I spent the first half of this week in Memphis, Tennessee, working with a remarkable local group of educators, parents and developers (yes, developers) who are all dreaming big together as part of Crosstown Concourse, an ambitious effort to redesign a 1.5 million square foot former Sears warehouse into a “vertical urban village” of residents, retail outlets, non-profits, and — wait for it — an innovative public high school.
It’s a thrilling idea — a city within a city, organized around an overarching umbrella of arts, education and wellness, and imagined as a learning ecology that helps all people examine multiple pathways to healthy living. And clearly, if it works, the high school it houses (there will also be an adult education high school, by the way) will need to look nothing like the high schools of our collective past, which were designed for efficiency, and for batching and queuing unprecedented numbers of young people into an Industrial economy that was largely fixed and known.
Indeed, if this project is successful, Crosstown High School will be, according to the lead developer (who happens to be an art history professor), “the beginning of the end of education in a vacuum.”
YES!
So what does that look like?
That’s the task we at WONDER now have before us — along with some great local partners. And while the specifics remain to be hammered out, we already know enough to say this:
A school like this must be a home base more than a school — a place where students gather to assemble their literal or figurative rucksacks before heading out on learning expeditions of their choosing;
A school like this must not look or feel like a regular “school.” The design goal is not to facilitate 1:30 teacher/student ratios, or facilitate easy movement through double-loaded corridors. Instead, it should be to give kids environments that look and feel more like this — or this.
A school like this must be oriented outward, not inward; the learning that happens there must be action-oriented, not abstract; and the space in which this all occurs must be dynamic, not fixed.
In other words, a school like this must mark the beginning of the end of not just education in a vacuum — but of the Industrial Age itself, and its emphasis on efficiency.
Behold: the “Age of Expeditioncy” — an era in which learning is deeply public, and contextualized, and relevant, and dynamic, and hands-on — is upon us.
It was fifteen years ago, but I still remember the first time I saw Blue Man Group. Watching those bald blue aliens discover how to eat a Twinkie, or investigate the queasy vibrations of a giant Jello cake, or climb the walls of the theater to learn more about the people who were sitting there – well, anyone who’s seen the show knows there’s nothing quite like it.
Since that time, Blue Man Group has become an international phenomenon, and an unlikely aesthetic portal through which to vicariously experience the wonders of inquiry, discovery and mischief. And now, those same core ingredients are at the heart of a remarkable new school in New York City – a school I got to visit and see through the eyes of two of its founders, “Blue Man” Matt Goldman and his wife, Renee Rolleri.
“Blue Man Group started in the 1980s as this outrageous idea,” Matt explained, shortly after we entered the school’s kinetic entry hall on a recent Friday morning and placed our shoes amidst a beehive of cardboard storage tubes lining the walls. “Our goal was to inspire creativity in our audiences and ourselves. We wanted to speak ‘up’ to the intelligence of our audience members while reaching ‘in’ to their childlike innocence. We wanted to create a place where people continually learn and grow and treat each other with just a little more consideration than we typically find in the ‘real world.’ And we wanted to have fun doing it.”
By the mid-2000s, their oddball idea now a full-fledged, flowering franchise, Matt, fellow founding Blue Men Phil Stanton and Chris Wink, and their wives formed a parent-run playgroup. Soon thereafter, they realized the same principles that formed the foundation for a successful theatrical performance could also be at the center of a successful school. “Better still,” Renee added, “those principles might even help spur a re-imagining of education for a new era, and a restoration of some of what this recent era of test-driven accountability has cast aside.”
