Flickr: umjanedoean

By Thom Markham

As Common Core State Standards are incorporated from school to school across the country, educators are discussing their value. It may seem that educators are arguing over whether the CCSS will roll out as a substitute No Child Left Behind curriculum or as an innovative guide to encourage inquiry rather than rote learning. In reality, as time will prove, we’re arguing over whether content standards are still appropriate.

Everyday there is less standardization of information, making it nearly impossible to decide what a tenth-grader should know. Beyond the core literacies of reading, writing, computation, and research, the world-wide culture of innovation, discovery, multi-polarity, interdisciplinary thinking, and rapid change depends on the explosive potential of the human mind, not entombed truths from the past. Increasingly, any standards-based curriculum is at odds with the outside world.

There is only one resolution to the debate. Sooner or later, inquiry-standards will take precedence over content-based standards. Education’s core task is to prepare young people to generate new ideas, filter them through a net of critical analysis and reflection, and move the ideas through a design process to create a quality product, either as an idea or a material object. Students need information, facts, and specific knowledge for a successful outcome. But that information must be gathered during the process of creation, in a usable, just-in-time format not found in “subjects.”

If you’re a teacher in tune with the needs of your students, you sense the disconnect between the curriculum and reality. You’d like the freedom to respond more directly to student needs, but standardized information and testing remains a barrier to innovative teaching.

So how can you, as a teacher, help move the dialogue forward? First, you can focus on becoming a highly-effective project based learning (PBL) teacher. When done well, PBL is the most effective method education has at the moment to introduce and practice inquiry-based education.

But PBL is the near-term solution. The ultimate destination is to align education with the requirements of a process-based world. This means we need to invent and agree on a set of clearly prescribed methods that promote inquiry, permeate the learning environment, and become as embedded in education as the current content standards. The move to integrate 21^st century skills into the curriculum is a start. But to really advance the cause, the following ideas will need to take root.

REDEFINE RIGOR. As the Google-age fully blossoms, the fundamental shift is from information to attitude. The instant, ubiquitous availability of knowledge puts enormous responsibility on the individual, as they try to sift through, discern, apply, and share information. This is not a simple cognitive exercise. Success in this environment requires a mix of self-awareness, empathy, and collaborative skills, as well as grit and self-direction. Eventually, the measure of student performance will be the demonstrated ability to use personal strengths to move gracefully through a connected world. We’ve started along this path, by the way. Portfolios measure personal growth and achievement; the best collaboration and teamwork rubrics assess empathy; many PBL teachers have found work ethic rubrics to be a great tool for measuring attitude and productivity.
BLEND CRITICAL THINKING, SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL LEARNING, AND OTHER VALUABLE SKILLS. In the search for better inquiry methods, the gaming industry has much to teach education. A case in point is a recent article by Mark Prensky, a leading games and learning advocate, who suggests reorganizing the curriculum into four areas that blend inquiry and performance. Let’s call these the 4 E’s: Effective Accomplishment, including portfolios, content mastery, tests, and assessment; Effective Action, including goal setting, persistence, and work ethic; Effective Relationships, including communication, teamwork, and empathy; and Effective Thinking, including critical thinking, creativity, and content acquisition. There are several advantages to developing this framework, chief of which it recognizes that the foundation for today’s skills is emotional balance and self-awareness, and it integrates valuable skills into the curriculum core, rather than extending their current status as an add on to academic work.

TEACH INQUIRY SKILLS. Creativity, problem-solving, design thinking, and critical analysis are learnable skills that benefit from intentional instruction. The options are many, starting with exercises in creativity and brainstorming, regular use of protocols to practice sharing and giving feedback on divergent ideas; and consistent assessment of the inquiry process using high quality performance rubrics for problem solving, design or creativity. We’ve also made inroads here. The eight Mathematical Practices accompanying the CCSS math sequence is an impressive guide to inquiry skills. But so far it’s been difficult to locate a missing link: A performance rubric for students that defines their level of performance on each practice.

