Blog Comment: What Would We Build?

[It is] striking when you think about how little of this really transformative thinking is taking place when we think about schools. And how difficult it is to retrofit this thinking into existing spaces. [...] I think most of us in this conversation would say “no”, that we would create something very different. That given a blank slate, we would keep the best parts of the interpersonal relationships between adults and kids but throw out the schedules, the desks in rows, the grades, the workloads, the levels and more and “think fresh” about the learning process in the context of what’s available to us now. Still, I wonder what percentage of educators in general would really think differently about the role of schools and their roles as teachers and learners.

In Weblogg-ed: If we could start over, what would we build?

Will Richardson, over at Weblogg-ed, has been writing from time to time about the issue of how we would build/create/rethink learning environments in the 21st century, given the tools that we have at our disposal now.  And he also comes to the conclusion (as I do) that the schools we build in the future should look much different than the ones we have now.

But how is it that they should look?  It is very difficult to imagine new buildings (or lack of them) in the 21st century when we have been wedded to certain ideas about what schools look like.  The industrial form, with classrooms arranged off of long hallways, has been the model for at least fifty years. When I look at classrooms in older buildings, I see similar classroom ideas: large rooms for desks, with a teacher’s desk in one corner or at the head of the room, and a blackboard at one end.  And when I go back in my mind to college, to our 150-year-old academic building that had only nominally been renovated, I think — “Wow, the classrooms looked just like classrooms. Even then.”  A local historical society has a two-hundred year-old building in an old schoolhouse, and — guess what? — their classrooms look just like classrooms, too.

So we have at least a hundred fifty years of pedagogy, and more like two hundred, that think of schools as a hallway, an office, and schoolrooms.  To that model we’ve added a gymnasium, a laboratory or two, and maybe an auditorium… but the essential model still holds. 

We’re not going to be able to let go of this model easily.  Plus, from a green perspective it makes more sense to renovate and re-equip the schools we have, than to start over with brand new buildings.  There’s so much material, time, effort, energy, and physical infrastructure locked up in the buildings we do have.  Replacing them, especially when we include the cost of demolishing the old structures — for every school district in America — will be tremendously expensive, and we’ll have very little money for this kind of restructuring.

So let’s think about functions that we’ll want students to be in school to do, instead.  What do the classrooms have to do, that they don’t currently do, but that they could?

• Presentation spaces
• Theaters (black box vs. proscenium vs. theater in round)
• Discussion groups
• Research space
• Social space (conversation, snack bar, etc.)
• Project assembly
• Galleries
• Computer labs (Foreign Language, digital, multimedia)
• Liaison offices
• Continuing Project Centers
• Remediation Centers
• Testing Centers
• Community Space
• Science laboratories
• Physical Education centers
• Classrooms
• Art Labs
• Recording Studio
• Audio/Visual Stage & recording booth
• Tutoring space
• Guidance Office
• Learners’ Council 

I’ll be writing about two or three of these every Monday this summer, and build some guidelines about how to renovate classroom space to do these kinds of new projects, but I think it’s interesting that classrooms and tutoring space are still on the list.  We all know that face-time is tremendously valuable in learning, whether one-on-one or in groups.  And we’re still going to need space for that to occur.  

Yet here’s the two most important things that I think I came up with in brainstorming this list: the Learners’ Council and the Testing Center.

Learners’ Council

We all know that school governance has to change.  The model of a head of school who is answerable only to a school superintendent who is only answerable to a board of education (or a board of trustees) is stifling innovation.  It must either go, or be bypassed somehow.  The current financial crisis may be the best opportunity to abolish them.  In their place, though, each school needs a bottom-up deliberative body, with weekly open meetings.  This learner’s council needs to have financial authority to make spending decisions for the school, and it needs to consist of members of all the stakeholders in schools that exist today: parents, teachers, students, representatives of the town, alumni, local business leaders.  Their meetings need to occur at the school they control, they need to have open question-and-answer times, and the results of their deliberations must be filmed, blogged, and presented on YouTube or similar service.  They should have rotating, term-limited officers, too, like secretary, president, vice-president, and treasurer, and they should be governed by Roberts’ Rules of Order or a similar body of regulation.

Testing Center

You should be able to take a test in a subject when you’re ready to do so.  If we’re going to have high-stakes testing, then let’s allow students to set the time of their testing, not the state.  The multiple choice examinations should be computerized, and you should be able to take them at any time, on your own schedule, in the school’s testing center.  Your advisor in American history thinks you need to take an examination on the Civil War?  Fine.  Go to the testing center on Thursday (before your internship at the local biotech company), and take the test. Does it have an essay component, with a time limit? Fine.  The testing center’s computers allow you to write the test without having access to your cellphone, wikipedia or other outside materials.  You take the multiple choice section, and write the essay, under the guidance of a trained test administrator.  The tests are open-source, and questions come from a body of questions submitted and randomized by American history teachers from across the country.  Passing one of these tests can be scored and scaled against learners of all ages from all over the country, and it’s not based on some vague formula invented by the teacher the night before the test.  Hmmm.

