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The following is an excerpt of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School, by 17-year-old Nikhil Goyal, a senior at Syosset High School in Woodbury, New York.

Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: “How do we teach it?” In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it’s time to crack that shell. It’s time to abolish silos and subjects. Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab’s Human Dynamics group.

“Today’s problems — from global poverty to climate change to the obesity epidemic — are more interconnected and intertwined than ever before and they can’t possibly be solved in the academic or research ‘silos’ of the twentieth century,” writes Frank Moss, the former head of the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Schools cannot just simply add a “creativity hour” and call it a day.

Principal at High Tech High, an innovative, project-based learning school in San Diego, California, Larry Rosenstock, points out, “If you were to hike the Appalachian trail, which would take you months and months, and you reflect upon it, you do not divide the experience into the historic, scientific, mathematic, and English aspects of it. You would look at it holistically.”

After indicating the problem at hand, scoop out the tools, research, networks, and people required to get it solved. Get out of your comfort zone.

In practice, this means the elimination of English, mathematics, history, and science class. Instead, we need to arrange the curriculum around big ideas, questions, and conundrums. What does learning look like in this model? Letting kids learn by doing — the essence of the philosophy of educator John Dewey. He wrote: “The school must represent present life — life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.” Let kids travel to places, work with mentors, and inquire about the world around them.

Diana Laufenberg, former teacher at the Science Leadership Academy, described to me, “The role of inquiry is the starting point of learning. School-based education has always been about telling and getting of information, rather than exploring or investigating.” Let kids create for themselves. We can start by employing project-based learning, where students probe real world problems collaboratively. Back in 1918, William Heard Kilpatrick wrote a famous article laying out what he called the “project method”: a curriculum based on “wholehearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment…the essential factor [being] the presence of a dominating purpose.” In project-based classrooms, learning literally comes alive.

CASE STUDY: BRIGHTWORKS

Let’s examine three institutions: The Brightworks School, a K-12 private school; Stanford d.school, an institute of design; and the M.I.T. Media Lab, a graduate program.

The Brightworks School in San Francisco, California, which opened its doors in September 2011, epitomizes a new style of learning. Founder Gever Tulley told me, “If the pedagogical unit of traditional public education is a day divided into a series of 45 minute periods, then the pedagogical unit of Brightworks is the arc, which is divided into three phrases.” Each arc, he says, has a central theme.

The first phase of the arc is called exploration. “Within this phase,” Tulley says, “we create a landscape of experiences populated by passionate people who have devoted some portion of their lives to an aspect of the topic.” The children begin a journey looking through a kaleidoscope of perspectives and eventually mold a clear statement of what they intend to accomplish in the next phase. The second phase is expression. Tulley notes, “During this phrase, the mixed age teams work together, sharing skills, to take the ideas to completion — within the deadline.” The final phase is called exposition, where the public gets to view what the kids have done.

The first topic of the previous school year was cities. For three weeks, the students looked at the history of cities, how cities work, and the future of cities. 18 field trips were built into their schedule. Almost every day, Tulley explains, “we went into the city to see something or work with someone who has dedicated their life to some aspect of the city. Be they in waste water management, city planners, or architects.”

“The point is to see the topic in as many ways as you possibly can,” says Tulley. “Part of that is to expand the notion of cities in the students’ minds.”

Note: project-based learning is not necessarily expensive. He reveals, “If you look at the net aggregate cost of putting a child through a nearby public school in terms of public expenditure, at Brightworks, we do not spend anymore on kids in our private school in terms of net aggregate cost.”

CASE STUDY: STANFORD D.SCHOOL

At the Stanford d.school, projects drive the curriculum. Bringing majors from engineering, business, medicine, science, and design to come together to solve real or abstract problems is the underpinning of the institution’s philosophy. The goal is to have students become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines. Its founder and director is David Kelley, whose mission is to transmit “empathy” into his students to encourage them to see the human side of the challenges posed in class and regain their creative confidence, often lost in the early years of schooling.

Based on the axioms of what Kelley has called “design thinking,” instead of being spoon-fed problems to solve, students must first define problems themselves through observation, research, and dialogue. After, students visualize and brainstorm potential solutions with one another in the stage of “ideation.” Next, by means of prototypes, students make sketches and three-dimensional models of potential ideas to iterate continuously. Lastly, students make the final touches on a finished prototype.