MAKE COHORTS AND TEAMS THE PRACTICE, NOT THE EXCEPTION. Probably the most deeply embedded norm of industrial education, originating from the 15^th century, is the ideal of the individual scholar. The default mode is to aim teaching at a single student, and assess and recognize accomplishments gained through individual performance. But we must shift this towards

team learning. The collaborative world succeeds through interaction and exchange, and it’s important to move towards deep, peer-driven learning and performance. A supportive team that meets regularly during the course of a unit will provide feedback and help each student produce a better individual product. In an inquiry-based classroom, this should be standard practice.

SEE THE BALANCE BETWEEN INQUIRY AND CONTENT AS A DYNAMIC. This dilemma—<Should I teach content or turn students loose to figure out things on their own?—is at the heart of the debate over teacher preparation for the CCSS. Knowing when to teach directly, or allow for problem solving, is a high art. But that is what inquiry-based education demands. For some content, the best choice is <just teach it. Other topics can’t be taught, but must be learned through discovery, trial and error, or prototyping—all of which require more time. In an inquiry-based world, lesson design allows for fluidity, mini-lessons, and ample time for process. Success relies on whether teachers have the ability—and give themselves permission—to move back and forth between content and process.

THE CIRCLE OF CONTROL. The chief obstacle to an inquiry-based system is us. To give up a content-based curriculum, with its deep traditions, proven techniques for controlling behavior and outcomes, and dominating, standardized regimen, feels like giving a 14-year old the keys to the car and a full tank of gas. It’s scary. The shift into the next, non-industrial phase of schooling is a psychological issue, not just a logistical one. The world that is opening up requires faith that something new, and better, is being born, but in the short term, it can feel like it’s falling apart. But I’ll leave you with two thoughts. First, it’s happening, whether we agree or not. Second, we’ll need good minds to figure it out, meaning more of those young people in your classroom who have been well trained in the art and skill of inquiry.

Thom Markham is a speaker, writer, psychologist, school redesign consultant, and the author of the Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert tools for inquiry and innovation for K-12 educators. To download the tools for inquiry, go to the PBL tools page on www.thommarkham.com.

New Tech Network

In many schools, project-based learning happens in isolated cases: in certain teachers’ classrooms here and there, or in the contexts of specific subjects. But for students to benefit from project-based learning, ideally it’s part of a school’s infrastructure — a way to approach learning holistically.

For one quickly growing network of schools, project-based learning is the crux of the entire ecosystem. New Tech Network, which was founded 15 years ago, is taking its school-wide project-based model to national scale. The organization, which offers a paid program for schools to use its model, began with a flagship school in Napa and has grown to 120 schools in 18 states, most of which are public schools.

The network has not only grown in size, but also in notoriety. President Obama visited Manor New Tech High School in Texas last week, as part of an effort to promote an education agenda focused on producing graduates that can compete in today’s global economy.

The nod from the president comes at a time when New Tech is attempting to position itself as a successful model to follow. But rather than relying on test scores and such quantifiable numbers to prove its value, New Tech’s own 2013 annual report frames success by focusing on deeper learning that can’t be measured by standardized test scores and their college readiness. Yet it’s that lack of emphasis on test scores, an all-consuming worry for many districts, that makes it more difficult for the organization to pin point numbers to tell its story.

Here are a few of the statistics New Tech has gathered from their schools: students graduate at a rate six percent higher than the national average and enroll in college nine percent more than the average. They also persist in four-year universities at a 17 percent higher rate and 46 percent higher rate when it comes to two year colleges. Perhaps most importantly, they claim that students’ higher order thinking skills between freshmen and senior years grow 75 percent more than a comparison group that did not attend a New Tech high school.

New Tech calls itself a school development organization and is a non-profit subsidiary of KnowledgeWorks, another non-profit that acts as a foundation, education policy advocate and on-the-ground work through mergers with groups like New Tech, Strive and EdWorks.

GRAPPLING WITH THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM

New Tech offers whole-school change to any school interested in contracting with them, including public schools. It has implemented the model in charter and private schools as well, but the majority of its clients are public schools. “From where we stand, public school districts are as capable of innovative schools as charter schools,” said Lydia Dobyns, president of New Tech Network. But as everyone in education knows, every school and every district has different needs, and the organization’s offerings are changed accordingly.

