Learning Accelerates When Students Join the Feedback Loop

For many families, engaging with their student's school experience means navigating a stream of messages—texts, emails, alerts, and newsletters—throughout the year. The information can feel constant, but may not be linked to a clear way families can support and connect with students. When alerts about learning or missed homework do arrive, they frequently come late and are framed around what's gone wrong, signaling problems rather than opportunities for families and caregivers to support a student's progress.

Instead of messages that are disconnected from what families can realistically do next to support their child, Cambiar Thrive begins from a different understanding: engagement isn't about volume. It is about connection—purposeful, contextual, and grounded in trust. When families and students have access to information they can understand and act on together, learning shifts in lasting ways.

That shift is at the heart of Cambiar Thrive's “Big Ideas Challenge,” a national competition designed to mobilize both students and caregivers with data that fuels student success and wellbeing. By making academic and non-academic data easier to access, meaningful, and actionable, the Challenge also supports organizations in designing tools and approaches to engage earlier and more effectively in their student's learning.

From Information to Partnership

Cambiar Partner Derwin Sisnett, who helps lead the Thrive program, often returns to the idea of partnership in his work. Focusing on caregivers alone can be helpful, but can also be incomplete.

“If we're focused on caregivers and how caregivers are accessing student data, that's great,” Sisnett said. “When you add that other layer of students also leaning into that journey… what student, particularly what teenager, doesn't want to be the hero of their own journey?”

That one shift of bringing students into the same “reflection loop” as their caregivers changes the dynamic entirely. A reflection loop lets people process information together—pausing to reflect and think about next steps. Using this model, students and families can work from a shared view of what's happening and what comes next.

“When you pair [data and reflection loops] together, that really does reinforce the power of the partnership,” Sisnett said. “It becomes this two-way communication where both are working together in unison toward the same kinds of goals and outcomes in much greater strength when they're doing that together.”

More than a communications strategy, Thrive's model is developmental: Adolescence is a critical window for building agency, including learning how to set goals, track progress, and make decisions with increasing independence. When students are excluded from conversations about their own learning, the message—however unintended—is that learning is something happening to them. When they are included, learning becomes something they help shape.

Listening Before Designing

Thrive's model emerged from listening. In its first cohort, Thrive and its grantees conducted more than 300 empathy interviews with families and students. The goal wasn't to validate existing engagement strategies, but to understand how families and students actually experience them.

What families described was consistent across contexts: communication was frequent but fragmented; platforms required multiple logins; data arrived without explanation or guidance; even highly motivated families were left unsure whether their child was on track, what the information meant, or how to respond.

One insight stood out from those interviews. When students and families sat side by side with the same information, the quality of engagement changed dramatically.

Low Volume, High Signal

Across the Thrive learning community, a shared realization emerged: families didn't want more platforms; instead, they wanted clarity. Thrive pushes against “high-volume, low-meaning” communication, replacing it with fewer messages and clearer signals: insights paired with action, in plain language, at the moments families can actually use them.

Another practical distinction inside the community is what leaders describe as not sending families “code.” As Sisnett said, families want to see what matters. “They want to actually see data.” Instead of asking families to interpret charts, portals, and dashboards on their own, Thrive emphasizes leading with meaning—for example, the single insight that families and their student can discuss together that evening—then exploring pathways to explore deeper information if needed.

“Having students side by side with their family looking at this data and doing it in partnership amplifies times 10 the kinds of navigation and decisions that need to happen,” Cambiar Founder and CEO Christina Heitz said. It's a subtle but profound design change that moves beyond access to how people actually learn.

By bringing middle and high school students into the feedback loop, they're supported in interpreting what they see alongside a trusted adult. Over time, reflection becomes a habit and helps them build confidence to ask questions, seek support, and make grounded decisions.

Big Ideas

With support from Bezos Family Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and Lemnis, Cambiar Education awarded more than $2M across 19 grantees—$100,000 each—for the Big Ideas Challenge representing a range of ideas, organizations, leaders, and communities. A subset of grantees is eligible for more than $250,000 in future follow-on funding.

“With the launch of this new cohort, we are moving beyond mere reporting to true student ownership. By putting actionable insights directly into the hands of students and caregivers, we are bridging the information divide and igniting a new era of student-led success,” Heitz said. “This is how we transform the trajectory of a generation.”

Today, Thrive's investments enable grantees to better impact families and students through partnership, expand access to essential student data and, just as importantly, build understanding of what it takes to make data usable in real life.

To accelerate the broader mission, Cambiar Thrive also plans to publish insights from the first cohort, sharing what's been learned so the field can move faster.

One of the Big Ideas Challenge's clearest through-lines is the idea that innovation has to live at the intersection of cutting-edge tools and authentic relationship.

Heitz often describes the Thrive model through the heart symbol in its logo—a Venn diagram. One circle represents what technology can enable: consistency, personalization, access, and fewer, more meaningful communications tailored to different families. The other represents what only people can build: trust, feedback loops, and the kind of conversations that turn information into action. The impact lives in the overlap.

“We said from the beginning, we want to change the field,” Sisnett said. “This is not just about one organization doing well. If a handful of organizations can demonstrate what could happen at a much greater scale… then we'd have much greater impact.”

The work is iterative by design: learning, revising, testing again. It is urgent by design. Families are being asked to make higher-stakes decisions with fewer shared reference points. Students are navigating more complexity. Schools are stretched. In that environment, the feedback loop creates shared understanding, shared language, and shared next steps. When students join the conversation, learning becomes something shared, rooted in reflection, strengthened by trust, and shaped together over time.