Paul Schultz

What kids learn at a young age will determine whether they're prepared for a future full of unknowns.

When most of us were deciding what to major in at college, the word Google was not a verb. It wasn’t anywhere close to being conceived at all. Neither was Wikipedia or the iPhone or YouTube. We made decisions about our future employment based on what we knew existed at the time. We would become educators, journalists, lawyers, marketing reps, engineers.

Fast forward a couple of decades (or more) and we see that the career landscape has changed so drastically that jobs need new definitions. Social media strategist, app developer, mobile web engineer?

Some of us could ask ourselves if we would have embarked upon our current careers had we predicted how the Internet would revolutionize every part of our lives? It’s hard to say, but when it comes to preparing our kids for what’s ahead, Cathy Davidson has a few ideas. The author of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking), who’s also a professor at Duke University, believes that, in light of the fact that “65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet,” we should cast aside our fear of technology, and prepare our school-aged kids with important skills, both in technical ways and other less tangible ways.

“We are right on time to give up techno-phobia and to tackle the problems and opportunities of the digital world with good sense, pragmatics, realism, and purpose,” Davidson said. “Once we absorb the realization that we’ve already changed, and that we’re actually doing pretty well despite major realignments in our lives, then we can think about how we want to take this amazing new tool [the Internet] and use it in a way that better serves our lives. It’s time to survey our lives and figure out what works, what doesn’t, and how we can make real and practical improvements in our schools, our workplace, our every day lives.”

Davidson offers three can-do suggestions for parents:

1. EXPERIMENT WITH SCRATCH. It’s a brilliant and fun multimedia programming language that allows inventive media mixing almost immediately, without any background. It is creative and fun. Even if your child has no interest in being a programmer when they grow up, familiarity with the building blocks of a programming language will give them some skills and expertise at producing the kind of content they are already consuming. [See "5 Tools to Introduce Programming to Kids."]
2. EMBARK ON A MEANINGFUL PROJECT.Help your child (at any age, really) by being willing to help out—but emphatically not to lead or rescue—in an extended, risky project that has real impact in the child’s community—school, neighborhood, church, synagogue, community center. But stay out of the way. Let the kids shape the project. Kids should find a project that will probably not succeed in all the ways they hope. Dreaming big, taking risks, and scaling back if and when you have to are fantastic skills. These skills are hardly ever taught in the school room which seems to be organized (as is much American society these days) as if some litigious personal injury lawyer is there ready to pounce at any moment.
3. LEARN HOW TO BE A RESPONSIBLE DIGITAL CITIZEN. Learn how to give and take feedback in a public and responsible way. There are different software tools that can help you set up a system where each student has an online identity, for privacy. Give each student 10 stars to award over the course of, let’s say, a 10-week project. Each week, every student is required to award one star to a member of the team whom s/he deems to have done the most to move the project forward. Before students award their stars, they need to put in writing, on the class website, the reasons for the choice. They shouldn’t waste good energy on negative criticism. Critique is the easy way out, as anyone who has read the trollish comments on the Internet knows. Negative comments are a drain on everyone’s energy and negativity is not the same as high standards. If each star is awarded with a well thought out assessment of why merit has been earned, that is a far better way to train judgment than trashing.  What special contribution did a classmate make that made you want to give him or her a star? Everyone will learn from the answer (and the accumulating stars). Sound easy? It’s not. But if you can learn judgment–not silly bubble test grading, not sarcasm or bullying but clear-eyed judgment on the way to the group’s success at attaining its goals—then you are building up a repertoire of successful skills and methods that you can call upon later, in any circumstance.

Davidson believes the culture of fear that has dominated the public discussion around the Internet and kids is damaging at best, ruinous at worst.

“Sadly, it’s a fearful time in American culture, with news focusing excessively on everything tragic, horrifying, and threatening in the world,” she said. “There is no evidence of an increase in such crime, just an increase in reporting.”

And the notion that the Internet is ruining our brain, our attention and memory is flase, she says. “Everything new changes our habits, makes new patterns, and there is certainly a learning curve whenever we face new challenges. But the fact is we’re doing amazingly well. Let’s have some perspective here!” she says.