The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world, sustainability, health and wellness, and K-12 education. From extracting water for irrigation in Burma to supplying solar lanterns for the poor in rural India and Africa to building infant warmers in Nepal, these students are certainly making their mark on the world.

CASE STUDY: M.I.T. MEDIA LAB

Similarly, the M.I.T. Media Lab has an anti-disciplinary approach to learning. Their research program is “focused on inventing a better future through creative applications of innovative digital technologies.” Instead of lectures, grading, and tests, roughly 25 groups of graduate student researchers and a few undergraduate researchers work with faculty members and scientists on a research topic. Due to its non-linear and collaborative process, fascinating innovations are born from Aida, a dashboard-mounted robot for cars and trucks to a trillion-frame-per-second video to Huggable, a robot teddy bear companion for pediatric hospital patients.

How can we evaluate projects? We can’t grade them the same way as tests. Gever Tulley offered me a very relevant hypothetical situation.

“Suppose you and I decided to build a boat. Our hypothesis might be: we can build a boat under $30 using recycled materials and sail it across the Hudson River. Our teacher or mentor can help us shape that to ensure that the challenge meets our cognitive and intellectual development. If the teacher thought the task was too easy for us, he or she might add a twist — the boat needs to have two masts or sail power. Half a day, a few times a week, you and I would work on this project and we have a deadline.”

“Suppose then we build the boat, drop it in the Hudson River, and it sinks. No one has to tell us that our boat is not working. We don’t need the ‘F.’ Its unnecessary and inappropriate. That first version of the boat could have been a hypothesis. We learned from the experience and the next version will be more well thought out. So after going back to drawing board and making tweaks, we test the final version. We find that the boat sails well downwind, but cannot sail upwind.”

“What grade should a teacher give? Is that a ‘C’ because it only went in one direction? Or is that an ‘A’ because we tried a bold idea but we neglected 3,000 years of sailing history and would have been able to sail it in both directions if we had done our research? You can’t decide. The feedback from the boat is its own incentive to improve our thinking for the next project.”

The point is that evaluation is no longer about giving a single number, but rather a documented process from start to finish. At the Brightworks School, students will leave with an iPad, filled with all the projects they completed in their term. Plus, portfolios and publishing your work online is one of the biggest motivators for kids. When she was teaching at the Science Leadership Academy, Diana Laufenberg said that if you Googled her students’ names, you would find an entire web history linked to them. Couple that with the fact that in project-based learning, kids are working on something they have a passion for, thus they have a stake in the outcome and will keep trying even when something isn’t working. That’s true in life as well.

Brightworks School

PROJECT-BASED LEARNING IS MESSY

Why hasn’t project-based learning picked up yet? There are a few reasons. First, the model of education says principal Chris Lehmann where kids sit in rows, read textbooks, and hear lectures has lasted so long, because it never goes that wrong. “It’s boring as hell, but most principals don’t yell at their teachers if they walk by their classroom and all they see is a quiet classroom with kids reading the textbook. No one gets in trouble.”

“If you go into a classroom,” says Lehmann, “where there isn’t that structure, kids aren’t exactly on pace, projects look messy, and it’s loud, teachers have gotten in trouble for that.”

Second, the way students attempt to learn via projects does not work. Tulley says, “It amounts to kit-based experiences in 45 minute periods. ‘We’re going to do a biology kit.’ We already know that those recipe like exercises do not stimulate creativity.”

I also spoke with Harvard Professor Eric Mazur on this issue as well. He says, “You can have students do laboratories and hands-on activities and learn nothing, because they are following the cookbook and going through the motions without having their brains on. The word ‘hands-on’ is overused and abused.”

The role of the teacher in project-based learning as Laufenberg likes to say is an “architect of opportunity. Through a scaffolding strategy, they help us make sense of what we have learned. Still, teachers must understand that learning is uncomfortable, messy, and complicated.” Get over compliance and control!

In a summary published on Edutopia, Brigid Barron and Linda Darling-Hammond reviewed numerous studies and found that:

1. Students learn more deeply when they can apply classroom-gathered knowledge to real-world problems, and when they take part in projects that require sustained engagement and collaboration.
2. Active-learning practices have a more significant impact on student performance than any other variable, including student background and prior achievement.
3. Students are most successful when they are taught how to learn as well as what to learn.

