Reconceptualizing Schools

Our public school system is in serious need of some backwards design. In the present, it feels like schools are built to process students through a process based around the way we’ve always done it. Though some teachers and even some schools have attempted serious change, it is almost always change built around the existing model rather than a true reconceptualization of the way schools work.

The greatest reconceptualization schools need is to be built around future-oriented goals for our students. The drive in high school now is to meet curriculum standards and graduation rates. Students may be engaged, challenged, and involved, but only around the margins of what is required. Instead, schools that are designed to be effective in 2025 will aim to guide students to the development of essential skills for their personal and professional lives. Additionally, schools need to look more like the real world – much like the laboratory bias in any sort of experiment, we have to be careful what effect we are measuring. Schools are great at identifying which students are good at school. However, the oft-repeated anecdote about Albert Einstein failing high school math bears repeating one more time; the real world does not measure compliance with a teacher’s rubric, memorizing formulas, or answering multiple-choice questions. Without a concerted effort to think of schools as preparation for the real world, students will continue to be turned off to their education and our educational system will continue to fail our students.

So, what needs to be done? First, schools need to identify a set of learning goals for students – we need to be able to imagine what a successful high school graduate should look like. What are the minimum acceptable standards, and what are the ideal objectives? Rather than target content knowledge, these goals should target skills such as critical thinking, presenting and organizing information, research, analyzing complex problems, and group-based problem solving. Content is the vehicle through which students should practice and demonstrate proficiency (or excellence) in these skills. There is a place for identifying a common curriculum of, for example, historical events and works of literature that all students should experience. However, these should be the exception rather than the rule. Content standards organized around themes, which students can explore using whatever specifics are interesting to them, will lead to the most successful schools and students. Innovation, not standardization and memorization, should be the priority.

Second, schools need to rework the entire pacing and structure of studies. Though it makes sense to keep students with age-peers in most cases, it is wrong to assume that all students are capable of learning at the same time, on the same day, and moving on to the next unit at the same speed. Instead, students should be given a set of goals and tasks for a set time period, and be asked to demonstrate their knowledge and skills by the end of that time period. By the end rather than at the end opens the space for advanced students to pursue their own interests. Joseph Renzulli’s research into gifted programs indicates that students who are capable of “compacting” their studies may benefit from exploring additional projects rather than additional repetition of things they already know. This will be uncomfortable for schools and teachers who are used to all students progressing along the same track, but will generate better outcomes for all students.

Clearly, then, the next step is schools need to find teachers who are comfortable working in tandem with other teachers, and across multiple disciplines. The real world does not divide itself neatly into issues that can be dealt with knowledge and skills one content area; dividing education into boxes serves to compartmentalize student knowledge and make it more difficult for them to make connections across content areas. Furthermore, successful teachers in 2025 will need to be able to guide students in multiple projects, and sometimes in unpredictable ways. Adults who need clear pacing rules and strict control of the classroom cannot be successful in this environment and are holding their students back from what they could achieve.

The most real-world way to organize schooling is around project-based learning. Students can complete projects both independently and in collaborative groups, allowing them to demonstrate what they are capable of on their own but also to develop their skills at interacting with and working with others. Schools should also make a plethora of technologies available, especially by tapping community resources and local businesses. Students could obtain valuable work/internship experience and apply what they know to solve a real-world problem for a real business, in exchange for space and resources that only for-profit businesses may have available. Everyone benefits from this type of transaction.

Selling this plan to schools and the broader community should be a simple proposition (as long as money isn’t discussed!). First, the above mentioned ideas about school-business partnerships will be a great selling point to the business community. Furthermore, many reports have shown that businesses do not feel that graduates have the appropriate skills they need to succeed in the workforce. Schools do not do enough to focus on critical thinking and problem solving and collaboration – but this reconceptualization emphasizes those things.

