Let’s solve one of my biggest frustrations

I have an exciting announcement. And it begins with one of my biggest frustrations: personal project-based education is beautiful, but oh so labour-intensive!

It’s a frustration that stayed with me through my years at Agora and in every school where I supported project-based learning. When I coached students at Agora, I loved when they walked in with a spark in their eyes and an idea that mattered to them. Starting from a personal wish or curiosity is one of the most beautiful foundations for learning. But behind that excitement, I always felt two responsibilities:

First, helping students go deep: making sure their project brought them into their stretch zone, where real learning happens.

Second, helping them go wide: connecting their idea to perspectives they didn’t yet know existed.

Both responsibilities were far more difficult than I expected.

Let me start with "going wide". As a mathematics teacher, I could easily see where math connected to their ideas. Patterns, ratios, logic, data: those links were natural to me. But when a student needed a geographical, historical, biological or artistic lens, that wasn’t my strength. I could try, but I often wasn’t good enough to give what they deserved. And if you happened to have me as your coach on the wrong day, your “personal” project could quickly become a mix of your idea and my mathematical bias simply because it was the only lens I had available. Breadth matters, but breadth requires perspectives. And as teachers, we simply don’t always have them.

Then there was "going deep". Some students naturally asked deep questions, and depth was easy. But many didn’t. Real depth requires subject language: the vocabulary that lets students analyse, compare and understand at a higher level. Without that language, both the student and I could get stuck. I watched them spend days doing dry, directionless research hoping to find the words they needed for progress. Sometimes they did. Sometimes nothing happened at all. People often said that “this frustration is part of the process”, but I never fully agreed. Many times, the frustration wasn’t a life lesson; it was a capacity problem. We simply didn’t have the structure, organisation or knowledge to give students the lenses they needed at the right moment.

And even with perfect organisation, no school team can carry all perspectives needed for all potential projects. If you’ve never cooked, you simply don’t know that cooking is full of ratios, scaling, chemical reactions and timing structures. You can’t offer connections you can’t see.

So project-based learning became incredibly labour-intensive. To do it well, teams needed alignment, shared review moments, cross-disciplinary input, meetings, conversations and more meetings. And if we weren’t careful, we took over the project. What started from the student’s motivation slowly shifted into a project shaped by adults. The spark faded. The ownership slipped away.

This frustration stayed with me for years. I saw teachers everywhere with the same struggle: helping students go deep, helping them go broad, doing it without taking ownership away, doing it without drowning in planning, doing it without losing the student's Why. And every time, I thought: there must be a better way.

This summer, something finally shifted. A few months ago, I quietly hinted on LinkedIn that something new was coming. Today, I can finally share it. For the last six months, I’ve been working with a partner on a solution. Not another theory. Not another document. Not another training. But software. It looks promising in surprising ways.
We are creating software that solves all of the above: it helps students go broad, go deep, shape meaningful end products, and stay motivated, without taking over their project. It gives them the perspectives and subject language they need, while giving you the time to focus on what matters most: quality observation, meaningful questions and just-in-time support.

And now that the foundation is there, we are ready for something special. We are opening a small test phase with five schools. We already have interest from about three, and we are opening the remaining spots through this newsletter. 

Interested? Want to try?

We’re looking for five schools to join us in this early test phase, and three have already stepped forward. Each school joins with five students and one teacher. Every student receives a 30-minute online session, during which I will personally guide them, using our software, to create a complete personal project — from their initial idea to structure to meaningful end products.

If you'd like your school to take one of the remaining spots, let’s book a call and explore it together (or simply send me a message).