Davidson also believes the archaic education system — especially when it comes to graded exams — will inevitably change because it has to. The discrepancy between how kids learn inside the formal school environment — complete with bell schedules and drills — and the free-form and social nature of informal learning will invariably have to be addressed.

In my interview with Davidson, I ask her to enumerate practical steps schools can take to prepare students for the future, and what she considers to be the ideal school day.

Here’s the full transcript of my interview with Davidson. I recommend reading it — and Davidson’s book — in full. It’s well worth the time.

Q. It seems that so much of the apprehension about bringing technology into schools is about fear. Fear of losing control of information, fear of harming children’s attention spans, their learning brain. How do you think we can address or overcome these fears?

A. Sadly, it’s a fearful time in American culture, with news focusing excessively on everything tragic, horrifying, and threatening in the world, especially sexual crimes against children. There is no evidence of an increase in such crime, just an increase in reporting. And an exponential increase, for middle-class American parents, in limiting our children’s mobility. We know from research that a child’s world has shrunk in the last 200 years in the West from being allowed, as preteens, to wander to the next village or to roam over one’s city until now, where even “play” has to be monitored by an adult-arranged and supervised “play date.”

We are also fearful about ourselves—the Internet is ruining our brain, our attention, our memory. Well, it isn’t. Everything new changes our habits, makes new patterns, and there is certainly a learning curve whenever we face new challenges. But the fact is we’re doing amazingly well. Let’s have some perspective here!

Historian Robert Darnton says there have been four great Information Ages in all human history, where a new technology has transformed how we communicate and interact—and he goes back to 4000 BC Mesopotamia for the first of these, the invention of writing. Then comes movable type, then mass steam-powered printing of the Industrial Age that makes books available to the masses for the first time in history, and now, our own Information Age where anyone can “Broadcast Yourself.”  We’re 15 years into something so paradigm-changing that we have not yet adjusted our institutions of learning, work, social life, and economic life to account for the massive change. Fifteen years in is when people tend to start thinking about technological change in less fearful and more practical ways. They give up their nostalgia for the “before” and then start to focus on now, on how we can make the tools and resources available to them as productive as possible.

In other words, we are right on time to give up techno-phobia and to tackle the problems and opportunities of the digital world with good sense, pragmatics, realism, and purpose. Once we absorb the realization that we’ve already changed, and that we’re actually doing pretty well despite major realignments in our lives, then we can think about how we want to take this amazing new tool and use it in a way that better serves our lives. Being afraid is never useful. It’s time to survey our lives and figure out what works, what doesn’t, and how we can make real and practical improvements in our schools, our workplace, our every day lives.

Q. What do you predict could happen if the education system continues to resist the change?

A. I predict the education system will change. It has to. There were enormous changes to all forms of education in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In fact, most of what we think of as “school” was developed and institutionalized about 120 years ago to teach kids regulation and efficiency, the bywords of industrialization. Farm kids and immigrant kids were streaming into the cities. To make an industrial labor force required the school bell (in literal and metaphoric terms) and lots of regimentation.

We have a mismatch between the inventive ways kids learn at home online and in their game play and with their friends on social networks and the industrial age structure, division of subject matter, and ways of assessment in school. It will change—because everyone (parents, teachers, kids, principals, policy makers) know our schools are out of date. I think we are on the verge of seeing a major change in educational policy and in how we test (the first step—get rid of those End of Grade exams!), how we measure, and how we teach and learn.  It will happen because it has to.

Q. What do you think that ideal school day could look like?

A. Remember Ichabod Crane, that parody of the tiresome schoolmaster in Washington Irving’s story “The Legend of Sleep Hollow” (published in 1820). If you plunked him down in a contemporary school room, he wouldn’t have a clue what electricity was, he’d be baffled by computers, but he would know exactly where to stand and he’d know exactly where he stood: front of the class, in charge, teaching to the test!

Cathy Davidson

In my ideal school, there would be no one school day because every day would be different. And it wouldn’t be a school of the future: the future is now! In researching Now You See It:  How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, I spent time with incredible teachers who, in ways large and small, inspire their students to learn. My future school would bring them together, take lessons from them. They give us heart and will because they already exist. We can learn from these three, one who taught decades ago in a rural one room school house, one senior scholar-teacher in a Manhattan school, one brand-new twenty-four year old teacher in a small urban city (in Durham, N.C.).