The school’s mission statement spells out the core ingredients such a re-imagining will require: “cultivating creative, joyful and compassionate inquirers who use courageous and innovative thinking to build a harmonious and sustainable world.” And all of these characteristics are visibly on display for anyone who visits the school’s building on Water Street, formerly the Seamen’s Church Institute, near the southern tip of Manhattan. Student artwork is ubiquitous, from paintings to sculptures to support beams that have been turned into trees. Every floor has a common space that the children are responsible for decorating. A construction lab features a treasure chest of wooden blocks of all sizes, and everyone likes to spend time in the “wonder room” – a black-lighted, fully padded playspace with a disco floor – yes, a disco floor. Otherwise-drab hallways are brought to life with pastel colors, feathers, and fabric. And each classroom is anchored by adults who are deeply skilled in progressive teaching practices that date back more than one hundred years.
In that sense, aside from its distinctive decorative flourishes, much of what the Blue School does is not new, and does not claim to be. After all, John Dewey knew a thing or two about how people learn, and as Renee pointed out, “Dewey’s Lab School was both a destination for learning and a base camp for cultivating culture. That’s what we want here as well.”
However, two components of the Blue School’s program are new – groundbreaking, even – and the rest of us would be wise to take notice.
The first is the school’s educational framework, which takes its organizing principles directly from the personality profile of the Blue Man himself. “When we were designing the show,” Matt explained, “we imagined the characters seeing and interacting with the world like children do. The Blue Man continually explores and researches the world around him. So we imagined him doing so via six different lenses:
The Group Member – the lens of collaboration, connection, and global citizenship
The Scientist – the lens of curiosity, critical thinking, experimentation and analysis
The Hero – the lens of perseverance, commitment and leadership
The Trickster – the lens of provocation, innovation, and play
The Artist – the lens of imagination, instinct and creative expression
The Innocent – the lens of emotional awareness and mindfulness
“These six lenses are mindsets or approaches children, teachers, and others in our community can assume to explore work, academic areas, an environment, and materials,” Matt shared while we watched a cluster of four-year-olds make mud in their airy, light-filled classroom. “We want to teach our kids how to surf in all of those different energies. And we want to help them develop critical life skills and practices along the way.”
An educational framework organized around archetypal personalities, each of which is mapped to different core attributes that combine to make up a creative, joyful and compassionate person? I have never seen another school organized in such a way, and the elegance of the design extends to which lenses are likely to be most compatible with which components of the curriculum (which, befitting a progressive school, is negotiated between children and adults, and which therefore largely unfolds in real time based on expressed student interests). This is what makes Renee proudest. “We’re still learning, but so far we’ve been able to create a healthy, warm, safe, nurturing environment where community is paramount and where children’s interactions between classes are just as important as what happens during classes. It’s the kind of educational program I wish I’d had for myself and which we all dreamed we’d have for our children – a place where people feel like there is genuinely no better place to learn and to grow.”
What makes the Blue School’s framework even more exciting is its commitment to explicitly link everything it does to the latest research about how the brain works, and about how people learn. As Renee explained, “we know there is a broad range of expectations within each age group and that the rate of development varies greatly between children. This is why we believe age doesn’t matter nearly as much as sequence. There are clear developmental progressions that children experience – physically, cognitively, emotionally, and linguistically – and no one experiences any of them at quite the same pace. Why, then, do we continue to educate children in a linear, grade-by-grade process, when the research clearly tells us that this is not how people learn?”
Lindsey Russo, the school’s director of curriculum documentation and research, agrees. “Schools were not applying this new neurological science out there to how we teach children,” she said in a recent article profiling the school in the New York Times. “Our aim is to take those research tools and adapt them to what we do in the school.”
Consequently, children at the Blue School learn directly about the different regions of their brains, and what thoughts and behaviors they control. Adults speak daily about the importance of meta-cognition and helping children develop “supported autonomy.” And school leaders seek advice and feedback from leading scholars like UCLA neuro-psychiatrist Dan Siegel and NeuroLeadership Institute co-founder David Rock.
“Teaching and learning are reciprocal processes that depend upon and affect one another,” Renee said, smiling, as a phalanx of strollers and parents surrounded her. “We just hope our school can be one of the places to help us understand, as a country, how to support those processes in ways that help as many people as possible unleash their wildest, most beautiful selves on the world we all share.”