Second, making graduates more productive after high school or college will help sell this idea to parents. Parents will also love the fact that students learn more and act out less when they are engaged in schools, and realistic and authentic project-based learning is one of the most effective ways to increase engagement and enjoyment of schools. It should certainly be easy to enlist the support of students who will finally be free of boring lectures and standardized testing. Research shows that test scores and attendance increase with these types of school programs, which everyone can get behind.

Finally, whenever school reform is discussed, the public (or maybe just the media) tend to express their alarm about how far behind American students have fallen in international educational measures. This reconceptualization will lead to greater academic performance and critical thinking skills necessary to excel on international tests and improve America’s ranking on these measures. Furthermore, it will produce a cadre of prepared and excited graduates to fill American businesses with productive and innovative workers, keeping America’s productive and economic edge alive for generations to come. Certainly the media will like the sound of that!

Schooling in 2025

What will be the role/responsibility of schooling in 2025? In some ways, my answer to this question is the same as my answer to the role of content knowledge in 2025: as a vehicle to teach skills. While the factual information in our lives is very easy to find in the Internet age, there are few better ways to learn skills than to receive guided and graded practice in a controlled environment. Critics of schools (i.e., our students) will certainly argue that many of the things they learn in school are not useful in their lives – most people will not use differential calculus or dissect a frog outside of the classroom. But even the basic skills that are taught in earlier grades and reinforced through high school-level instruction – basic grammar or algebra, for example – are best learned at school, rather than re-discovered by each individual as they go through their lives.

More importantly, this line of thinking misses the point. The formulas of calculus may not be important, but the thinking strategies that go along with solving complex mathematics have value even as purely mental exercises to strengthen overall cognitive abilities and push the limits of what the brain can do. Comparing ancient civilizations may not be useful, but skills of historical comparison, evaluation of evidence, and chronological thinking are essential mental processes that students will benefit from mastering, and cannot easily acquire from reading things on the Internet or watching a video.

Some critics of the entire process of education see it as a strategy for control, teaching our youth how to take direction from superiors, follow arbitrary rules and schedules, and learn how to work until their bosses are satisfied with the product. It is hard to see the structure of modern schools without seeing echoes of the early industrialization of the country, when the future workforce had to learn to work to sit at a desk and work until the bell. However, the more conspiratorial aspects of this aside, the schooling performs an important role of socialization that would be sorely missed in a world without formal schooling. Students learn how to navigate social situations, manage and budget their time, and deal with rules they may not like. They learn how to interpret feedback and how to improve on their performance. Without schooling, these functions would be left to parents, who cannot create a social environment of peers the way that schools can, or employers, who have much more to lose while waiting for students to grow and mature than schools do.

Finally, the most important role of schooling in 2025 can be summarized in one word: exposure. Schools have resources that parents do not to expose students to information, ideas, and skills. While many students dissect a frog for the first and last time in 10th grade biology, others find their life’s calling in science. Schools can expose students to literature or historical eras that they would not have encountered on their own, showing students a unique view of the world. With technologies or projects that can only be practical on a larger scale, schools have the resources to show students things they would otherwise not see. Though this includes providing access to computers and the Internet that not every student has at home, it also means a full curriculum of things and experiences that need to be organized among large numbers of children – whether that is sports or drama or a school service project. Schooling provides these experiences and exposure to so much more of the world than students may find from the examples they see at home or the websites they may navigate to on their own.

The rigorous and authentic learning experiences that engage students in learning flow from this idea. If the role of high school was to teach students skills, rather than content, and to show them what the world looks like from different perspectives, rather than require them to memorize trivia, students would be engaged through project-based learning that allows them to explore their interests. With a more open curriculum, students could have a variety of opportunities and choices to meet the skill-based goals set for their courses. Removing the strict timetables and requirements currently in place would help teachers of students who might be left out or uninterested find a way to keep them engaged and maybe even excite them about school. And if I could explain in any more concrete detail what that would look like, I would be on a million-dollar book tour right now, not writing this blog post!