As the old adage goes, “Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand.” Harvard Professor Howard Gardner said to me that schools should incorporate the best of two models of learning: a hands-on children’s museum, which encourages open-ended exploration, and an apprenticeship, which provides a more structured environment for practicing meaningful skills in an authentic, real-life context.

The bottom line is that you don’t have to learn the boring stuff before you start applying it. Start rolling around in the dirt from the get go.

Nikhil Goyal lives with his family in Woodbury, New York. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC Melissa Harris-Perry, Fox and Friends, Fox Business: Varney & Co., NBC Nightly News, and Huffington Post.

Brightworks

When we envision a well-rounded, progressive education for our kids, we think of a vibrant environment that nurtures students’ passions, provides structure for rich and deep learning, a place where kids can get their hands on projects that are meaningful to them.

That’s the goal at Brightworks, a small, K-12 private school just starting its second year in San Francisco: to re-imagine traditional modes of education so that curiosity and creativity hold sway over standardized tests and worksheets. But in the course of creating this space for students’ interests, the school has also had to refine some of its original ideas to make room for realities like assessments and how to group students.

Brightworks first opened last fall, billed as a progressive school that allows kids to follow their own passions. It’s organized very differently from traditional schools. Teachers are known as “collaborators” and the curriculum is centered on “the Brightworks arc,” which divides learning into three phases – exploration, expression, and exposition – based on a central theme. The students explore a theme, design projects around that theme, then present their work to the community. The idea is that these projects – such as building a wooden stage for a play they’ve written or using aerial silks to demonstrate kinetic energy – provide the context for learning core academic skills.

As with every experiment, the first year has provided plenty of opportunities for refining, according to founder and co-director Gever Tulley.

“It’s been a great year. We’ve had great moments and we’ve had hiccup-y moments,” Tulley said.

Or as one parent, Amanda Moore, puts it, “It’s been everything we expected and nothing we expected.”

CREATING A STRUCTURE

While the school still follows the basic “arc” structure it started with, Tulley says there have been a lot of refinements. One major change has been how students are grouped. The year started with kids of all ages — six to 12 — working together on everything. But that proved problematic. What’s easily graspable to a 12-year-old might be far over the head of a six-year-old, and what might be new and interesting to a six-year-old could bore a 12-year-old. Now, students are grouped into age-based cohorts, or “bands,” so that age-appropriate work could move along more smoothly.

What happens during the day is more or less fluid at Brightworks — in fact, a typical day is hard to describe, as the school values spontaneity and student-directed work. Overall the typical structure involves a few key parts: 1) Morning Circle, when the entire school gets together to check in and make announcements; 2) “band” meetings, or small-group reflections where students check in with one another and the teacher about where they’re at in a certain project arc and what they plan to do that day; 3) Exploration or Expression phase activities, often involving a field trip or a visit from a professional in some field; and 4) Closing Circle time when the entire school gathers again to reflect and part ways.

The Brightworks Arc

Tulley admits that the collaborators still struggle with the most appropriate way to integrate core academics into project work. “You don’t want to compromise the quality of the project phase by cramming a math exercise into it,” he says, but there are still plenty of teachable moments (building wooden structures involves math, for example) and collaborators are trying to build their knowledge base and comfort zones around those.

MEANINGFUL ASSESSMENT

“We’re still in a lot of discussions about meaningful ways to assess children without the harm of grading and testing,” Tulley says, adding that many students at traditional schools have optimized the ability to cram for a test, then to purge the information post-test. “I think that’s something that we’ll develop over time.”

Student assessment at Brightworks takes the holistic approach. At the end of last year, teachers pored over student work, progress, accomplishments, behavior, and everything else that contributed to a student’s experience and put together a two- to three-page narrative assessment sent home to parents. These assessments were specifically tailored to each student, but were based on a template that Brightworks staff put together based on “all of the things we want our students to eventually be,” says Director Ellen Hathaway — including qualifications in academic areas.

The assessments covered three areas: students’ project-based learning, social and emotional learning, and skills acquisition and quantitative learning, according to Program Coordinator Justine Macauley. “Rather than assessing the students’ work product, we looked at their work and development during the process of their project,” asking questions like, Are they a supporter of other students’ projects or do they spearhead their own? Do they listen to others? Do they self-advocate? What subject areas do they gravitate to? and How adept is the student at organizing him/herself, their projects, their process?

