Redesigning Childhood Education (3 of 4): What School Should Look Like
Before we talk about what alternative models should replace the traditional K12 school system (see Parts 1 and 2 if you missed my case for that), let’s define the goal of childhood education in the first place.
What is it that an exceptional school should achieve?
teaching how to learn: If nothing else, school should teach children how to teach themselves. This is the most important knowledge you can have in life. Like the biblical proverb of teaching a man to fish rather than providing him a new fish every day, teaching students how to learn — and encouraging their independent intellectual curiosity — empowers them to handle any situation going forward. In a world where technology is shifting at an ever-faster pace, this ability is absolutely necessary for every level of the workforce; by the time students graduate and enter careers the technology they need to know at work will already be different from what they grew up on.
basic skills: There are important technical skills that all children need to learn as quickly as possible in order to be able to keep learning on their own and with others in school. These building blocks are the ability to read and write articulately, to do foundational mathematics, and to conceptualize abstract problems and strategies. Later on there are technical skills like writing code or manipulating data sets that would be incredibly valuable for children to build proficiency in…but most schools still fail to accomplish the first three over thirteen years so let’s get that right first.
foundational knowledge about how the world works: Most people can agree that there is an elementary understanding of the world around us that we’d like each young person to have as they dive into the rest of their life. This means a high-level comprehension of biology, physics, chemistry, government, personal finance, etc. in an applied manner that makes it clear how this knowledge directly touches their daily lives. Guiding a student through this content in relevant context is a critical for it to be understood and retained for the long term. (The longstanding approach of teaching these topics as abstract theories results in them being forgotten within a few days or months).
creative, critical thinking: Children need to be raised to do what computers can’t. That is to be human — emotional, creative, capable of seeing unusual relationships between unrelated things — not to spend their school years memorizing history dates, scientific formulas, and other simple facts they can find online in 3 seconds. Youth need analytical skills and an ability to solve problems (and build new things!) through outside-the-box, interdisciplinary thinking. That will make them more resourceful in their personal lives and far more valuable and impactful as professionals.
socialization + collaborative problem solving: Part of schools’ role in child development is teaching children how to function around one another, both socially and professionally. Except for in academia, such social skills are vital for career success, not to mention positive friendships, healthy families, and active citizenship. We learn best together, when sharing and debating ideas between peers gets our brains working and exposes us to the broad spectrum of alternative ways to attack the same problem. (The theoretical ideal where you could have one teacher full-time tutoring each student solo, like in Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s Emile, is not in fact an ideal at all.)
There are many school models that could be designed for these goals. Since our 1800s-era model was not, and it doesn’t make sense anymore, what’s the magic solution to replace it?
Well, there is no one solution. One of the flaws of our existing system is the assumption of a one-size-fits all school.
We’re heading into a future where there will be a broad range of (respected/mainstream) school types families can choose for their child. Different models will cater to different learning styles, interest areas, teaching philosophies, and more. This is exactly what’s needed in education: a marketplace of options where different schools try different things and discover a vaster scope of what does and doesn’t work well in educating children, making them all better over time through the exchange of ideas and competition to attract students. (Yes, I’m talking about bringing healthy market competition to schools in order to benefit the consumer.)
Some schools will let students heavily shape their own personal curriculums while others will maintain a stricter curriculum everyone must work their way through; some schools will focus on creating “well rounded” youth, others will focus on molding future engineering prodigies; some schools with have campuses where hundreds or thousands of children go everyday, others will have 20-student micro-schools; some will maintain 180-day annual academic calendars, others will operate year-round allowing students to come and go at will.
Based on the last two decades of research and experimentation, here are key elements of school redesign that make a lot of sense and are succeeding in various incarnations at innovative schools like the AltSchool network, Khan Lab School, and Summit Public Schools. (If you’re familiar with school types, this framework is Montessori taken to a farther extreme and enhanced with technology from the ground up.)
Hyper-personalized: Rather than one-size-fits all, each student has a personalized plan mapping out what they will learn, through which activities, and in what order. It’ll have benchmarks to measure progress against, just the same as an employee leading a new project at work would have (with understanding that some things will take longer and others shorter).
Experiential learning: School activities will be much more physically and mentally engaging; there will be few if any lectures with one teacher telling a big group of students what they need to know. Instead you’ll see group activities, personal projects (instead of basic “fill in the blank” homework assignments), and interactive online content.