• From Inez Davidson: Mrs. Davidson is a “back to the future” teacher whose Friday “challenge days” can be incorporated into any school today, right now. She taught back in the 1950s to 1980s, in a three-room school house in rural Mountain View, Alberta, Canada. She turned teaching third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders into an asset instead of a deficit, having kids teach one another what they had learned the year before. And every Friday, the third- and fourth-grade kids would be pitted against the fifth graders in a learning challenge that the kids themselves would dream up—spelling bees, math quizzes, geography tests, language tests, grammar tests, poetry and rhyming competitions. Or project challenge: Who can build the highest tower out of Popsicle sticks without glue? And then she set year-long challenges as well. My personal favorite was challenging the kids to find pen pals in as many Mountain Views as they could find anywhere in the world, researching the places where they lived, becoming pen pals, and then interviewing the pen pals for a final research paper on Mountain Views in China or New Zealand.  Decades before the Internet, she made learning connect kids around the world, expanding horizons, teaching geography and languages and politics and history in a way that mattered intensely to the kids.
• From Katie Salen: I would take the idea of the Boss Level Challenge, a building block of the game mechanics that power Quest2Learn, a public school in Manhattan. Katie Salen is a professor at Parsons School of Design who was part of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative that I’ve also been working with for several years, helping to run the annual Digital Media and Learning Competitions. Katie proposed working with the New York city school board, with teachers and parents, to create a revolutionary school within all the existing rules. Q2L works with the teachers’ unions, with the city’s lottery system of accepting pupils, with end-of-great testing, with college prep aspirations, with all of the supposed restrictions that limit teachers everywhere. I couldn’t believe she would succeed, but Katie is a gamer and she met the challenge.  Q2L exists and she’s now working in Chicago to start similar schools. The specific assignment that I loved at Q2L took kids who had spent a semester building new levels for the popular digital learning game LittleBigPlanet (LBP) and challenged them to rebuild their video game level in the real world. They switched off the screens and had to calculate and plan, with blueprints and research and  scissors and glue, paper and wood and paint.  Brilliant!  Kids need to understand the relays back and forth between real and virtual worlds and need the skills to navigate both.
• From Duncan Germain: Duncan was a 24-year old first-year teacher when I spent time in his sixth grade class at Voyager Academy, a public charter school in Durham, North Carolina, where I live. He taught something called Creative Productions which was intended to take all the things kids were learning in other classes and give them real world application. I was there for the bridge building challenge where students self-organized into groups ranging in size from one (some kids preferred to work alone) to five. I talk about all the really remarkable skills his students were learning on the way to build the best model bridge but what most impressed me was the long sheet about collaboration that each student had to fill out, describing such things as how to “justify” the project they were doing and their methods relative to their other school studies, the habits of mind the project was instilling, and the relationship of the project to the real world.  Sounds tough? They were doing it. When I asked Mr. Germain where he got the idea, he said from his father. These sixth graders were using a project-plan form that his father used as a management consultant helping businesses adjust to new global, distributed economies of work and labor.

These are just three examples. I think it’s important for all of us to know that future school already exists, it is working. These great teachers and others I profile in Now You See It inspired me and I hope they inspire other out there too.

Q. If you could suggest five practical applications to apply to every school in the country, what would they be?

1. End standardized EOG tests–they demotivate learning and good teaching.  Instead test in challenging ways, using tough game mechanics with real-time feedback on results so kids can learn from the test—not be taught to scam the test!
2. Make all learning real, relevant, tied to communities, with real application in the kids’ lives outside of the classroom. Example: Ban research papers—unless they are published online and have an informative, persuasive, or other real purpose for others. Learning should have an impact beyond getting an “A” on  the assignment.
3. Teach kids to think through, with, about, for–and create–new, interactive digital global communication. I don’t mean this as an add on. I mean rethinking all the subjects we now teach in view of the possibilities (what techies call “affordances”) of the digital age. That means getting rid of the “two cultures” binary. STEM subjects are impoverished without creativity, analysis, critical thinking. The Information Age is about putting back together the knowledge that the Industrial Age subdivided. A simpler way is to say have them all learn Scratch multimedia programming and think about the possibilities.
4. Restore arts, music, shop, P.E., dance:  Kids need the soul-stirring learning that lets them move, make, sing, create, dream.
5. Eliminate the “college prep” and AP distinctions, and stop making college the implicit standard for all education, back to preschool. Many worthy careers don’t need higher ed.   Many careers that don’t need higher ed still need a liberal arts education in creative, applied, cross-disciplinary thinking, all of which are as necessary to run your whole hair salon or motorcycle repair shop as they are to get a law degree. Conversely, make college free and open to everyone, at any age. Now, that would be a game changer!

