings: Updated settings in Sora Home allow guardians to update student emergency contact information and set a password recovery email.
• Absence Request Revamp: It is now easier than ever for parents to add new absence requests from the homepage or calendar in Sora Home. Parents can edit and delete requests and even submit retroactive requests as long as it’s within the current cycle.
• A New Way to Share Feedback: Sora parents can submit feedback in a tool called Canny to help make Sora Home even better.

Mid-Cycle Progress Reports

Elizabeth Davis, Director of School Operations, shared about progress reports and how parents can turn these into active growth mindset conversations with students. Elizabeth shared how to view the Mid-Cycle progress report in Sora Home and explained that the experts share narrative comments that will be different for each person.

Some questions or feedback that could be shared from parent to student in the spirit of growth mindset include:

• What could your next steps be? This is especially helpful for mid-cycle.
• What goal do you want to set for each of your expeditions this cycle?
• It looks like you’re really on your way to mastering this topic.
• Should you be attending office hours?

“As those Mid-Cycle Progress Reports come out, it’s very, very important in our Sora environment to really consider, how do we turn all of those experiences into an opportunity for growth, into an opportunity for students to exercise agency, into an opportunity for them to ask interesting, difficult, fun questions that really will propel their understanding of lots of different connections across disciplines at that deeper level,” said Elizabeth.

Parents, please check Heartbeat for the full recording of the event if you would like to see more.