OK, people, let’s get specific: Out of all the schools in the world, which ones are the most transformational when it comes to imagining a new way to think about teaching and learning in the 21st century?
There are a lot of inspiring schools out there, so I want to repeat: which are the most transformational – by which I mean schools that are demonstrating, by policy and practice, 10 or more of the 22 core categories from QED Foundation’s Transformational Change Model?
What I find so useful about the QED model (scroll down a bit on their home page to see it) is the way it identifies the central pillars of a high-quality education, and then demarcates what each pillar looks like in a traditional, transitional, and transformational setting. In a traditional school, for example, we tend to assume the student bears the primary responsibility for learning; in a transitional environment, that responsibility shifts to the teacher (see, e.g., just about every recently proposed accountability policy in the U.S.); but in a transformational context, the responsibility is shared via a learning team that includes, and extends beyond, teacher and student.
Of course, learning teams are just one part of a holistic system of environmental conditions. That’s why, taken together, the QED change model helps clarify what we need, and which stages our own evolution will need to pass through, in order to pull K-12 schooling out of the Industrial-era model and into a new, Democratic-era paradigm.
Because that sort of clarity is in short supply, too often we hold up models of school reform that are, at best, examples of transitional progress, not transformational change.
With that caveat in place, please help me find the best set of transformational schools the world has to offer – and please ground your recommendations in the QED change model.
I’ll start the bidding with two examples, and a sample of the ways in which the school is modeling transformational practices:
Science Leadership Academy (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) – SLA is an inquiry-driven high school that opened its doors in 2006. Students at SLA learn in a project-based environment where the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection are emphasized in all classes.
Goals: Traditional – Test Results Targets; Transitional – Curricular goals; Transformational – Learner Aspirations & Life Options
Assessment: Traditional – Of Learning; Transitional – For Learning; Transformational – As Learning
Educator Development: Traditional – Re-certification Hours; Transitional – Group Learning; Transformational – Collaborative Inquiry
Riverside School (Ahmedabad, India) — Riverside offers a curriculum and experiences of engagement with the city that enables children to better understand their skills, potential, and responsibilities as citizens. It is also developing social intervention initiatives in the city to provide a wide array of activities (cultural, instructional, and recreational) that can be synchronized with the regular school curriculum.
Selected transformational practices:
Model of Success is Based On:Traditional – The Willing and Able; Transitional – Inclusion; Transformational – Racial and Social Justice
Context for Learning:Traditional – Classroom; Transitional – School; Transformational – Learning Community
When/Where Learning Happens:Traditional – In School; Transitional – Coordination between in- and out-of-school; Transformational – Anywhere/Everywhere
To be sure, Riverside and SLA are just two of the schools out there doing several things really well, and being very intentional about the way they do so. What other schools are demonstrating a transformational approach to teaching and learning? And in which specific ways are they doing so?
“Get a computer, please! Log on . . . and go to your textbook.”
Yet that’s what the Washington Post did this morning – and they’re not alone. Despite ubiquitous calls for innovation and paradigm shifts, most would-be reformers are little more than well-intentioned people perfecting our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.
Compounding the problem, even the best new ideas face a minefield of the same old obstacles that, left unaddressed, will lead to nothing new. For example, there’s a growing push to make homework more passive (i.e., watching a lecture at home, something that in the past would have taken up a class period), so that the school day can become more active (i.e., venturing outside to leverage community resources, something that in the past would have required a field trip). Yet the early-adopter schools are finding a familiar nemesis – inflexible definitions of “seat-time”, and strict requirements associated with course credits that inhibit teachers from letting different kids proceed at different paces and in different ways. They are, in short, the intractable rules of the Industrial Era, which was about standardization and scale, being applied to the flexible needs of the Democratic Era, which is about individualization and customization.
Instead of installing Smart Boards, and then using them as Blackboards, how can we think more imaginatively about the opportunities and obstacles in our field?
