OnSite opens the doors to school systems where students grapple with real-world problems, reflect on who they want to be, and build durable skills for an uncertain future.
Why OnSite
Collaboration, judgment, communication, the ability to work a problem nobody has solved yet. Researchers call them durable skills. Employers ask for them consistently, school communities name them in nearly every Portrait of a Graduate, and they hold their value as the economy changes.
Naming them is the easy part. A few school systems have gone further, rebuilding school around real-world problems and honest reflection. No two look alike. In some, students hold real roles with employers. In others, every project ends in front of an audience or a panel whose judgment counts, or students spend years investigating their own city and take what they find to the people who run it. What they share is that the problems are real, someone is waiting for the answer, and the school knows each student well enough to help them make sense of what they're learning and who they want to be. None of them is finished. That's part of why they're worth visiting.
Durable skills come from that cycle of real work and honest reflection. Nobody learns to collaborate, communicate, or persist from a unit on collaboration; they learn it from work that someone is counting on, and from the habit of making sense of what happened.
The field knows these systems exist. What it doesn't have is a way to see them in operation: how the schedule actually works, what the central office had to give up, what a hard week looks like from the inside.
From Everett Rogers's work on how innovations spread to Richard Elmore's on instructional rounds, researchers have documented the same pattern. Practices that can be observed take hold. Practices that can only be described do not.
Where the model comes from
OnSite is modeled after the visitation program at Lindsay Unified, in California's Central Valley.
After building one of the country's first fully competency-based, learner-centered systems, Lindsay spent the next decade hosting visitors from around the country. No gatekeepers, no network to join: just open doors on four dates set at the beginning of the school year. Thousands of educators have walked through Lindsay's classrooms since, and visitors from Rowan-Salisbury, North Carolina to Eureka, California went home and built their own competency-based learning systems.
It's Lindsay's approach to access, not its specific instructional model, that we set out to replicate. A decade later, that program is still close to the only publicly available demonstration visit that opens a whole school system, central office included, rather than a single school.
Lindsay's program grew out of its own circumstances. It was never designed for other systems to copy, which is part of why no one has. We're working to change that.
The vision
School systems all over the country, each building its own way for students to grapple with real-world problems, and open to anyone who wants to see how.
What a visit is
We plan and facilitate the visit so the school system can focus on sharing what worked, what didn't, and what it's still working through. Most visits run a day or two on the ground and make room for three things, though the shape flexes to fit the host system and what's being explored. A virtual session several months later asks visitors what they've done since, which is how we learn what a visit actually changes.
Time inside schools: structured classroom observations and direct conversations with teachers, coaches, and principals. Time at the system level: panels, internal meetings, and real leadership conversations with central office.
Visitors join the hosts over good food and drinks. The informal setting surfaces candid exchanges and is often where new relationships form across sectors and geographies.
Working alongside leaders from around the country and across the sector, visitors make sense of what they saw. Breakout conversations, whole-group synthesis, and dedicated time to work through what it means for the work back home.
We plan each visit with the host: what it focuses on, how the system tells its story, and how the days are shaped. Beyond that, the school system does what only it can do, and we do the rest.
The host system
Tells its own story, including what hasn't worked
Opens schools and classrooms, and decides which ones visitors see
Assembles panels of students, teachers, and central office leaders
Provides a space for visitors to convene
Notifies staff and families, and handles visitor screening
OnSite
Markets the visit and registers visitors
Facilitates every session
Arranges food and transportation between sites
Collects visitor feedback and brings it back to the host
Raises the funding that covers our fee
How a visit is paid for
The field spends heavily every year to learn about good practice: conferences, consultants, networks, fellowships. Nearly all of that money flows to organizations that convene and interpret the work rather than to the systems that build it. A system that opens its doors today absorbs the cost itself while the knowledge it developed generates revenue somewhere else.
We invert that flow. The facilitation fee covers designing, planning, and running the visit. Registration revenue, net of the cost of putting it on, goes to the host system. Rates are tiered, with the lowest going to school systems and state agencies. We don't take on the follow-on work ourselves. Visitors who want help doing this in their own systems get connected to people and organizations who do it well.
The 2026–27 school year
Four demonstration school systems, in different parts of the country, each showing a different practice. They are the first of twenty we plan to build in the coming years. A host system can be a district, a charter network, or another structure with leadership that reaches beyond a single school. Hosts run one public visit a year, with a second where demand supports it.
What we look for
Real problems, with someone waiting for the answer
The work goes to a client, an employer, an audience, or a city, and it can miss the mark. The system is years into it rather than piloting it, and the practice is uncommon enough to be worth traveling to see.
A school that knows its students
Every student is known by an adult over years, and reflection is attached to the real work rather than scheduled beside it. Students can say what the work has taught them and who they want to be.
A practice visitors can actually observe
The work is visible in classrooms and in leadership meetings, not just described. If an outside observer can't see it, it isn't ready to be visited.
Leadership willing to tell the full story
Leaders who are honest about the false starts, field hard questions without getting defensive, and can say "we haven't figured that out yet."
A culture of reciprocity
Systems that want to know what outside leaders see when they walk through, and are curious about what they might be missing.
What host systems receive
National reach
System leaders, funders, and practitioners come from around the country to see the work up close, and take what they learn back to their own systems.
Honest outside perspective
Visitors give the host candid observations, reactions, and questions before they leave. It's the kind of cross-sector feedback most system leaders rarely receive.
Fewer one-off visits
Systems doing this work field steady requests to come see it. Public dates consolidate those into one or two a year, with the marketing, logistics, and facilitation handled.
Revenue
Registration revenue from public visits, net of the cost of running them, goes to the host system. Note: revenue begins with the first public visits in 2027–28.
The broader field
We aren't the only ones doing this. Other structured visit programs worth knowing about include Lindsay Unified, the Nashville Hub, Opportunity Culture, High Tech High, and Digital Promise's League of Innovative Schools. If you run one we should know about, tell us.
Who is doing this
Founder
Alex Seeskin designs and facilitates OnSite visits. He is a Professor of Practice in Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and consults for school systems through Schoolhouse Analytics. Before that, Alex built and ran the University of Chicago's To&Through Project, which helped Chicago educators use data to improve high school and college success.
Senior Advisor
Tom Rooney was Superintendent of Lindsay Unified School District, where he spent nearly 20 years building the learner-centered Performance Based System. Under his leadership, Lindsay became one of the first districts in the country to open its doors to visitors, training students and staff to host educators from across the country.
Get in touch
The first public visits follow in 2027–28.
School systems
If your system has been at this for years and the work is visible enough for an outside leader to see, we'd like to talk. Selection runs as a two-way conversation, with room for either side to say no.
hosts@onsitevisits.orgFunders and partners
Whether you want to support the founding cohort, sponsor a visit in your region, or just understand how the model is put together, reach out and we'll send the full description.
info@onsitevisits.orgIf you'd rather just keep an eye on this as it grows, leave your email and we'll send occasional updates.