This coming school year, staff will be looking at the same three areas broadly, but with more specific focus on certain areas depending on the projects and the arc topic, Macauley said.

Another change is the frequency in assessments: They’ll happen three times a year, instead of just once, which Hathaway says will be more effective and far easier for teachers to manage.

A YEAR IN REVIEW

Many parents and collaborators are excited to be part of the growing Brightworks community and are surprised by the positive effects the school has had on its students. Others are skeptical about both the model and its execution. Does this open-ended, student-driven approach mean that kids aren’t learning core academic skills? Is there too much time for free play? Are there adequate assessments in place so that learning can be measured?

One of the critics, who commented on the previous article on Brightworks, responded to a few questions via e-mail on the condition of anonymity. Despite an appreciation for the school’s mission, the commenter — who claims to be familiar with the inner-workings of the school — finds that the departure from traditional curriculum at Brightworks forgoes academic rigor, daily structure, and basic classroom management. “Children need schedules to feel their environment is a safe and predictable place,” the commenter said, adding that there may be “students as old as 10 who don’t know how to do multiplication or how to use a dictionary. “There are basic skills we need as adults to succeed in our culture, like critical thinking, analyzing, evaluating and synthesizing information.”

These are common concerns when teachers and parents investigate a model like Brightworks. Is it okay to let a child learn to read and to do basic math later than what’s typically done in traditional schools? Do students exercise critical thinking and analysis at Brightworks, or does the lack of structure inhibit learning?

For Amanda Moore, a teacher whose daughter is six and attends Brightworks, the results are evident in what she sees everyday. “The real feature of my day is that I show up at 3:30 and she does not want to leave. She feels empowered by her education. She understands that she’s responsible for things,” Moore says.

Brightworks

Students work on projects throughout the school day.

Adds Tulley, “Each child has his or her personal narrative through the school. That seems to be working really well. They each have an individualized experience. It feels like they have a story to tell; it feels personal.”

That’s also important for parent Angela Wall, whose nine-year-old will attend Brightworks this fall. During the past few years while her daughter has attended traditional schools, Wall says she would see her “flourish during vacations in developing her curiosity and seemingly become frustrated” during the school year. “I want her to be set up with a lifelong love of learning,” Wall says. “And I’m not convinced that the education she’s currently involved with is doing that. I see it squashing some of her passions, slowly.”

Wall says she arrived at Brightworks as a huge skeptic, grilling the collaborators and founders about academic skills, assessment, and even college admissions without standardized tests (although apparently, Brightworks has been talking with Stanford University about providing different admissions requirements for students who’ve been schooled in alternative ways). And she left feeling “very very inspired and ignited intellectually,” finding that Brightworks prioritizes collaboration between students and the ability to tackle a problem, embrace failure, and try again above all else – key skills in a collaborative age.

NOT FOR EVERY CHILD

Still, this school is not for every child, nor every parent, and part of Brightworks’ struggle is to accurately assess a kind of educational model that doesn’t have much precedent. “What we’re trying to develop is something difficult to test: the habits and abilities of a lifelong learner, someone who seeks challenge and enjoys looking at topics that they haven’t encountered before,” Tulley says.

Though for some parents, this kind of experimentation is worrisome, for parents like Amanda Moore, it’s ideal. “My six-year-old is learning how to draw a bird,” she says. “She’s learning math by measuring a wing span. I’m less worried about her being able to meet a reading benchmark. The question is, can she meet a challenge?”

Above all, says Tulley, Brightworks’ commitment to grow and evolve in conversation with its parents and community will be the key to its success. This coming year will involve more vetting and relationship-building with some of the professionals and experts they’ve brought in to collaborate with educators, for instance. They’ll also bring in a fresh crop of educators to accommodate a few more students and develop a more focused, pre-planned Brightworks arc.

“It may all fail,” says parent Angela Wall, who has committed to trying Brightworks for a year. “But I also want my daughter to know that people fail – and that when you go through failures, you figure out how to move on.” Sure, she says, “I’m taking a leap of faith with this school. But I’m willing to take that leap.”

What does the do-it-yourself movement have anything to do with school? This episode of the Infinite Thinking Machine features examples of how tinkering is starting to infiltrate the educational landscape, as with schools like Brightworks in San Francisco and in Maker Spaces around the country, where anyone can design and build anything they imagine.

In this episode, ITM creators challenge teachers to create a cool infographic depicting how to spend the ultimate summer vacation. Deadline is June 8. Here’s more information.

