About Alvo

Alvo Has Been a Leader in Personalization Since 2010

about-alvo

The Alvo Institute provides design, implimentation and professional development services to help schools, districts and educational agencies design, implement and sustainably operate innovative, 21st century classrooms. Founded in 2008, Alvo was the first technology agnostic firm in the country to help schools design and implement personalized learning using blended along side other instructional methods.

Alvo has served a wide range of clients including schools and districts in urban districts such as Los Angeles and Oakland, charter schools such as Summit Public Schools, KIPP Courage Houston, KIPP National, Alpha Public Schools and Da Vinci, rural districts in Oregon and Illinois, and independent schools in New York, Baltimore and Cleveland.  The team has also supported a virtual cohort of over 40 schools in Canada, The US and Mexico.  Alvo has been recommended by leaders in the field to advise educational, governmental and philanthropic organizations in the US as well as Spain, Brazil, Australia and South Africa.

Experience Matters: Alvo’s Team of Educators Supported the Country’s Earliest Personalized Instruction Adopters Using Blended

As an early innovator in blended and personalized methods, Alvo has a trailblazer’s understanding of the practice of designing personalized learning environments and a veteran’s knowledge of the catastrophic, expensive mistakes that can be avoided with careful planning and deep expertise of the fast-paced ed-tech space and an educator’s awareness of school implementation/transformation cycles.

  • We have been delivering results longer than just about any other blended provider. Recognized as one of the pioneers of personalized learning, we have gained enormous experience over the past years of work. Our clients’ designs are never experiments; we deliver solutions that we can be sure will work based on years of experience and measurable results.
  • We deliver high quality, cost-effective, sustainable solutions. We design high-return solutions, focused on systems that will last for years to come. We help schools find the most cost effective, scalable tools and online content, and most importantly how to leverage the bounty of free and publically available content and tools in the market place.  With the money our clients save learning how to navigate the sea of for fee items, like online content, our clients are able to invest deeply in helping teachers transform their practice, and in turn become coaches for other teachers ensuring that 21st instructional practice is not tethered to a costly suite of content or technologies but rather to deepened faculty and leadership capacity.  Additionally, we have a strong record of consistently finishing our client engagements within the initial scope of work, and either on or under budget.
  • We help you spend sufficient time purposefully planning and help you drive costs down. We don’t sell solutions – we build internal capacity and help you invest in your human capital. We will help you build or find the technology and data systems that best meet the needs of your schools, teachers, and students. We help our clients to use a combination of the stellar FREE resources and tools available today before investing in long term technology contracts.
  • We understand educators, because we ARE educators. Our team of consultants is comprised entirely of former teachers, principals, and district administrators. We know what works in classrooms and drives student growth. Most importantly, we know how to coach and support teachers who will be doing the important work of implementation. Teachers appreciate our approach, and our team members, because as educators we can appreciate their reality, challenges, and perspectives. 

To learn more about why we do this work, please view our videos.

Alvo’s Unique Theory of Action: Blended is a Pathway to Personalization

Our theory of action is simple; highly differentiated, personalized instruction, supported by blended learning, will lead to improved academic and social-emotional outcomes for all students and in turn, a significantly higher percentage of students will experience success in post-secondary education, citizenship and ultimately the workplace.

At Alvo, we believe that blended learning is a deep and deliberate expression of differentiated instruction that can lead to personalized learning paths for each student. Alvo believes that Blended Learning combines the best from traditional instruction together with the best online instructional innovations. In a Blended model, teachers and students make decisions about a student’s instructional experiences based on close and regular analysis of student data. The opportunity for personalized instruction is deep, but will vary depending on the specific model. We believe that Blended is the most efficient and effective path to support personalization.

Alvo does not believe that technology is the central element of a great blended learning design, which is why Alvo is one of the few instructional design firms that do not sell technology.  Instead, we design programs around how to use data to personalize learning for all students and to maximize the human and financial resources within schools. Technology fits around the instructional design.

With good intentions and a sense of urgency to give students the very best, we have seen too many schools rush into a blended learning implementation, convinced they can and must “build the plane as they fly.” At Alvo, we believe that you can’t build a plane as you fly it when you are carrying other people’s children on board. We believe in a strong initial design and planning phase, supporting an implementation with careful monitoring and support.  A successful initial launch will lead to innovation that is long-term, sustainable and systemic.

Learn more about our services here.

Why Do We Do This Work?

Alvo is a team of experienced educators who are passionate about creating environments where children can thrive. Learn more about what gets the Alvo team up in the morning.
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Why The Name Alvo?

When our founders began traveling around California to talk about the impediments to realizing the a robust data culture, they used a graphical image that looked like a bull’s-eye. Rebecca, an ardent non-violence advocate, thought calling it a bull’s-eye was too war-like. Russ, a fluent Portuguese speaker having lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, suggested they call it the alvo—Portuguese for bull’s-eye. Everything sounds luscious and peaceful in Portuguese.

For the Alvo Team, Alvo became the name of the thing they dreamed of doing: creating an institute to help educators navigate the waters of emerging technologies in order to dream, design and deliver innovative programs that help student achievement thrive. Today, the alvo symbolizes the data-driven, targeted, and results-oriented methods that The Alvo Institute uses to help educators dream, design, and deliver their instructional nirvana.