Chrissy Schmidt

Head of The Forest School Online

Chrissy was born and raised in Florida where she was homeschooled for her entire secondary school journey. She experienced firsthand the challenges and joys of self-directed learning at home! After completing coursework in Psychology, she was fascinated by child development and decided to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Education at the University of Central Florida. Chrissy has spent the past 15 years working as an educator in a variety of grade levels and settings, including public, private, international, experiential, and online schools.

After catching the travel bug in 2011, Chrissy developed a passion for international development with a focus on how education can transform lives. She completed Master’s level coursework in International Development with a residency in Rwanda before moving to Thailand. In rural Thailand, Chrissy spent several years developing experiential education programs for teens and managing English language programs for children, teens, and adults in a small village. Eventually she moved on to working at an IB World School in Bangkok where she grew her passion for inquiry and project-based learning, and began to have a vision for implementing this kind of learning in an online education space! Since then, she has dedicated her time and career to learning best practices for online learning. Chrissy taught for Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth’s online program, designed an online program for One School of the Arts, and developed a project-based learning model and full curriculum for her own online school before joining The Forest School Online. Chrissy is excited to continue pioneering online education and making excellent education accessible to learners all over the world!

Outside of her career roles, Chrissy is an entrepreneur, designer, and creative at heart; taking great joy in being a lifelong learner. She enjoys tinkering with running a small YouTube channel about her family’s adventures as a multicultural family, and loves nothing more than introverted reading and crafting time. As a native Floridian, Chrissy is thrilled to be living in the tropics in sunny Thailand!