Marketing from the ground up? | Not So Distant Future

Carolyn Foote writes in Not So Distant Future:

How do we find tools that help us manage those exceptions–do we have a grab bag of innovative ideas handy? Can we think outside of the box? Can we allow for bottom up innovation?

via Marketing from the ground up? | Not So Distant Future.

About two years ago, I was frustrated in my efforts to show a ten-minute movie clip.  I could find one of the school’s roving carts with a TV, but the VCR had been cannibalized for some other cart.  I found another cart with a VCR and a broken TV.  So, I assembled the VCR with the TV, only to have the whole assembly whisked away from me by a colleague with a prior reservation for that period.  In response, I did what seemed like a sensible thing at the time.  I went to Wal-Mart just down the street, bought a cheap DVD-VCR combo and a cheap TV, and assembled them on the cart with a broken TV.  I turned in the receipts to the school’s development office, and got tax credit for the donation instead of trying to wrangle re-payment from the school.  That’s bottom-up innovation, but it’s usually not sustainable, partly because of what teachers are paid — but also partly to the response that I got, which was that it wasn’t the right way to do things. We had three broken TVs in the storage closets — apparently that’s the right way to do it.  

Also, how can we help/get/encourage teachers to be part of the innovation and building? Do we ask them seriously what would work for them, what their “dream” software application is, what their dream of a better classroom for their students would look like, what they waste their time on that could be done better? Do we involve them in making the choices of what’s selected to solve issues? Do we collaborate with them on assignments to truly find the optimal tools online or for purchase?

via Marketing from the ground up? | Not So Distant Future.

I don’t think teachers know what their dream software looks like, because most teachers are wedded to certain cultures and practices in their classroom.  The unhappy teachers are looking for a way out, while the happy teachers are satisfied with their classrooms as they are.  To plagiarize Chekov, “Happy teachers are all alike; unhappy teachers are each unhappy in their own way.”

But the software, desirable dreams or not, are each disruptive in their own way. Blogging increases a student’s ability to write and reach an audience greater than the one-to-one audience of the traditional essay.  Podcasts allow for a different modality of expression.  Film-making, once the province of studios and ‘indie film makers’ with access to a trust fund or $15,000 of their friends’ money,  now belongs to the masses in the long run.  And the institutions which used to make schools function — newspapers, textbook publishers, school boards — are all coping with challenges of their own which are indirectly joined to the technology revolution, but which are not directly attributable to it.

The truth is, the ‘dream software’ is out there in nascent form now — something that combines e-mails, blogs, wikis, image and video creation and editing, and a broad-based swath of content — call it the Digital Canon, based in primary sources and secondary guided learning experiences — which will transform/destroy public and private schools, and replace them with highly personalized and tribal learning processes. We’re moving to the age of the storefront classroom, where the class opens directly into the world, and the world flows in and out of the classroom on a daily basis.  The notion of “on campus” and “off campus” is going to cease to matter, because no nation is going to be able to afford to keep its talent locked up behind a chain-link fence for eight to ten hours a day.  That’s what the Technology Revolution means:  that a child in an Oklahoman ninth grade ‘class’ is just as capable of producing an awe-inspiring film as a master who’s been working with a camera for forty years in Hollywood.  

And you don’t need fancy infrastructure like school boards or even school buildings to support that kind of learning.  You need teachers prepared to give just-in-time learning in person, by video, or chat;  or asynchronized answers via podcast, video, wiki, or blog. Are those teachers going to be continuing guides, one-offs, or provide education to a vast cloud of witnesses? I have no idea.  But the students are going to have to be the ones motivated to learn in this new style.  To plagiarize again, this time from a 1970′s button: “Lead me not into learning; I can find it myself.”

Movie about nanotech in 10 years…

Here’s the link, if embedding doesn’t work. Link came from heron61.

I’m going to have to show this to some kids. Including you all.

Among the digerati at my school, we increasingly think about the divide between digital immigrants (those who learned technology as it was introduced, but grew up before the real digital explosion of the late 1980s), and the digital natives (those who grew up after that explosion, and knew computers and the Internet to be part of the structure of their world). Our school’s administration — and faculty, me included — is entirely dominated by the immigrants, but it’s trying to educate natives.

There’s an increasing disconnect between our plans for technology use and the ‘normal’ way our kids use them. Not giving computers to our staff is actually hobbling our teaching style, because our students have access to more technology, and more expensive technology, than we have. And yet we want to have a physics program, and a young-engineers program, and a strong science curriculum and a strong mathematics curriculum.

Hence podcasts, for me in history. Hence lego projects in physics that illustrate mechanical forces. Hence smart boards in some classrooms. Yet … and this is a big yet… all of these things are merely skins on old-style software — the teaching methodologies haven’t yet changed. Technology trumps culture — once you have chariots invading Egypt, it’s no longer possible to build pyramids, because you need a strong noble class with access to manpower and land rights to build a countering force. If you have technology that runs circles around your caste of educators, you need a different cultural model. I think it’s going to be the big struggle in schools for the next … oh, thousand years. The old will be new again, and I think that’s important.