Flickr: tinkering-unlimited

At Brightworks, a K-12 private school set to open in San Francisco this fall, there will be no tests, grades, or transcripts.

Instead, students will participate in activities and interact with professionals in various fields, design a project that they bring to fruition themselves, and produce a multimedia portfolio that they’ll share with the school, the community, and – via the Brightworks website – the world.

Brightworks is co-founded by Gever Tulley, creator of Tinkering School (a sleepover summer camp where kids explore and build things) and author of 50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do, and Bryan Welch, director of A Curious Summer (theme-based workshops for kids that spark curiosity and critical thinking).

The philosophy at Brightworks builds on the approaches to learning that Tulley and Welch have developed and tested through their respective summer programs, and the premise is simple: Get students passionate about something (read “The Nine Tenets of Passion-Based Learning to learn more”), then set them loose to explore and enact that passion.

“What’s been happening with A Curious Summer since I’ve been running it,” says Welch, who co-founded the program with Marina McDougall, art projects director at the Exploratorium, “is that we will pickle these children in curiosity. We’ll get calls from parents months after the camp, saying, ‘After taking your workshop in stop-motion and photography, my child can’t stop playing with optics.’ It can be problematic, even: Kids go back to school pickled in curiosity and that might supercede what they’re being offered at school. So I felt like, wouldn’t it serve our children better if we could then give them tools and materials and let them do their own work?”

BrightWorks

Isaac is determined to leave the ground, by any means necessary. Aka - jumping.

He thought that Tinkering School could benefit, if prior to arriving, children could develop a passion on a certain theme at A Curious Summer and drive the tinkering themselves. “At Tinkering School, children arrive not knowing what they’re going to do,” says Welch. “Gever whips off the tablecloth and says, ‘These are the tools and materials I challenge you with and this is what I challenge you to build.’ But wouldn’t it be better if the children said, ‘We challenge ourselves’?”

The result of this fusion is Brightworks, a school where children will get to spark their enthusiasm on a certain theme and tinker with it year-round, using what Tulley and Welch call “the Brightworks arc,” a curriculum with three phases: 1) exploration, 2) expression, and 3) exposition.

This means that if the year’s theme is “wind,” for instance, Brightworks students will look at wind from many disciplines and angles, such as meteorology, wind instruments, wind as an element in the body in Chinese medicine, sailing as a method of wind-powered transportation, or nautical history and the way wind has fueled colonialism and changed the way languages and cultures interact in the world.

The teachers (or “collaborators,” as they’ll be called at Brightworks) will populate this vast thematic landscape with exploratory activities and professional expertise. “Let’s bring in a pilot. Let’s bring in a kite flyer. Let’s bring in a wind musician,” says Welch. “And we want them to bring the real tools and materials that they use” in their careers in an effort to “dismantle the membrane that so often in traditional schools keeps children and expertise separate.”

The project that the students subsequently design, Welch says, can be absolutely anything that deepens their understanding of the theme – from building a sailboat to writing a rock opera about Amelia Earhart. “The kingdom of childhood is this place where we can actually support this incredibly experimental work,” he says.

And in the third phase, students will share their work with a “legitimate audience” – not just their classmates, but also, for instance, the elderly at a local assisted living center, a class of kindergartners, or students at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.

The school, though private, will offer sliding-scale tuition to every applicant, effectively allowing for half the tuition to be given away. And the hope is that as soon as things get rolling, Brightworks will be able to offer sliding-scale after school programs, workshops, and night classes for children and adults in the neighborhood, too.

Sure, there are only 30 students aged 6 through 12 starting in September (though there are a few slots still open for 12-year-old girls) and the teacher-to-student ratio at Brightworks is a minimum of 1 to 6. The program is resource and labor-intensive. “We don’t scale well at all,” says Welch.

But they plan to replicate through offering their curriculum as an open-source platform online and building their reputation throughout San Francisco. This is something they’re already doing. Tulley and Welch have already received plenty of calls from other educators asking how they could build their own Brightworks school.

Also, Welch says, the development of the school’s structure was hugely influenced by the nearly 200 home visits he made to explain its mission and methods to local parents. “We’ve created, in dialogue with these families, a much more full-fleshed version of our school,” he says. And at this point, “it’s as full-fleshed as it can be for a school that hasn’t started yet.”