New Tech schools are entirely project-based and cross-disciplinary. Students take courses like Bio-literacy, which mesh subjects together, emphasizing that disciplines are not stand-alone endeavors. Technology is woven throughout the school day and at home seamlessly. Many New Tech schools have one-to-one programs and all schools in the network use a learning management system called Echo that tracks student progress, is open to teachers and students, and connects New Tech educators around the country.

New Tech Network

Assessments are designed to measure different kinds of learning outcomes. Mike Reed, principal of Columbus Signature Academy in Indiana, said that only 60 percent of assessment is based on content. The other 40 percent is based on what he called “school-wide learning outcomes,” things like written and oral proficiency, work ethic, presentation skills and the ability to give and take feedback. Students can see the project rubric and know where they need to improve their skills.

“Looking at school performance is really different from looking at student growth, which is really what we want to focus on,” Dobyns said. That’s why New Tech doesn’t promise to increase school test scores – it sees that as a separate question, and one that they’re not necessarily interested in.

The schools that have taken on this model don’t seem to mind that test scores aren’t the focus. “A big difference you’d see is student engagement,” Reed said. “Students are working on authentic projects and problems.” He gave an example of a cross curricular physics and environmental science class that studied the physics of power and electricity. “Our students learned those skills and then rewired houses that were destroyed in New Orleans’ 9th Ward. They’re going to remember that far longer than regurgitating a test or a lab.”

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

New Tech works with schools individually, offering professional development as the school gets started. “One of the things we’ve learned and changed is that every implementation is now a custom designed implementation plan,” Dobyns said.

New Tech sticks with a school for five years, spending the first year laying ground work, listening to what schools want and need and garnering teacher buy-in. They offer intensive trainings to help teachers retool skills to teach entirely-project based and cross-curricular classes. Each school is given a coach who visits throughout the school year, checks on lesson plans, suggests changes and helps troubleshoot problems. And New Tech focuses on nurturing the leadership capacity of principals so they can continue to innovate with teachers.

[RELATED READING: Are Teachers of Tomorrow Prepared to Use Innovative Tech?]

At Columbus Signature Academy, Reed and his staff discussed the professional culture they wanted to promote and decided they’d make decisions by consensus. “That changes everything in a school,” Reed said. Those affected by a decision get equal say in making it, and that includes students. For example, teachers are in charge of the master schedule because it affects them most, but students can weigh in about how changes affect them too.

If gaining consensus is important in New Tech Schools, so is transparency. Teachers share and vet lessons with colleagues at the beginning and end of every project to learn from successes and mistakes. Teachers aren’t penalized if something they try doesn’t work out. They share their successes, experiments, and failures and everyone learns from the experience. That’s the kind of collaborative learning schools expect from students and Dobyns thinks it’s important that teachers experience and practice it too.

TRANSITION CHALLENGES

Opening or converting to a New Tech school can mean some growing pains.

“It’s almost a month of de-programming,” said Randy Hollenkamp, director of Bulldog Tech in San Jose, one of the few middle schools New Tech has begun to pilot. When kids enter his seventh grade they are so used to the traditional school system, they don’t know how to work collaboratively on projects. “At first their grades go down just because it’s projects. It’s actually kind of harder because you have to be a self-learner.” In traditional schools, kids are constantly being directed, so they don’t have to think for themselves as much, Hollenkamp said.

“Every year, as you grow into it, it’s difficult for the group of students who aren’t a part of New Tech,” said Jason Witzigreuter, principal of Adams Central in Monroe, Indiana. Adams Central is a unique school in the New Tech Network because it is a K-12 school under one roof, but only the high school uses New Tech’s model. Witzigreuter calls his school a hybrid model and a learning experience. The school is three years into the experiment, which means the seniors are the only class without their own laptops and without some of the communication and presentation skills that the freshmen quickly pick up.