Experiential learning includes learning new things in a real-world, interconnected context instead of in silos. This is important when you consider what learning looks like at the cellular level. There’s no such thing as a singular “memory”, but millions of little packets of information (chemical messages) collected from all senses that get encoded into neurotransmitters in our brain cells (aka “neurons”). Related neurons interconnect (messages encoded in neurotransmitters pass through a neuron’s axons to recipient neurons’ dendrites). The more that new information is related to existing knowledge, the better it can be recalled and the better its full complexity can be understood. The more stimulating (passionate and engaged) new information is, and the more that associated cells are later accessed — i.e. regular firing of the synapses transmitting information between neurons in that network — the better maintained all that knowledge is for the long term.
Mastery learning: It’s the most simple concept in education yet we’ve been ignoring it: actually learning something. Forget grades from one-off exams; performance will be measured by progress in what you’ve mastered— because why on earth would you progress to the next step in a curriculum if you got a C or B or even A- on the prior material? Even video games don’t let you do that…you have to pass your current level first. For each skill/knowledge area, an individual student needs to master (i.e. A+) each step on it one at a time…sometimes they will take longer than their peers, other times they’ll leave them in the dust. Peers’ progress shouldn’t force a child onto the next thing too soon or hold them back when they’re on a tear. It’s extremely common for a child to be very strong in one area (like reading and writing) while performing average or below-average relative to peers elsewhere (like math). Even within one subject area, some concepts take longer to “click” with a student but then they catch up with and surpass peers in progress later.
Mixed-age classes: Instead of grouping students into cohorts based on age, have classrooms with a mix of ages and mastery levels. Ignoring ages allows collaboration based on curriculum progress and allows a work environment like that children will face in every other sphere of life. Mixing students at different levels of mastery also provides a critically important opportunity for peers to guide one another, emphasizing learning through collaboration and creating the opportunity to learn by teaching others (which research shows hugely valuable in organizing and retaining knowledge).
Teacher as coach: Teachers won’t stand in front of a class commanding students, they’ll provide overarching structure and work with individual students on their personalized learning plans, plus coordinate small group interaction and answer questions as needed. The key to teacher-as-coach is that it’s the teacher who answers questions while students drive the learning and discussion. The teacher is on your side to support you, not a judge on the other side of a negotiating table.
Flipped classrooms: The buzz in education for a number of years has been “flipping the classroom” so that students are exposed to information for the first time online with a non-synchronous video/reading etc. on their own time outside of class so they can move at their own pace. Class time is then used for actually discussing the material, clarifying questions, and working on activities (ex: lab experiments) to apply the new knowledge firsthand. (Note: There won’t be a pure 100% flip, I don’t think — there’s naturally still a need for teachers to provide broader context and clarifications during the school day, and benefits to teachers overseeing students at times while they work on their own to understand how they each do so.)
Assessment through constant data collection: Assessment of mastery comes from both teacher-provided data points and data from educational software programs that can map out a comprehensive picture of a student’s strengths and weaknesses, with comparative analysis to understand a student’s work relative to peers. Measurement doesn’t come from a one time test, but from analysis of every activity the child gets involved with each day.
Using more technology in the course of this generates thousands of data points about student behavior and content mastery that can be broken down for important insights to teachers, students, and parents. More digital activities during and outside of school also allow for machine learning (like Knewton or Kidaptive) that adapts the activities in real-time to play to a student’s unique strengths, weaknesses, and learning style.
When you tie these components together, you have schools that are substantially more effective and enjoyable for all types of children, not just those capable of sitting quietly in desks all day. In fact, it’s likely that we’ll be able to cut the amount of time needed for mastery of core K-12 curriculum dramatically by removing the large amount of the time spent in misguided group lectures and doing busy work (in school and as homework), and replacing it with better planning and an approach that makes students eager to take control of their own education.
We tend to vastly underestimate children’s capacity for learning, and continue to baby high schoolers as if they’re in elementary school. When you show respect to young learners and empower them to drive their own education, they will — by and large — demonstrate the according maturity. Allowing students to learn through the context of advancing endeavors they’re directly excited about makes it a pursuit they care about and might obsess over, not unlike their sports training or artistic pursuits. (I’ve always found it notable how often teens struggling academically and seen as problem children in the classroom will then show great maturity, discipline, and vigor for learning in their personal pursuits after school.)
There’s still a lot of work for parents, teachers, and administrators to do in raising children and supporting their education. These new school models won’t change that. Leading a school will never be easy. Even with the best adaptations and personalization, kids will have behavioral issues and other developmental challenges at times. I have a radical expectation for our educational change, but I’m not naïve enough to think it will be a utopia. Schools designed to fit their purpose in the modern world can create a big shift in children’s achievement however, and I’m confident we’ll look back in a few decades scratching our heads as to why it took so long to bring these changes forth.
