Bringing learning tools to the ends of the earth
About Guide School
Founded in 2024, Guide School is dedicated to bringing AI-powered, mastery-based schooling with exceptional human guides (instead of traditional teachers) to K-12 children worldwide.
Guide School was selected by Alpha School, the fastest-growing AI-powered private school network in the United States, to train its school guides.
In its first year, Guide School exceeded revenue goals, unlocking second-year funding, and launched a growing YouTube channel alongside a full suite of Guide training modules and core academic systems to help educators stand up the microschools of their dreams.
Our microschool partners have answered the call. They are proving that student-driven, guide-supported, AI-powered education can flourish anywhere — from remote islands to rural towns to urban highrises — and that children everywhere can now rise to the highest levels of achievement.
Meet the teamGuide School's founding team
Heather Clayton Staker
Chief Executive Officer
Heather Clayton Staker is an education entrepreneur in the United States who has spent more than 20 years studying educational innovation and the rise of blended learning as the disruptive enabler of student-driven schooling. She is the co-author of the Amazon bestseller Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools (Wiley, 2015), The Blended Workbook (Wiley, 2017), and How to Create Higher-Performing, Happier Classrooms in Seven Moves (Christensen Institute, 2017).
Previously, Heather served as a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation and as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company. She has been a featured presenter in hundreds of radio, television, podcast, webinar, and live events on six continents and has testified in U.S. legislative hearings as a spokesperson for student-centered learning.
Heather holds a BA magna cum laude in government from Harvard University and an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.
She is the mother of five children and lives in Austin, Texas.
Allan Staker
Chief Creative Officer
Allan leads storytelling, marketing, and media creation for Guide School. If you're enjoying our crazy social feeds, you have him to thank.
He is also the founder of Brain Chase Productions, a gamified learning studio that blends cinematic storytelling, puzzles, and play in large-scale summer and afterschool programs across the United States. Working with Marvel animation screenwriters, Allan leads the production of original animated stories that hide clues to the locations of real, buried treasures around the world—from Barcelona to Vanuatu. Brain Chase has served tens of thousands of students across 10+ countries and has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, and Inc. Magazine.
Before Brain Chase, Allan founded Yoostar, an interactive entertainment platform that lets users act inside scenes from Hollywood films—licensed from major studios, patented, and launched on Xbox and PlayStation. Yoostar was featured in Rolling Stone’s “Great Rock & Roll Gift Guide,” NBC Today Show's "Hollywood's Hottest Gifts," and UberReview's "Coolest Toys on the Planet."
Allan started as a filmmaker, earning the Audience Choice Award from the American Film Institute for one of his student films. He later founded a broadcast advertising agency where he directed Super Bowl commercials, and then brought that storytelling lens to marketing and strategy roles with Hawaiian Airlines, Apple, and Dell Technologies.
Allan holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree in film directing and business administration from Brigham Young University, graduating magna cum laude. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family.
Our research base
20 years of disruptive innovation
Heather's research for the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation launched this work.
We are currently running pilots across Africa and Asia to test and refine each of our tools. Because AI is evolving so rapidly, we update our learning app stack every week.
Publications
Blended
This bestselling book from the Christensen Institute showcases the Flex and other blended-learning models.
Blended Workbook
Annotated examples of blended-learning plans that Heather helped 75 school districts develop.
Microcredentialing
A method for reskilling the teacher workforce. Our "stackable competencies" stem from this research.
Malaysia
Spotlighting 88 Malaysian teachers who implemented a Microsoft model premised on student-driven learning
Singapore Pilot 2
Case study documenting a second pilot test of a Guide model in Singapore, this time with six schools.
Singapore Pilot 1
Case study documenting a pilot test of the Guide model at Fairfield Methodist School in Singapore.
Disruptive?
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Heather C. Staker posit that the Guide model is “disruptive."
Classifying K-12
One of the first papers to define blended learning, a precursor to the Guide model, and create its taxonomy.
Western Governors
An investigation of the back end of one of the US's first competency-based education systems.
Proven practices.
Efficient system.
We'll help you set up and run a microschool with excellence and efficiency, removing costs with our economies of scale and sharing best practices from this growing movement.
Guide School is based on 20+ years of research and testing. Our team will help you succeed.
Save time and improve results by relying on our tested systems and solutions.
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