Flickr:Purpleslog

Make Your Own List. Make Your Own Future.

The article “21 Things That Will be Obsolete in 2020” has elicited a range of responses from readers. One describes a school where much of the predictions are already happening, while others convey serious doubt that any of these will come to fruition — whether it’s due to lack of money or dedication to education, fixation on standardized testing, or just plain jadedness about the possibility for change.

I asked the writer, Shelly Blake-Plock, to respond to the comments. Here’s his thoughtful observation.

By Shelly Blake-Plock

I’ve heard the criticisms regarding how outlandish these predictions seem for low-income schools. And I think a lot of it has to do with the transition period we find our selves in as a society and I think a lot of it has to do with the seemingly endless failures that have shaped the view of many an educator when it comes to the word “reform.”

And so when it comes to digital technology, folks say to themselves: “I’ve heard all that before. I’ve heard about how computers are going to change everything. I heard about how our offices were going to be paperless. Right. I’ve heard about the latest program that’s going to help my kids learn and I’ve seen all the computer games and seen money wasted on computers that are obsolete by the time they are plugged in.”

And I think, by-and-large, those folks making those complaints have been right to do so for years. But what they perhaps aren’t getting is that we’re not talking about computers anymore. We’re talking about the way that we connect to one another as human beings.

Those connections have changed. We don’t need to be broadcasted at anymore. We don’t need so many of the hierarchies we used to unwittingly depend upon. Just ask any manager of a CD shop in the mall.

We’re in the middle of a transition that extends to every conceivable form of human experience.

Including education.

We’re in the middle of a transition period between analog and digital realities in work, school, and life. That isn’t to say the analog isn’t important — it’s just to recognize that the digital in many ways opens up new opportunities that the analog just can’t offer. Anyone who has been able to immediately share pictures and videos of the kids in real-time with family elsewhere in the country can attest to this.

In schools, however, we often act as though nothing beyond the classroom walls and the strict curriculum taught within them matters. And we act as though digital technology is somehow only auxiliary to the experience our kids have in learning throughout the course of the day. So we have “reading time” and “math time” and “tech time” (maybe), but we often fail to integrate those things in the way they are already integrated in reality. We fail to integrate them, we fail to personalize them, and we let ourselves believe that doing so would just take too much effort and not show anything quantifiable for it in the end.

Many of the folks who’ve criticized my ideas in terms of tech in the classroom have told me it’s not feasible because “we don’t even have books, how are we going to provide computers?”

And I think that’s a fair question. But I’d argue that by-and-large you don’t have to spend a ton of money on computers. Because your students are often carrying more technological capacity in their pockets in the form of cell and smart phones than you could ever have imagined years ago.

Many schools are considering “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device) as a way to fundamentally alter the playing field. The most important thing is being able to connect; it doesn’t matter so much exactly on the device. So let kids bring what they have and let them work together and share. Improvise. Experiment. Learn to trust one another and teach one another. Supplement what you actually need rather than spending money on 30 or 60 or 1,000 of the same thing. Manage your class in such a way that some kids can be using the available devices while other kids are doing something else. Not everybody in your class has to be doing the same thing at the same time. Mix it up.

As for books: Think about how much those textbooks cost; and think about how often new editions are printed. Think about how much money you waste on paper, toner, and copy machines. I’d suggest reallocating your funds from perishable forms of information to dynamic and ever-updated forms available online — and often for free. All you need is to provide the connection.

Now, yes, some things on my list of things that will be obsolete in schools by 2020 may seem extreme. But the idea of something like Facebook connecting 600 million people seemed pretty extreme four years ago. The idea of social media becoming a force in journalism, protest, and organizing seemed kinda extreme. The idea of a Fortune 500 company hiring someone in charge of Tweeting probably still seems extreme to a lot of folks; but go take a look at the Twitter feeds of every major corporation and organization today.

