A Day @ Array…
Moves at a frenetic pace. And rightly so. At Array class starts at 9 a.m. and breaks at 12 for lunch. Class resumes around 2 p.m. and concludes at 5 p.m. If you’re adding this up, that’s only 6 hours of instructional time. Compare this to other intensive coding schools and you will see that this is a unique schedule. This isn’t a flippant choice by Headmaster Eric Trowbridge. Instead, this choice was inspired by the Finnish education system.
You can listen to Eric talk more about this on the TED stage, but we are going to hear from him this week on this as well. For now, I want to share my own experiences and perspective on this unique way of running a school. Having been a teacher for 8 years and having a master’s degree in Adult Education Administration, it is quite a profound experience to shift into a completely different educational system that focuses on efficiency and not the number of hours.
In my experiences, as a society we love to measure success and achievement in time. It can go both ways. Those that spend lots of time on skills are revered and those that spend an exceptionally short amount of time to attain exceptional skills are also quite honored. Think accomplished professor and child prodigy as an image for these two extremes. There in the middle where the rest of us sit, learning and skill is measured more minutely with literal minutes. We are positively obsessed with instructional time, documenting work hours, recording even the slightest absences, and are almost always assuming more time on average is better or represents better learning.
At Array this posit is disregarded almost entirely. We are looking for optimization, a healthy amount of stimulus and reflection, along with leisure and learning. Let me run you through a typical day in terms of how we view time and learning.
At Array we start the day with a “Daily Download.” This is a chance for students to share, staff members to update, remind, or introduce upcoming activities, and sometimes to just be silly together. In a lot of educational institutions this is “wasted” time, at Array this is recognized as a form of reflection and learning. After the Daily Download, students launch into intensive and difficult learning. Why? Because this part of the morning is recognized as a particular good time for the majority of people (regardless of age) to be productive, to learn new information, retain information, and take on challenging concepts. Lunch hits and students get 2 hours of reflection on their own time. This is a phenomenal time for students to internalize the information from the morning in their own way.
As our students come back from lunch, they are given another three hours of lecture, activities, and projects. During the afternoon, students have the opportunity to apply the morning’s information and add additional insights. In another break from traditional education, Array does not assign mandatory homework. There is the option for different exercises, challenges, and videos if you would like, but not required. So at 5 the students are able to make choices about how much engagement they want to continue to have with the information that day.
So how do our students spend less time and learn the same or more as other coding schools? It’s actually pretty simple, quality over quantity, trust over control, and internal motivation over external. Time is one of our biggest ways of insuring these principles. When you are here at Array, you are busy, engaged, and your time is respected. Some concepts may be easier for you than the person next to you and the next week that might be totally reversed. At Array, each week you get to choose what you need beyond the common 6 hours of learning.
ET will deliver more info on this concept later this week. In the meantime, I can assure you it is quite thrilling to see some students showing up early, others choosing to work through lunch, and still others asking for more projects in the evening. It is truly a system that promotes individual control, individual learning styles, and individual learning times. If you are considering Array and want to hear more about this concept of self customization, tune in later this week, watch our Headmaster’s TED talk, and most importantly, join us October, 26th for our Meet Array event. This is the perfect opportunity for you to ask questions and really decide if this type of learning environment is right for you!