“Our kids at a lower grade are able to understand how to collaborate better and use those soft skills, or 21st century skills, better because they’ve been taught that through New Tech,” Witzigreuter said. He tries to use the younger students’ success to encourage seniors into demonstrating the same kinds of higher order thinking and maturity.

[RELATED READING: How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?]

From New Tech’s perspective, one of the hardest things about working on a five-year timeline can be school leadership changes. And, like any part of the public school system, funding cuts can affect whether a district is able to continue to pay for the program.

COSTS

New Tech’s model is not cheap. It costs about $100,000-$120,000 per year for each school. That hefty fee includes support, training, professional development, and access to the knowledge and experience of all the other schools in the network. Still, to pay for it, districts have done everything from pass school bonds, apply for state innovation grants, apply for private foundation grants and beg districts for the money. In addition to New Tech’s service fees, schools have to pay for the technology that accompanies the program and often facility redesign to foster more collaborative “studio” spaces.

Though it’s a big price tag, the principals interviewed at three New Tech schools thought the money was well spent. Success For All is another school development program that uses a “whole school” model at the elementary school level. They estimate that for 500 students, their program costs $120,000 in the first year and decreases to $50,000 in the second year, finally reaching $30,000 in the third year. High schools programs generally cost more than elementary programs, though.

NEW DIRECTIONS

New Tech has proven that its model is scalable, in part with extra cash from its parent company KnowledgeWorks. Now they’re trying to see if it can work beyond high school. In the past year New Tech has opened 10 middle schools in various states and is dipping into the elementary school scene as well. They’re also trying to find ways for districts to expand the model to other schools nearby on their own. “The first New Tech School can be an anchor in their district and then the strategies can spread across the schools,” Dobyns said. Leaders and teachers at the anchor school could act as trainers and coaches to others, lowering the cost of transitioning future schools.

Design Learning Challenge

Creating a safe recreation space for teens; protoyping a recyclable lunch tray; setting up a water delivery system to guard against urban fires; building a public awareness campaign to combat hunger. These are just a few of examples of the types of tasks students are taking on when they participate in the Design Learning Challenge, an effort to get students to figure out how to solve real-world problems in their communities.

Combining project-based learning, with an emphasis on the arts and design thinking, this academic competition now in its third year — a partnership between the Industrial Designers Society of America, or IDSA, and the National Art Education Association, or NAEA — has more than 750 students participating this year.

Educators who enter the competition work with their students to identify a significant problem or challenge in their lives for which they can design a solution. Like most other project-based learning, the idea is that the process for designing an effective solution will get students to use skills from a range of subjects, from understanding the historical context of a project, to computing project budgets and specifications.

Although the IDSA and NAEA are supporters of the challenge, their support is not meant to restrict contestants to artistic or industrial design, according to Doris Wells-Papanek, the organizer of the challenge; product, communication, service, and experience design are also in bounds.

The challenge is divided into two age categories: students in grades K-4 and grades 5-12, and teachers can find suggestions for project ideas.

For grades K-4, one of the suggested challenges is, for example, “Where do I put my stuff?”

PROBLEM: Young students struggle to organize and manage their stuff at school

CHALLENGE: Gather materials and objects found in the classroom to then make sense of purpose and usefulness –repeat the process with student’s stuff followed by redesigning the cubby, desk, or locker

CRITICAL QUESTION: What level of impact might this self-directed learning experience have on students compared to a teacher-driven process?

For grades 5-12, a sample challenge is “Transform Time and Space.”

PROBLEM: Teenagers in your neighborhood lack a safe place to gather and socialize with friends

CHALLENGE: Target 1-3 viable spaces that are underutilized and within walking distance – then generate a design proposal that serves the local community and is financially sound for the owner

CRITICAL QUESTION: What kind of transformation design would serve the local community as well as provide a compelling and long-term solution for teenagers and space owner?