In the spirit of Bill Maher, I’d like to suggest three “new rules”:
1. Name your non-negotiables – I’m not expecting everyone to agree on these, but we should at least be clear as individuals about what our efforts are designed to accomplish. For example, do you think 3rd and 8th grade reading and math scores are a sufficient metric, by themselves, for evaluating whether or not schools and teachers are successful? If so, fire away with any and every study that supports your claim. But if not, stop cherry-picking the studies that benefit your argument (i.e., “schools that add art classes show a XX% rise in achievement.”) Either these tests are a valid stand-alone metric or they aren’t. Decide what you believe, and be consistent.
2. Begin with the end in mind – Thanks to Stephen Covey, this mantra has been with us for a while now. Yet I rarely encounter schools or school reformers that clearly understand what they’re looking for, and why it’s different in a transformational way. If we let current policies answer this question for us, we’re back to test scores; after all, nothing else matters in an era of high-stakes accountability. But what if we seek a more balanced learning environment, and a more balanced set of skills and competencies in young people? What would we need to do in order to bring that environment about, and how would we know if we were successful?
This goes beyond merely a new organizational mission statement – although for many places that would be a good start. Instead, it gets to the core questions we as a field must grapple with: What should be the primary context for learning – the classroom, the school, or the larger community? Will our goals be evaluated by test results, by curricular goals, or by individual learner aspirations? And does the responsibility for learning rest primarily with the student, the teacher, or a learning team that includes both?
Until we ask and answer these questions, both as a field and as individuals seeking to contribute something meaningful, the structural dysfunctions of the Industrial model we’ve worked within for nearly a century will remain invisible to us, and we’ll do things like get rid of textbooks . . . so students can read them online. Or renovate old schools . . . without also asking what new schools should look like. Or celebrate our increased efficiency in the old system . . . rather than create a truly disruptive new set of values and models.
At least one organization has clearly thought this through – check out the QED Foundation’s change model, in which they break out the primary components of a learning environment and then characterize reforms in each area as traditional, transitional, or transformational. QED has decided it will commit no less than 80% of its efforts in the transformational space. What have the rest of us decided? Have we even though our work through to this degree?
3. Stop waiting for the planets to align– Too many educators feel as though the current test-obsessed system has been imposed upon us. This has led too many of us to spend too much time complaining about what’s wrong, and not enough time actively amplifying what’s right. We are all complicit in the current system, and we all have a responsibility to change it for the better.
So if you’re a teacher or a principal, what are you waiting for? Be more proactive in demonstrating a better way to equip young people with the skills and self-confidence they need to be successful in school and in life – and show us how you did it. Band together with others to generate your own sense of political cover if the current policy environment continues to hinder your capacity to create a balanced, healthy learning environment. And define, and then maintain fidelity to, your own non-negotiables and end-goals.
In the end, transformational change really is that simple – and that difficult.
“But how, exactly, will they be reared and educated by us? And does our considering this contribute anything to our goal of discerning that for the sake of which we are considering all these things – in what way justice and injustice come into being in a city.”
— Plato, The Republic
Heard the bass ride out like an ancient mating call, I can’t take it y’all, I can feel the city breathin’, Chest heavin’, against the flesh of the evening, Sigh before we die like the last train leaving.
—Black Star, Respiration
What characterizes the ideal city – and the cities in which we live? How accurately does the health of a city reflect the quality of its plan for educating its youngest citizens? And does the push towards greater school choice get us closer to, or farther from, that ideal?
I’ve been thinking about those questions a lot since reading a column by George Will in last weekend’s Washington Post. In it he references two U.S. Supreme Court opinions in which the Court affirmed the constitutional right of parents “to direct the … education of children under their control.” As a student of the 14th Amendment, I sought the opinions out. What struck me had less to do with the legal arguments, however, and more to do with an excerpt in one of the opinions from Plato’s Republic, arguably the most famous political work of all time, and a work squarely concerned with the role a city – and, by extension, its education system – must play in helping all people develop their fullest potential.
