Nikolaus is a Partner at Transcend. He has spent his entire career in education as a teacher, academic coach, principal, Director of 21st Century Learning, and Chief Academic Officer, in school districts and charter organizations focused on personalizing learning using a competency-based systems approach. Nikolaus maintains a strong track record of successful and committed leadership focused on serving learners first and foremost.
Prior to Transcend, he was the Director of 21st Century Learning for Lindsay Unified School District, where he was engaged in the system-wide transformative work of building a learner-centered performance-based system. Some of the most exciting projects at Lindsay for Nikolaus were leading the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant around defining what personalization is and increasing the capacity of staff to deliver on this definition, as well as refining Lindsay’s community WiFi project to ensure Lindsay Unified provided access, hardware, and installation free of cost to any family in their district; thus, ensuring equity of access to information for all their learners. He also led the development and future visioning of Lindsay’s learning management system, to ensure a high-quality curriculum, tools, and data analysis was delivered to all stakeholders, learners, parents, teachers, and leaders, in the most effective and efficient manner possible.
Earlier experiences in education for Nikolaus included serving as the principal of a K-8 school in Lindsay Unified. He went to Lindsay Unified after being the Chief Academic Officer of Ingenium Schools, a charter management organization in the Los Angeles area, where he led a grassroots development of a system-wide, personalized and competency-based learning approach. Prior to this, he was an academic coach and a teacher in Westminster 50 school district in Colorado.
Nikolaus holds a Master’s Degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Colorado at Denver, and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Liberal Studies from California Lutheran University. Nikolaus currently lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife, son, and daughter.
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Leaps for Equitable, 21st-Century Learning
Transcend’s Leaps for Equitable, 21st-Century Learning describes the key ways we believe the student experience must change so that schools can prepare all young people to thrive in and transform the world.
Transform Learning with Community-Based Design
Community-based design is a collaborative and local process that brings together young people, educators, administrators, caregivers, and experts to redesign learning. It goes beyond traditional school improvement initiatives by involving the entire community in reshaping...