But competitors are expected ultimately to define their own parameters, with this five-step process:

• EXPLORE concepts, skills, and terminology common to industrial design. Also, address how to harness natural curiosity and transform it into a design project.
• DESCRIBE the challenge identified, as well as the criteria used to judge whether the project is proceeding successfully. This description happens through the creation of visual displays such as posters and storyboards, and the conducting of interviews of community members to help identify the challenge and potential ways to solve it.
• EXPLAIN how the challenge will be addressed, how the project could evolve mid-stream, and what realistic expectations are for a result. This may be a good opportunity to bring in a real-world expert to give students advice.
• DEMONSTRATE the project in process by creating a Google Site to act as a homepage, where students record and evaluate their work and the challenge’s competition jury can survey student work.
• EVALUATE project results and design concept learning. Consider what changes students and the teacher might implement during a redesign, as well as how lessons learned from the project might apply to other school subjects and/or life situations.

Students in this year’s challenge have already submitted their work for steps 1-3. Steps 4-5 are due on May 15. The submissions are evaluated by a jury of design professionals and college professors.

There are also plans to allow teachers interested in the concept—but hesitant to commit the necessary time investment to fully enroll in the challenge—to choose a less intensive category of competition. That would potentially help interested teachers who Wells-Papanek says have sometimes come to her for assistance after trying to dive too deep into the competition.

“They get excited about it and they want to accomplish more than is realistic,” she said of some of the challenge’s participating teachers. “I help them to make sure the challenges they take on are as realistic as possible.”

istockphoto

Education reformers have been calling for a different type of education, one that nurtures creative and innovative thinkers. But for many, that future is hard to see and even harder to influence.

Science fiction writers and blockbuster movies have been predicting a world run by robots for decades, and for most of us, the fantasy has stayed in the realm of fiction. But artificial intelligence has made rapid progress and robots are becoming more a part of everyday life than many people realize. Those who study robots and their impact on life foresee a day not too far off when many jobs now held by people will be automated.

“If you can detect a pattern, you can automate it,” said Charles Fadel, founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign and a visiting practitioner at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, who spoke at the recent Learning and the Brain Conference. Fadel sees signs that robots are already becoming a part of everyday life. Google has a self-driving car. Japan recently put on a concert, attended by thousands of people, featuring a hologram popstar with a synthesized voice. Virtual models are gradually being put to work displaying the newest styles, and Watson the supercomputer whooped-on the best Jeopardy players. Signs of robotic intelligence are everywhere and educators need to be preparing students to enter a dramatically different world, Fadel said.

As artificial intelligence improves and slowly takes over aspects of daily life, the only way for people to continue to be useful is to “up-skill” — and that takes creativity. “Incremental creativity is just improving on something, but radical creativity is thinking something up,” Fadel said. He believes that, in time, computers will be capable of incremental creativity, slowly improving a process and building on its success. What they will never be able to do is generate a radically new idea.

“We’re being pushed upwards in abstraction, in some senses,” Fadel said. Recognizing how sophisticated computers already are, and how much better the algorithms are getting will be important as the education system evolves. Implicit in Fadel’s stark view of how artificial intelligence fits into human kind’s future is a question about the value of education. Why teach content when everything is searchable? Why teach specific skills when computers will one day be able to do that work, he asks.

[RELATED READING: How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?]

Education has to focus on learning how to learn – metacognition. School will still be important, but not to impart what happened during the Revolutionary War or to teach the quadratic formula. School, he said, should focus on teaching young people the intangibles, the things that make humans unique: relationships, flexibility, humanity, how to make discriminating decisions, resilience, innovation, adaptability, wisdom, ethics, curiosity, how to ask good questions, synthesizing and integrating information, and of course, creating.

In the future, computers and humans will be working together to create the next big invention and when that happens, people can distinguish themselves by controlling the process and the strategy. Humans will define the goals and will think creatively about solutions.

But to get to that place, the education system needs to nurture creative young people. That isn’t happening right now, he says.

EDUCATORS CAN HELP

Most political leaders and education experts agree that the education system needs to adapt to the technological realities of the age and work to produce more creative thinkers. “The whole culture is coming out with support for more and greater creativity in students,” said R. Keith Sawyer, professor of education and psychology studying creativity and learning at Washington University in St. Louis, at the same conference.

