Why Are There So Many Walls?

Last night, I was participating in our school district’s summer Twitter book study on George Couros’s book The Innovator’s Mindset. The penultimate question was:

My answer was visceral and immediate: “Why are there so many walls?”

I currently work in a beautiful old high school building where great things are happening in teaching and learning. But it’s full to the brim with walls. These walls keep teachers separate from other teachers and keep students separate from other students. Bells ring and students either scoot or shuffle through the halls, pouring out of one square of walls and into another.

I’m sure that many other schools lucky enough to find themselves in historic buildings have a similar “wall” problem.

What would happen, though, if we could take down some of these walls? Or replace them with moveable walls? Or maybe we could even make walls disappear and reappear at will? I think that if we took a different approach to walls, we could get students, teachers, administrators, families, and communities learning together. Maybe there doesn’t always need to be a special task force or committee…maybe it’s just about getting rid of some of the walls.

About ten years ago, some friends and I came up with a vision for our perfect school and we called it “Schwa Academy.” (I don’t know why. I think maybe we just liked that it looked like it was turned on its head.)

At Schwa Academy, we wanted open spaces, where students could choose their own learning paths and explore their own ideas without the constraints of walls, courses, standards, and testing — the hallmarks of the traditional school model.

And if you know anything about education, you know that we are a bit locked into that traditional factory-inspired model of education. But people are wanting change. This summer, I attended #ISTE2016, the Personalized Learning Summit in Chanhassen, MN (#MNPLS16), and EdCamp Southeast Minnesota (@edcampsemn). On a national, state, and local scale, it is clear that we are poised to get rid of some of these walls.

There is an anti-traditional-model movement in education that’s gaining traction, and a few of its basic tenets are: 1) We don’t want students to receive learning, we want them to experience it, 2) We want to teach and learn together, not in strictly-defined roles, spaces, and times, and 3) We want to take that learning and do something meaningful with it.

Perhaps if we addressed this “wall” problem in our buildings, we might find the ability to achieve the above-mentioned goals. And, if we’re even luckier, other “wall” problems in our lives might be similarly solved. The-Presidential-Candidate-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named wants more walls, but I don’t agree. Of course we still need them to hold up the roof, but we don’t need them to hold out each other.