Different School

What if school was nothing like it is now? What would it look like, and how would it be designed?

The mission of this blog is to dream and design completely experimental school models with no limitations. The vision is the blog will be a compilation of crazy and disruptive ideas, a creative outlet, and a exploration of all the ways learning could happen.

I’m not particularly concerned about scale, because one school model shouldn’t serve everyone. It’d be great if a good model is replicable, but if it could only work in one place, and for 20 students, then who cares — as long as its a great learning environment for those 20 students.

I am concerned about challenging assumptions that define our current traditional school. These assumptions include: the school year, the school day, the daily schedule, class size, classroom configuration, and groupings by age and grade. If you think for a moment, you can readily recall what the standard is for each of these assumptions. I want to throw out those all out the window and start from scratch.

I am huge fan of what Sal Khan did in The One World Schoolhouse. He proposed a school model that completely upends our assumptions about school. Essentially, a class would be as many a 100 kids in a large room of various age grouping working on a variety of activities and projects across many subjects. The school year would run year around and students would take vacations as needed. From this brief description you can already tell how it challenges our assumptions about school.

In each of the designs I propose I’ll try to provide a basic structure. I want to be sure to include the guiding principles of the school design and how it challenges the assumptions. I also want to include why my proposed school design might offer advantages to traditional school design — how it might better serve its intended student population.

I want this to be a collaborative project so feel free to contact me ideas for your own school. Let’s start being different.