Sawyer says fostering creativity starts by recognizing that it’s a collaborative process, not one big idea from a genius. Rather, it’s more like improvisational theater. “Each person contributes a small idea or contribution and the next person picks it up and takes it somewhere,” Sawyer said. “It’s unpredictable and unplanned but something wonderful emerges.”

Recognizing that much of the creative work generated comes out of collaborative group work, teachers can think about their classrooms as places for improvisational flow, where teachers and students are building knowledge together. Structure is needed, but some flexibility as well.

“The role of the educator is to channel and guide what is fundamentally an improvisational process,” Sawyer said. “Students learn what they need to learn but in a way that allows them to be creative.”

To arrive at an improvisational classroom, educators can move away from an instructional model for the classroom. The traditional model clings to the notion that children need to learn particular facts and it’s the teacher’s job to impart that information to students. Facts and information build incrementally and turn into more complex ideas, and learning is measured by testing knowledge of facts.

But many argue that this model results in superficial knowledge and low retention, weak transfer to new situations, inability to integrate facts and apply to other situations, Sawyer said.

Sawyer proposes that schooling should be constructionist, focusing on a deeper, conceptual understanding of topics with the ability to build new knowledge in new situations. To do this, students need to take facts, skills, and concepts and apply them to real-word problems. Learning should start with a driving question. This way, students can explore the topic through inquiry and discussion, working in teams, just as they would in the workplace or other life situations. Students create a tangible product that addresses the issue at hand, and along the way an instructor guides the process.

Sawyer is not naïve about the challenges to this model. It’s hard to develop a good design question. “The really good problems are not too hard, not too easy and they result in the acquisition of required content,” Sawyer said. But even after coming up with a perfect problem, it’s difficult to get students to actively engage and to collaborate effectively. It’s hard to assess learning this way and to effectively critique in a way that doesn’t stunt ideas, but helps guide the process.

It may seem daunting to change the current system into something that resembles the constructionist model Sawyer and others champion. But Sawyer said it’s happening in schools across the country, and educators are passing along these ideas to each other.

[RELATED READING: Fostering Creativity Is Not An Option]

“Every teacher is a creative professional,” Sawyer said. “And in the ideal world, every teacher is contributing these small ideas, engaging in mutual tinkering. But we have to share with others, we can’t keep it in the classroom.” The creative act of teaching needs to be a collaborative one, like a startup team working on the next innovative product. If each teacher continues to tinker and offer ideas to the larger group, a creative breakthrough will emerge.

“It’s going to be every one of us that contributes ideas along the way,” Sawyer said. And in doing so, teachers everywhere can create the institutional change that stands between them and implementing the ideas that to many are obvious and instinctual.

Quest to Learn

By Ashley Williams, Youth Radio

What if your extracurricular activities weren’t just extra but a part of your academics too? New thinking on education intends to bring students’ interests into the classroom. It’s called Connected Learning and promotes the idea that students will excel in school if what they are learning is relevant to their lives, experiences, and passions. This plan is spelled out in a new report, by Mimi Ito, the research director of the Digital Media and Learning Hub at the University of California Irvine.

While students would still learn core subjects like math and science, Connected Learning provides ways for students to link their classroom lessons to their lives outside the school. Ito says the objective of Connected Learning is to, “meet young people where they are in terms of their peer culture, their interest in popular culture, social media, rather than say you have to meet us where we are as adults.”

Ito uses the Harry Potter Alliance to demonstrate how Connected Learning’s can be effective. She says, “the HPA connects young people who are inspired by the civic virtues portrayed in the Harry Potter books, and want to apply them to the real world.” This fan network organizes over social media platforms (Facebook, Livestream, Youtube, Twitter) to spread awareness and solutions to issues like, equality, and human rights, and to support of charitable causes. Literacy has been a central focus of the group. Their annual book drive has brought 85,000 donations since 2009 and contributions have helped build a library for a charter school in NYC.

