School of The Future?
Imagine a classroom with upper elementary school students all in one learning space. There are smaller areas with chairs, some with pillows, bookshelves and boards, the usual stuff. The teachers move between the students and know the students from multiple levels. Students know teachers from other levels. The older students are each partnered with a younger “buddy,” who is welcome to contact them at any time for support. Students are free to go to the library, with permission.
The music teacher is in a rock band. The students create electronic music from household items, record, and then transform the sounds, while learning the science behind music, and the history of rock and roll. In gym class, they sort through materials and develop their own games. The lunch room is also the stage, and there are other flexible spaces that can be converted to serve multiple purposes.
Students read books about societies and then divide into smaller groups to create their own society, including governance and a financial market. They manage the society throughout the year and end with an auction of the goods they’ve made, as well as student reflections on the failures and successes of their societies.
Assignments include designing and constructing a model of a piece of furniture that serves multiple functions. Students also develop and test inventions. They are given scraps of balsa wood, remnants from design stores, protractors, compasses and exacto knives, and each student is tasked with designing and building a house. Students choose the books they want to read and then participate in group discussions. Students learn and create together.
Does this sound like the school of the future? It’s not. It’s the elementary school I attended 26 years ago.
May 30th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Now, answer your own implied questions: why is this a surprise to people? Why aren’t many, most, or all schools like this?
May 30th, 2008 at 8:34 am
I LOVE this post. I WANT Evan to go to this school. I WANT him to be building, playing, deconstructing, reconstructing. I WANT him to have access to materials and tools. I WANT him to be exploring things outside of rigid pigeon holes. Even if the entire school can’t work like this, why can’t there be huge chunks of cross-curricular work like this?
I had my grade 9 science kids build an art project for their spring break project - worked with their art teacher to merge art and biology into some really cool stuff. Kids ROCK when they’re not held back.
Chris, I’d guess we don’t see a lot of this now because it’s hard to measure. We’re all about not leaving any child untested, and that’s harder to do without compartmentalization. That, and parents would sue the school (and school board, and city, and state/province, etc…) if little Billy cut his finger on an exacto knife…
May 30th, 2008 at 8:40 am
That might be part of it, but I don’t think it’s all of it because these kinds of schools have never been the norm (to my knowledge) and the over-emphasis on testing and minimizing risk is somewhat new.
What fascinates me is the feeling I’ve been getting over the last couple of years that almost all the answers we are looking for are already well-known– and have been for a long time. Only the implementation in a new environment is novel… but I don’t have a lot of faith that the implementation will ever happen on any meaningful scale if we can’t figure out why previous revolutions in education have failed.
I think the reaction to edupunk is a great example. We see people clamoring how cool it is to have a meme– that they know edupunk when they see it (and it’s true) and we see people complaining that it’s just a new term for something we already know (and do)… it’s not coincidental that the reactions dovetail together.
May 30th, 2008 at 9:06 am
If I weren’t 10 years old at the time, I would probably have a better understanding of how they did it. Maybe I will try to track down the people at the school. I think the gym teacher is still there. It was a brand new school and I think it was under capacity. I should also say that I don’t really know what K-12 schools are like right now, other than what I’ve observed working with mentor teachers at a university COE. Maybe schools are already like this.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:52 am
[...] If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! And if there’s anything else I can do for you, feel free to drop me a line.Jennifer from injenuity wrote about what her elementary school was like 26 years ago. [...]
May 30th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
With the exception of some elite private schools and some exceptional magnet schools, I think schools are rapidly tumbling downhill, and your post is a great reminder.
When I was in elementary school in a similar time period, the regular public school was okay, but I was lucky to have been in a small program for the (eight) academically gifted students in the district. We spent all of fourth grade designing our own planets — making topographical maps to scale, learning about linguistics to create our own languages, designing a monetary system, etc. Then in 5th grade, we had to create and run our own businesses, and even had to “pay” for our pens and pencils and “rent” our computer time. There is zero doubt in my mind that those years let my inner-entrepreneur shine through and are why, even if faced with weeks of eating ramen for dinner, I have never been able to work for someone else.
This program existed only for the three years I was in it … over the course of the three years, parents of children not in the program went to the Board of Ed to get their children placed in it too, and to be “fair” to program quickly bloated, and then had no budget. A true tragedy. Forget being politically correct … we are not all the same and people of different skills/abilities need them nurtured, NOT to be in a class of 50 that learns the same thing the same way at the same pace.
May 31st, 2008 at 5:18 pm
here is that place:
http://www.fccps.org/meh
http://thedeputyhead.com
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:23 pm
As a highschooler with a little sister in elementary school, I solely blame the No Child Left Behind Act and the rise of standardized testing. Schooling is not schooling anymore where learning actually takes place. Teachers are literally forced to teach by the book and spend weeks reviewing just how to take a test and whats on the test so that states can evaluate student performances EVERY YEAR. My sister has to take an English Standardized Test in Jan, followed by Math in March and for some reason they threw in Science in April. This used to happen in only 2nd and 5th grade but now my state mandates 2nd THROUGH 6th grade.
Stupid testing.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
[...] Via Kwa, I read what Jennifer had to say about her school experience, some years ago. [...]