Yes, crazy stuff happens. And maybe if we deal with the poverty and crushed communities that are realities for our lowest income students and maybe if we allowed them to actually have voices and take part in the digital revolution that is galvanizing the spirit of low-income and oppressed people throughout the world into something empowering and reality-changing, and maybe if we got rid of the red tape and the fear that gives us excuses about why there has to be a digital divide, then maybe we’d actually be amazed at what our kids can do.

America doesn’t lack money. The money is there. What America seems to be lacking is the will to actually use its strength to empower the folks we’ve conveniently left behind.

I teach pre-service and young teachers in the grad program at Johns Hopkins University. These teachers work in classrooms throughout Baltimore City Public Schools. Some of them are in places with fresh paint on the walls and computers in the labs, while some of them are in classrooms without enough books for the kids. A few months ago, one of my young teachers found himself in a discussion with the principal about what to do with some recently available funding. He actually managed to convince him to let him pilot a 1:1 iPad program for inner city high schoolers. By all accounts, it’s worked out great for him. Another of my teachers started a tech and new media program in an unused room in his high school. His kids are engaged in what they are learning and they are applying real-time learning from the Web to the realities of their lives in Baltimore.

So when I hear people say: “This is impossible,” I tend to react by telling them to figure it out and do the impossible. Teachers: you are the most amazing people on the planet. You are gifted with a fine mind and great compassion. You handle adversity and trauma and you inspire the future. You are going to have to be the ones to figure this out. You can’t rely on your administrators to do this for you. They are busy. They don’t always see what’s going on or what’s available. So you’ve got to make it happen. Go to Donors Choose and apply for funding for your classroom. Get a Twitter account and follow #edchat to make connections with like-minded educators around the world. Don’t let the reality of whatever condition your school might be in right now dictate what reality will look like in the future. Shape the future you want to see. Organize with the families in your school’s community. Find energetic young teachers at your local college and put them to work helping us all create something new.

And your future doesn’t have to look like mine. My list isn’t some steadfast rule, it’s just a silly list of ideas. But I’m trying to do my part to make my silly list of idealistic ideas come true for the teachers I serve in Baltimore City. I’m trying to make it come true for the kids I serve at the little Catholic high school where you can find me most weekdays. I’m trying to make it come true for my own three kids who go to a public elementary school where classes meet in trailers, but nonetheless kids get to present work online. You’ve got to make your own list. You’ve got to make your own future. Do something impossible.

Read more in the School Day of the Future series.

Flickr: Corey Leopold

Inspired by Sandy Speicher’s vision of the designed school day of the future, reader Shelly Blake-Plock shared his own predictions of that ideal day. How close are we to this? The post was written in December 2009, and Blake-Plock says he’s seeing some of these already beginning to come to fruition.

[Update: I asked Blake-Plock to respond to comments to this post. Read it here.]

By Shelly Blake-Plock

1. DESKS
The 21st century does not fit neatly into rows. Neither should your students. Allow the network-based concepts of flow, collaboration, and dynamism help you rearrange your room for authentic 21st century learning.

2. LANGUAGE LABS
Foreign language acquisition is only a smartphone away. Get rid of those clunky desktops and monitors and do something fun with that room.

3. COMPUTERS
Ok, so this is a trick answer. More precisely this one should read: ‘Our concept of what a computer is’. Because computing is going mobile and over the next decade we’re going to see the full fury of individualized computing via handhelds come to the fore. Can’t wait.

4. HOMEWORK
The 21st century is a 24/7 environment. And the next decade is going to see the traditional temporal boundaries between home and school disappear. And despite whatever Secretary Duncan might say, we don’t need kids to ‘go to school’ more; we need them to ‘learn’ more. And this will be done 24/7 and on the move (see #3).

5. THE ROLE OF STANDARDIZED TESTS IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS
The AP Exam is on its last legs. The SAT isn’t far behind. Over the next ten years, we will see Digital Portfolios replace test scores as the #1 factor in college admissions.

6. DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION AS A SIGN OF DISTINGUISHED TEACHER
The 21st century is customizable. In ten years, the teacher who hasn’t yet figured out how to use tech to personalize learning will be the teacher out of a job. Differentiation won’t make you ‘distinguished’; it’ll just be a natural part of your work.

7. FEAR OF WIKIPEDIA
Wikipedia is the greatest democratizing force in the world right now. If you are afraid of letting your students peruse it, it’s time you get over yourself.

8. PAPERBACKS
Books were nice. In ten years’ time, all reading will be via digital means. And yes, I know, you like the ‘feel’ of paper. Well, in ten years’ time you’ll hardly tell the difference as ‘paper’ itself becomes digitized.

9. ATTENDANCE OFFICES
Bio scans. ‘Nuff said.

10. LOCKERS
A coat-check, maybe.

11. I.T. DEPARTMENTS
Ok, so this is another trick answer. More subtly put: IT Departments as we currently know them. Cloud computing and a decade’s worth of increased wifi and satellite access will make some of the traditional roles of IT — software, security, and connectivity — a thing of the past. What will IT professionals do with all their free time? Innovate. Look to tech departments to instigate real change in the function of schools over the next twenty years.

12. CENTRALIZED INSTITUTIONS
School buildings are going to become ‘homebases’ of learning, not the institutions where all learning happens. Buildings will get smaller and greener, student and teacher schedules will change to allow less people on campus at any one time, and more teachers and students will be going out into their communities to engage in experiential learning.

13. ORGANIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL SERVICES BY GRADE
Education over the next ten years will become more individualized, leaving the bulk of grade-based learning in the past. Students will form peer groups by interest and these interest groups will petition for specialized learning. The structure of K-12 will be fundamentally altered.

14. EDUCATION SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO INTEGRATE TECHNOLOGY
This is actually one that could occur over the next five years. Education Schools have to realize that if they are to remain relevant, they are going to have to demand that 21st century tech integration be modeled by the very professors who are supposed to be preparing our teachers.

15. PAID/OUTSOURCED PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
No one knows your school as well as you. With the power of a PLN (professional learing networks) in their back pockets, teachers will rise up to replace peripatetic professional development gurus as the source of schoolwide professional development programs. This is already happening.

16. CURRENT CURRICULAR NORMS
There is no reason why every student needs to take however many credits in the same course of study as every other student. The root of curricular change will be the shift in middle schools to a role as foundational content providers and high schools as places for specialized learning.

17. PARENT-TEACHER CONFERENCE NIGHT
Ongoing parent-teacher relations in virtual reality will make parent-teacher conference nights seem quaint. Over the next ten years, parents and teachers will become closer than ever as a result of virtual communication opportunities. And parents will drive schools to become ever more tech integrated.

18. TYPICAL CAFETERIA FOOD
Nutrition information + handhelds + cost comparison = the end of $3.00 bowls of microwaved mac and cheese. At least, I so hope so.

19. OUTSOURCED GRAPHIC DESIGN AND WEB DESIGN
You need a website/brochure/promo/etc.? Well, for goodness sake just let your kids do it. By the end of the decade — in the best of schools — they will be.

20. HIGH SCHOOL ALGEBRA 1
Within the decade, it will either become the norm to teach this course in middle school or we’ll have finally woken up to the fact that there’s no reason to give algebra weight over statistics and I.T. in high school for non-math majors (and they will have all taken it in middle school anyway).

21. PAPER
In ten years’ time, schools will decrease their paper consumption by no less than 90%. And the printing industry and the copier industry and the paper industry itself will either adjust or perish.

Read more in the School Day of the Future series.

IDEO

Stoking a child's imagination: a 12-year-old's vision of a medieval war.

Unpredictable, inconsistent, and designed to be wildly relevant for learners, their engagement, and their development.

Sandy Speicher leads IDEO’s Design for Learning domain, which brings human-centered thinking to systemic challenges in education. Her work helps educators use design tools and methods to work in new ways, to prepare for future challenges, and to transform their organizations and communities.

