Innovating via Pop-Up Classrooms
Of a warm May weekend in Akron, a normally gray, vacant block magically transformed into a thriving destination. For three grand days, North Hill teamed with music and entertainment, bustling shops, a redesigned roadway, food trucks, street vendors, children playing, unfamiliar-yet-wonderful ethnic food smells, and crowds of people.
No mere festival, this long-planned event acted as a demonstration project — a brought-to-life vision for local developers to see and learn from.
In Fresno, Dallas, Tampa, Norfolk, and beyond, similar“Better Block” projects temporarily transformed underused urban blocks into showcases of the best of city life. Later, these weekends of prototyping led to permanent improvements to the life of each block.
What does this suggest to education?
Yesterday, Matt Candler and 4.0 Schools announced a support package for “Tiny Schools”. Asking What if we tested schools the way chefs test new restaurants?, Matt evoked the same innovation-testing techniques as the Better-Block projects. It’s a great question, and beyond asking, 4.0's announcement included a Contract Template for Tiny School Builders.
The Tiny School Project applies the techniques that transformed the restaurant-starting-business to our world.
Pop-up classrooms are like pop up dinners — an afternoon or Saturday version of a new school.
Tiny schools are like food trucks. bigger bets than pop-ups, they let you test a school with 10–15 students for 2–12 months in borrowed space.
It’s a much-needed prescription, changing the focus of innovation in a dramatically new way. For too long, innovation in education has focused on
- Entirely new, expensive schools
- Media, project, lesson, and unit creation
- Pedagogy — how teachers present or engage individual lessons, units, projects.
Missing — between whole schools and unit lessons — lies a much-neglected space for innovation. The ‘course-level’ space, the rethinking across a quarter, semester, or year, of how learning could be tied together.
Too, rethinking what really belongs in a K-12 education?
- Is there some entirely new class that ought be standard across most schools? Should “Making” be prevalent in every school? Ought access to calculus and chemistry be an educational ‘right’? (Many schools don’t/can’t offer them). If so, how? Should every student program? How much? Are basic illustration and drawing skills something each teen could be given?
- Are there new concepts and tools that ought be integrated across several classes? Design Thinking comes to mind. This powerful framework for digesting human-centered problems might be an important addition to any student’s intellectual toolkit. (How are we to find out?)
- If we are to add new learning, how do we fit it in? What existing learning must go? Or be re-framed, or accelerated? Could we integrate Algebra II content into other work in a way that no longer requires students to dedicate 120 hours to this often tedious and unappreciated course?
Not a Saturday version of a new school, but 1–5 students taking an entirely new, quarter-long class?
What if we used the ‘pop-up classroom’ concept to find out?
In this case, the ‘pop-up’ classroom metaphor isn’t so much about how long, as as about who and what . Perhaps several Saturdays, nights, and holidays will be employed. Yet only one, two, or five students initially test the waters, more the second, third, and fifth times.
And — importantly — the results are published?
What If Students Could Create their Own Pop-Up Classroom?
Are we truly serious about personalized learning? About empowering both teachers and students? About innovation towards 2015 in every school? About connected learning, and dramatically enlarging the learning ecosystem?
If we are, we have to give students, parents, and others power to initiate the coursework.
- Perhaps they will choose MOOculus, a proven option for learning calculus. Or band together in a group of five to learn Arabic from DuoLingo plus an Iraqi citizen and some mentoring from a US soldier.
- Perhaps two will learn full-stack web programming with the help of a recipe that combines CodeSchool interactive lessons, programmer community help, a few live Meetups, and a 30 hour personal or team “passion project”.
- Perhaps they’ll design a Physical Ed class that involves FitBit, rowing, climbing, running and board-sailing. Or combine short classes at the local arts center to gain basic skills in drawing, with art history lessons from SmArtHistory on Khan Academy.
- Perhaps new designs of micro-apprenticeships at local factories and worksites, combined with a Manufacturing Basics certificate from the Institute of Manufacturing.
Through these and many other potential course paths, students and others might lead us toward the Next Generation High school.
No call for free-for-all learning is this. It’s important that a plan be approved beforehand for each popUp course; and that the plan, and it’s proposed assessment measures, be completed.
It’ll be even better if plans are published, forked, and iterated and improved through use by many groups of students.
More than spending $50 million on merely five new schools (XQSuperschools), Pop-Up classrooms are far more likely to give all schools the innovation they desperately need. Kudos to Matt and team for this amazing concept.
Ed Jones is author of Hacking High School: Making School Work for All Teens. He is bootstrapping A Statewide Laboratory for Student-Driven Learning.
