The Education of Ami Desai
By Erin Vanderberg
At home in her beautiful Park Hill bungalow, meditation deck out back, it’s clear that Ami Desai has it together. A known powerhouse in the Denver education community and now author, Ami sat down to talk with me about her new book, her recent world travels and how she became exactly what she wanted to be since she was four-years-old.
Until mid-2010, Ami was the Head of the Denver Venture School in Five Points. When her school merged with Envision Leadership Prep and became Venture Prep on the Smiley campus here in Park Hill, Ami – the entrepreneurial educator – became an entrepreneur herself by opening her own educational consulting business, Ami Desai and Associates, LLC.
As a result, the woman who used to wake up at 4 a.m., go to the gym before school, not come home again until around 8 p.m., eat a little dinner and work until bedtime, is now setting her own schedule. And because she can work from anywhere, and because educational consulting work is everywhere, she decided to use this new freedom and flexibility to tap back into traveling.
“I redefined what work looked like for myself,” said Desai. “I could be in these beautiful and amazing countries, working here and there, and it didn’t feel like work – it was tons of fun learning about new cultures. I purposely went to no place I’d ever been before, to expand my vision and mindset about people and cultures and happiness and life and what defines us as who we are as human beings.”
Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Bali, Lombok, Indonesia, Thailand and Brazil are the places she visited from 2010-11.
Ami was born in Vadodara, India. Her doctor dad moved her family to suburban Detroit when she was just a toddler. When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, almost since she could talk the answer was a “first grade teacher.”
Because the models in her family were all doctors, she nearly strayed off the educator course and went into psychology, but for an educational psychology class that just clicked. Her first job out of college was doing exactly what she had said she would: teaching first grade.
Ami, who by then had a Masters in Reading, came to Denver as a literacy expert through the Learning Network, and took a job at Montview Elementary in Aurora. While there, she decided an ESL endorsement was essential to teaching in Denver schools, and also earned her Principal Licensure in Administration. She went into the Mapleton Public Schools for several years, leaving Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts (MESA) for Denver Venture School in 2007.
The goal of the Denver Venture School – a charter high school partnered with Expeditionary Learning, focused on entrepreneurship and leadership with a project-based, character-driven curriculum – was to have students, by the time they were seniors, open and run their own business. According to Ami, kids came from all over Denver and as far as Aurora, some bussing up to 2.5 hours each day because they were so interested in entrepreneurship. The population was 80% poverty-level and 90% minority.
“These kids didn’t necessarily have the most powerful experiences leading into high school,” said Ami.
While the school merged before the freshman class could become business-operating seniors, the Metro State Innovation Challenge provided Denver Venture School an annual business-based challenge in which they thrived. In their first year as participants, students from the Denver Venture School swept the “Idea” competition and got first place in the “Business” competition, and continued to rank over the years.
“What I think we saw the most at Denver Venture School is that if you put something in front of students that they can drive, that they are passionate about, they will blow the top off of it,” said Desai. “We saw these 21st century skills that everybody talks about just crop up without putting any labels on them: they had to persevere, collaborate, experience hardship, focus on presentation skills and dress in real business-casual attire. If someone had told them that these are the skills you have to master to be able to win this, they would be like, ‘Whatever, too much.’”
Ami’s book, The Educational Secret, is available 2/12 at amazon.com and bn.com