Ito says another prime example of Connected Learning is at Youth Radio. The youth-driven media organization channels young peoples’ passions into education and job training. For instance, the poetry group inside Youth Radio, Remix Your Life, helps strengthen students’ writing skills, public speaking  and presentation skills while providing an outlet for us to express what we’re passionate about.

Here’s where Connected Learning could help close the opportunity gap. Ito says, “it’s important to diversify the kinds of entry points for the kinds of pathways that young people have.” She adds that “having their interests, their identities validated in the context of academic achievement, civic engagement” is essential to keeping students engaged. This could lead to better student performance.  But even more than improved grades, the goal for Connected Learning Ito states, is “not about individual achievement, it’s about contributing in the real world.”

EXCERPT FROM CONNECTED LEARNING: AN AGENDA FOR RESEARCH AND DESIGN

CASE STUDY:

A toy replica of a 1950s pickup truck with a 100-gram cast iron weight in its bed races down a wooden plank and crashes into an upright textbook that rests precariously on the edge of a high stool. The book wobbles and then topples several feet before smacking the floor with a loud slap. As it falls, the book collides with the raised end of a yardstick whose middle rests over a makeshift fulcrum, creating a seesaw-like lever. The impact catapults a small bottle of hand-sanitizer a few inches into the air before falling and bouncing on the floor. “Hmm,” says the 11-year-old student who released the car. The student and her classmates have been challenged to build a Rube Goldberg machine—a complex machine that performs a simple task—that can dispense hand sanitizer from a bottle with a pump-top. One of the student’s teammates suggests, “Let’s try a larger stool.”

This is Boss Level, a special two-week period that takes place at the end of each trimester at Quest to Learn, a 6th- through 12th-grade public school that opened in Manhattan in the fall of 2009. Quest is the first school in the country to organize its entire curriculum to be “game-like.” It is also attempting to incorporate many of the connected learning principles into an urban public school. Boss Levels are the times during the school year when these principles are most fully realized. During Boss Level, regular classes are suspended, classrooms are rearranged into work spaces, teachers fall into the background, and students work in small teams on a single “challenge” that culminates in a showcase and party for the school’s educators, staff, and family members. In addition to Rube Goldberg machines, Quest educators have challenged
students to write and perform short plays based on fairy tales, to design and orchestrate a series of outdoor games for an end-of-the-year field day, to research and construct a travel website featuring three NYC neighborhoods, to build a sculpture from recycled materials, and so forth. In each case, Boss Levels attempt to weave together connected learning principles with the strictures of school-based practices.

PEER SUPPORTED

Students drive activity during Boss Levels more than at any other time during the year. While educators put students onto teams and define the challenges, students take the lead in designing, discovering, and evaluating possible solutions. Students provide each other with ongoing feedback about each other’s ideas and work styles. They engage in delicate, and often difficult, negotiations over what their team should try next, who should do what, and who can tell or ask someone else to do something. While failure is commonplace, and while conflicts sometimes arise, educators resist intervening extensively. In general, students are active and highly engaged, and the classroom is often vibrant and boisterous.

INTEREST POWERED

While Quest educators define Boss Level challenges, students have extensive opportunities for connecting Boss Level projects to their own interests, many of which are dissociated from conventional schooling practices. For example, when a Boss Level challenge asked students to write, stage, and perform short plays based on fairy tales, students wove numerous interests and cultural forms from their out-of-school lives into the productions. One scene took place in a medieval coffee shop called “Moonbucks”; plots and characters drew inspiration from popular books, video games, music, and movies; several students with an interest in fashion worked on costumes; a student who was enrolled in an after school program for gymnastics helped choreograph stage fights; students who participated in online fan fiction communities worked on scripts; students who were interested in media production helped with recording and mixing sound effects; all students produced daily podcasts that provided updates about their projects to family members. In doing so, Boss Level blurred conventional divisions between education and peer cultures.

ACADEMICALLY ORIENTED

Boss Levels confer academic legitimacy on creative activities that are typically absent or marginalized at conventional schools. By treating Boss Level as the culminating academic experience for every trimester, and by showcasing the students’ work to family members and members of the New York City design community, Quest bestows academic legitimacy on forms of work that are not easily measured by standardized assessments.

