How this education technology company is reshaping after-school learning

Education technology company Brain Power has spent the past three years in a state of rapid digital transformation. And while the students in its enriched learning programs likely haven’t noticed, staff and parents are benefiting from a much lighter administrative load.

“Our mission is to teach kids how to think, not what to think … it’s a very human interaction,” says Vanessa Iarocci, Brain Power’s CEO and an instructor. “We were only going to grow if we could protect this idea of a very personalized human-centred education.”

Dr. Reuven Rashkovsky, a mathematician, started Brain Power in a makeshift classroom in his Toronto basement in 1990. Disheartened by the provincial math curriculum, he offered after-school enrichment classes to kids in the neighbourhood that engaged them with logic games and critical thinking strategies.

Today, Brain Power has 11 campuses, including one virtual campus, across the Greater Toronto Area, and 115 instructors, all with graduate degrees and many with PhDs. Brain Power offers programs on language arts, public speaking and discourse analysis, mathematics and problem solving and admission preparation for students from Grade 1 to 12. All the classes take place after school and on weekends.

Ms. Iarocci became co-owner and chief executive officer in 2022. Within a few months, she realized how manual the business’s processes were.

“The first big challenge is this weight of administrative burden that is on teachers,” Ms. Iarocci says. “And on the family side of things, particularly families of busy, high-potential kids, their lives are like a logistical nightmare; getting through the days is a miracle.”

However, the business had survived for over 30 years with its hands-on approach.

“How do you not wreck it? And how do you use the scaling as an opportunity to make it even better?” Ms. Iarocci says.

The first major digital change they introduced was overhauling the assessment process while still preserving the personalized, human-led approach.

“Students at Brain Power are placed by capability, not grades,” she adds.

Brain Power implemented a custom-built, intelligent matching and booking system, boosting capacity from 10 weekly meetings to upwards of 300.

“Families can enter their preferences and be matched with one of our faculty,” Ms. Iarocci says. “This isn’t like some call centre somewhere – this is an actual educator [doing the assessment] and we can set up the assessment in person or virtually.”

Next, it built an enterprise resource planning (ERP) program to follow the entire student customer lifecycle from safety needs and learning preferences to attendance logs and student records. The new system allows flexible class switching and cross-campus makeup classes, giving faculty real-time notifications about attendance, substitutions and class notes.

With its critical thinking and discussion-led approach (Brain Power classes often devote the first half-hour to conversations about the homework), Ms. Iarocci says any learning management system they used should focus on automating rote tasks like giving math students live grades.

“There are lots of tools that give students step-by-step instructions,” she says. “We’ve taken the focus away from just the right answer to what’s the process to get there – that’s where the problem-solving skills are built.”

Alexandra Rebarbar, a former student who now works part-time with Brain Power while studying at York University’s Schulich School of Business, says the classroom experience still feels similar to when she attended in 2014. But the extracurriculars facilitated and supported by Brain Power, such as workshops and competitions, have grown exponentially. Facilitating those extracurriculars used to devour the administrative staff’s time.

“[Last year had] over a hundred events the students [could] join … this kind of access and opportunity was completely unimaginable before,” Ms. Rebarbar says. “The technology handles all of the enrollment, logistics, participant tracking and results management – they’re all managed through one system that makes this administrative burden almost invisible.”

Ms. Rebarbar, who started at Brain Power in Grade 3 and continued through to Grade 12, says intellectual discourse has always been core to the experience. But it’s challenging when instructors, who are already taking time out of their professional careers to teach, are tied up in the scheduling aspects.

“[The technology] gives the students a lot more time with their instructors,” she adds.

Robert Martellacci, president of MindShare Learning, an education technology consultancy in Mississauga, says it’s no surprise that Brain Power has seen its intake grow.

“Parents who have the means are putting their kids in after-school programs and more advanced programs that will help them become true 21st-century learners with the essential skills to thrive in a world where career pathways are unclear,” Mr. Martellacci says. “Anything you can do to augment their learning, like after-school programs, is definitely valuable.”

Ultimately, it’s about balancing technology and the in-person experience. Borrowing a quote from Charles Fadel, founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign at Harvard University, Mr. Martellacci says the future belongs to those who can collaborate with intelligence, both artificial and human.

Ensuring teachers have access to technology to focus on what they do best is key.

“The biggest challenge we have is upskilling teachers who could then support their students,” Mr. Martellacci says. “It’s a constant catch-up game.”

In the context of the enriched learning environment, the skills are there; the technology just needs to support the instructors.

Ms. Iarocci says the digital transformation is also about the parents. It’s allowed Brain Power to preserve that sense of community it had when it was just one campus.

“We’ve really retained that and not gone to offshore call centres or chatbots like a lot of education franchises do,” she says.