Grandma and Abuela know authentic learning when they see it.
Empowered learning is hard fun — high performance takes hard work and the fun in attaining it makes it worthwhile! — Ferdi Serim
Curiosity, agency, courage, commitment, trust — the skills that predict whether a young person thrives — do not show up on a bubble sheet. They show up in performance, and ASCEND measures them the way a grandmother always has: by watching the doing, and saying so out loud.
A skill only counts once it is demonstrated, not approved: What did you make? What did it take? What would you tell your grandmother about it?
About This Course
You are not just facilitating this course, you are taking it.
Over the next few weeks you will move through a compressed, hands-on pass of the same key activities your students will do between now and Christmas. Several of them, Three Takes especially, you will do for real, more than once, the same way they will.
Your Progress
A compressed pass,
not a preview
Every activity here is the real thing, run at speed, not a simulation of what students will eventually do.
Built for two audiences
at once
Co-investigators and SMEs move through this together. What you notice as a learner is what you will watch for as a facilitator.
The bridge to
Five-by-Five
After this course, the same activities return all year as daily five-minute and weekly twenty-minute videos for every learner.
What’s Due by October 31…
- This course covers FFN’s and Remedios’s confirmed Staff Navigation sequences, the same screens your students will see, compressed into one pass.
- Survey, Gather, and Plant carry your students through February 12, 2027. You will not finish that arc in this course, you will get a real running start on it.
- Some students, especially those entering the Governor’s STEM Challenge or NM MESA,
will reach Level 3 on one or more pathways before Christmas.
This course is what prepares you to recognize it when it happens.
Every Ascend Activity is measured by the same
three questions:
- What did you make?
- How did you make it?
- Why does it matter?