At the same time, Quest attempts to link Boss Level challenges to more widely recognized academic domains and competencies. For example, the Rube Goldberg machine challenge required students to put into practice knowledge about physics and simple machines that they had been learning about over the course of the trimester. Similarly, Boss Levels encourage students to approach design challenges from the perspective of “systems thinking,” a twenty-first century literacy that educators emphasize in their instruction throughout the year. So, for instance, when tinkering with a Rube Goldberg machine, or when writing a play, or when designing a game for the field day, educators encouraged students to think of each design challenge in terms of its components, rules, goals, feedback mechanisms, and other aspects of a dynamic system. In doing so, they connect hands-on activity with forms of knowledge that are recognized in various academic and professional contexts.

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Realizing connected learning principles in a public school setting is not without its challenges. For one, Boss Levels can be seen as taking time away from preparing for state tests. While Quest hopes its students will score highly on tests, its students are evaluated against students who attend schools that place greater emphasis on testing. If the school cannot produce competitive test scores, many families will not apply to the school and the Department of Education could force it to change its leadership or even close its doors. Given these realities, Quest is under constant pressure to scale back on less canonical offerings such as Boss Level, and it has had to diminish the number and duration of Boss Levels as it has matured.

Additionally, the school has had to educate some parents about the educational value of experiences like Boss Level. Less-privileged families, in particular, have pushed the school to focus more on canonical pedagogic offerings, in part because their children’s options in the NYC school system largely depend on test scores. Further, families from various backgrounds have expressed unease with some of the student-centered aspects of Boss Level. The frenetic, messy, and often noisy character of Boss Levels can appear to some as chaotic and undisciplined rather than as engaging and invigorating.

Quest educators have responded to these challenges by attempting to educate parents about the forms of learning supported by Boss Levels, and over time many parents have come to see, and even celebrate, Boss Levels as important and unique educational opportunities. Educators have also had to make Boss Levels more structured and adult-managed as the school has matured, partly to ease parental concerns.

Despite these challenges, Boss Levels offer an encouraging example of how connected learning principles can be integrated into public schooling. Unlike most canonical schooling practices, Boss Levels organize students’ activity around a shared purpose, and they provide students with numerous opportunities for active and creative problem solving. Students, rather than educators, drive the process. Solutions are not defined beforehand and resources are not bound by the school’s walls. As a result, students have the opportunity to participate in the challenging, messy, collaborative, and open-ended processes that we believe characterize connected learning at its best.

Scientist Profile: Inventor

By Almetria Vaba

Spark your students’ curiosity in engineering and technology by introducing them to the designers, inventors, and clever thinkers featured in PBS LearningMedia. Use their stories to illustrate various themes of study like the engineering design process and the impact of technology.

• DESIGNING A WHEELCHAIR FOR RUGBY

See what happens when a U.S. Paralympic athlete challenges two teams of high school students to build an automated wheelchair. Use this segment to initiate a design challenge in your own classroom. Grades 6-12

• WIND ENERGY FUELS JOBS FOR OKLAHOMA YOUTH 

How can your students affect the world around them? Use this video segment about wind energy to illustrate the real-world impact of an innovative idea. Grades 6-13+

• SCIENTIST PROFILE: INVENTOR 

Get your class excited about great ideas! Introduce them to Ryan Patterson, teen scientist and inventor of an electronic sign language translator glove. Grades 4-6

• KID DESIGNER: A COMFORTABLE CARDBOARD CHAIR

Introduce your class to this industrious young designer who demonstrates how to construct a sturdy chair out of cardboard. Grades 3-12

• A HOUSE FOR A TEDDY BEAR 

See these young learners engaged in problem solving and trial-and-error design! Consider replicating this project in your own classroom to reinforce lessons on design, construction, and experimentation. Grades K-2.

• SID’S AMAZING INVENTION 

Sid believes that he has invented the ultimate solution to putting away his toys, later to learn that his invention is actually a simple machine called a lever. Invite young learners to explore the function of a lever alongside Sid and his friends. Grades PreK-1