By Sandy Speicher

Some children will be reading in comfortable chairs. Some will be digging into a scientific research question by conducting readings on a nearby pond. Some will be working on computers refining their skills in math while others are sequencing DNA. Some will be collaborating around a design challenge with new friends across the globe. One group will reenact a battle from medieval times, while others are learning on site, at jobs. Building, making, imagining, interacting, investigating, reflecting, connecting, shaping, participating. There will be challenge. There will be high expectations. And there will be tons of variation. With all of its possibility, the school day of the future will be one thing: it will be designed.

Elliot Eisner, one of my favorite education professors, often asked the question, “If aliens landed on our planet and walked into our schools, what would they think the school is meant for?” We’d brainstorm: Learning to sit in rows? Learning to get up and move en masse at the sound of a bell? Learning to stay in place for 40-minute increments? Learning to override your bodily functions? Learning to answer the questions that the person standing in front of the room already knows the answer to? It’s hard not to realize that a school, upon pure observation, looks like a training ground for behavioral management.

In the end, it’s not that much different than the design of most of our industrial work environments – time, constraints, structures, tasks, a consistent and organized system. It’s what we adults tend to design without really thinking.

But when you watch children – undeniable natural learners – they create different solutions: play, discovery, interaction. They observe the world, they stick things in their mouth, they touch things. They connect with the world to learn it. They experience it through their senses. And in discussions with the people around them, they create language and meaning and amazing new ideas and interpretations that the rest of us get the benefit of learning from.

It’s not too big of a leap to want the school day designed around these notions of how we naturally, and individually, learn. Designing the day around discovery of information, connections to real world challenges, discussions digging into our experiences with the world.

One thing to keep in mind, of course, is that not every child is starting in the same place, and not every child is headed toward the same place. Some need freedom in order to learn. Some need structure. Some need a mix. But all need respect for their individuality, trust in their abilities to succeed, and adults who have the foresight to design experience to bring out individual greatness.

IDEO

A 10-year-old illustrates "genetical engineering."

The School of One in New York City, for instance, is creating an exciting model of individualized learning that integrates technology and personal attention. Their school day revolves around formative assessments which technology helps capture, so that the teachers can look at the data at the end of the day. The teachers discuss – together – how each student is doing, and develop a strategy for the following day which can include any number of formats for what the student needs – teacher-led instruction, one-on-one tutoring, self-learning, or virtual tutoring. They’ve broken the model of one class with one teacher and created a network of learning toward specific goals.

Then there are Leadership Public Schools, whose students have unique needs of their own. The majority of their students are performing at an elementary level when they enter in the ninth grade. They have created a portfolio of adaptive learning technologies which allow students to access ninth-grade content while learning basic skills. It’s not “Drill and Kill” — they’ve integrated technology into the daily experience by helping students learn to create with it. This is putting them on the track not just for incredible academic gains, but also for immediate relevance in the job market – an important need for their students.

Students at schools in the New Tech Network are learning in related ways, but with a different design. They use projects to inspire new understandings. They’re also using technology to capture learnings – building videos and slideshow presentations – and they’re most often working in teams, learning different subject-matter content through real world challenges.

Teachers at Ormondale Elementary School in California build their curriculum from student passions. They have a range of approaches – inspiring children through teacher-defined projects, allowing them to define the end goals of any given exploration, capturing a student’s passion toward a particular topic and using that as the vehicle for exploration through teacher- or student-defined assignments. Their school day allows for this range of experience, and the “investigations” happening throughout the day vary greatly class by class, child by child.

All of these innovative models are showing us that incredible results, and experiences are possible when we design the school day with the needs of the student in mind. The historic “one-size-fits-all” model of set periods of time with groups of somewhere between 20-30 kids lined up in rows and one teacher in the front of the room orchestrating the conversation…. well, Sage on Stage, Chalk and Talk, and Spray and Pray might just have met their match.

The school day of the future will be unpredictable, inconsistent, and designed to be wildly relevant for the learner, their engagement, and their development.

Read more in the School Day of the Future series.

Hatcher spoke to me at the Big Ideas Fest in December, while his co-horts in education collaborated on a design thinking project.

“We can make education a natural right,” Hatcher says. “You were born, you get an education. You don’t have to come to us, it can come to you.”

He also addresses the need for qualitative rather than quantitative assessments .

http://www.vimeo.com/19938362

[Filmed by Ifanyi Bell]

Read more in the School Day of the Future series.