The Republic is about decay as much as it is about rebirth. Socrates is visiting Athens during a period of decline (Plato, it’s worth noting, is not exactly a fan of democracy). While there, Socrates falls into conversation with a number of other men, who then co-construct a vision of the ideal city, and, by extension, the ideal state of humanity.
If you’ve never read The Republic (I hadn’t until this week), you may be surprised by how radical the vision really is. To wit, the section in which he explains the structure of schooling is the one Justice James McReynolds chose to cite in his 1923 opinion for Meyer v. Nebraska:
“That the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent. … The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.”
“The desire of the Legislature to foster a homogeneous people with American ideals prepared readily to understand current discussions of civic matters is easy to appreciate,” McReynolds wrote, referencing a 1919 law that had outlawed the teaching of any subject to any person in any language other than English. “But the means adopted, we think, exceed the limitations upon the power of the state and conflict with [the] rights” of both teachers and parents.
Fair enough. After all, such a law seems to be a clear case of legislative overreach. But excepting its own forms of overreach (raise your hands, for example, if you’re willing to give up your children at birth so they can be raised in a common pen, or if you believe America should be recast as a communist country), in what ways can The Republic help illuminate the core opportunities – and pitfalls – of the greater push towards school choice?
On one level, The Republic seems to suggest that the very notion of choice is what ultimately undoes a community. “Have we any greater evil for a city,” says Socrates, “than what splits it and makes it many instead of one? Or a greater good than what binds it together and makes it one?” Seen in this light, the increasing balkanization of public education is merely the latest vehicle for pitting the motivations and self-interests of individuals and families against each other. Socrates seems to confirm this notion later, when he suggests that “in founding the city we are not looking for the exceptional happiness of any one group among us but, as far as possible, that of the city as a whole.”
OK, so choice bad, no choice good. Right?
Not so fast. Although Plato would clearly take issue with the individualistic nature of our modern society, and perhaps too with our decision to make public education even more heterogeneous than it was before, he also believes that the highest calling of each person is to be “a seeker and student of that study by which he might be able to learn and find out who will give him the capacity and the knowledge to distinguish the good and the bad life, and so everywhere and always to choose the better from among those that are possible. . . From all this he will be able to draw a conclusion and choose – in looking off toward the nature of the soul – between the worse and the better life, calling worse the one that leads it toward becoming more unjust, and better the one that leads it to becoming juster. He will let everything else go. For we have seen that this is the most important choice for him in life and death.”
When I look at the current landscape of school choice in DC (a landscape I’ll be exploring in great detail this year as I follow the fortunes of three area schools – district, charter and private), I wonder how we can learn from Plato’s caution and heed his advice. Will greater school choice be a means toward helping more children and families “choose between the worse and the better life,” while also furthering our capacity as a city to live “free from faction”? Is this even possible? Or is our shared fidelity to the twin pillars of democracy and capitalism such that a vision of greater equity and spiritual fulfillment is merely illusory, and as misleading as the shadows of the puppets that dance on the wall of Plato’s allegorical cave?
In part, Plato’s allegory is a way for Socrates to make another key point: “education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert that they put into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as though they were putting sight into blind eyes.”
Plato’s larger point here is that we delude ourselves into thinking we understand the nature of things, when in fact all we are doing is constructing a false sense of the world and calling it real (as theoretical physicist David Bohm once said, “Thought makes the world and then says, ‘I didn’t do it.’”). For those of us trying to improve schools, I think the analogy is also an appropriate condemnation of the current system of schooling we have – a system that was designed to meet the needs of the Industrial Age that was, not the Democratic Age that will be.
So, now that the school choice genie has been released from the bottle, I ask you: In what ways can it engender more schools capable of giving more people the skills and self-confidence they need to become active, visible contributors to the public good – a public good that, amidst the din of the ongoing battle between our intermixed democratic and capitalistic ideals, still seeks to fulfill our founding spirit of E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one?
Recent Comments