The Starter City of the Future posed dilemmas that were deliberate in order for students to learn from their mistakes and understand the reasons they would be asked to make revisions. I wanted them to learn to seek and solve problems and persevere by becoming accustomed to constructing original, three-dimensional artifacts that represented their thinking and revising their designs as they collected new information. I wanted them to stop using already existing paradigms. I was determined to have students' original thinking become second nature and visible to them so that they would know what they knew—again, metacognition—and could reuse what they knew.
After my students built what they felt would be needed in their Starter City on their individual land parcels, I had them put the parcels back together on the floor like a giant jigsaw puzzle to teach them how parts make up a whole. This took practice because they had to look at the wall map and rotate the image in their minds to know where to place their land parcels on the physical three-dimensional land site. We had daily races to see who could get his or her piece where it belonged the fastest. I devised all kinds of activities to ensure that everyone knew where their piece of property and everyone else's belonged.
(Looking at a shape in a specific position on a two-dimensional surface and recognizing it in a rotated position is a skill that IQ tests measure, and sure enough, even though IQs were thought to be immutable at the time, this group of underserved students made significant increases. Some went from 90 to 115 on the Individual Stanford-Binet IQ Test.)
When the Styrofoam land parcels were put together, the new dilemma I had planned appeared: the pieces fit, but because the students had been thinking only of what they wanted to build on their own land parcels, there were obvious problems with their designs. They were surprised when they identified how one road ran into the front door of a neighboring property. A freeway abutted a nursery school. There were too many parks and amusement areas and no facilities for the elderly. Some land parcels were dominated by shopping centers with no street access. Overall, there were too few places for living and learning. I guided them to solve this dilemma by having them, over time, do research, revise their designs, and learn to use a government structure to present and justify their solutions.
As my master's degree study of Non-Specific Transfer of Learning took hold, I began to think of ways for students to apply what they learned from building and running their City of the Future to a variety of topics. To connect to the required curriculum, I taught my students to name the problems they identified in their Starter City and associate them with larger topics.
My students gobbled it up. Even my difficult students and slowest learners came to life, creating solutions to the dilemmas they identified that propelled a sequential “story” set within the students' roughly built City in our classroom, based on what they imagined their Venice community would look like in the future.
Connecting the dots between “backwards thinking” and metacognition, instead of starting with the state-mandated K–12 curriculum requirements and textbooks, I developed a sequence of topics and themes around social, political, economic, and environmental issues and constructed a comprehensive course of study encompassing all subjects. For every topic or theme, I had my students build rough artifacts to express their thinking, enabling me to effortlessly engage them in learning what I was required to teach them. The “story” grew each month as I had students imagine and solve different curriculum-related dilemmas in their City of the Future. Built of found materials and governed by students, the City was a visible, daily reminder of their learning. Throughout the school year of building and role-playing, the City became an evolving container for displaying reusable learning across the curriculum.
The artifacts students built for their City became a springboard for lessons in Math, Science, and Language Arts. Without being conscious that they were being taught, my students excelled in presenting their ideas with conviction as they debated with their peers over which design was best for refining their Starter City of the Future and why. What I had hoped came true: my students stopped asking, “Am I doing it right?” and instead learned to assess the plans they made and carried out.
To have my students begin refining their Starter City, I had them study the topic of Shelter. They compared what they had built to types of housing all over the world, learned to describe their buildings in terms of geometric shapes and to calculate size and volume, and revised their designs according to their research. My next topic was Movement. The students compared their designs for moving around their evolving City of the Future and beyond its borders to what they learned about how people throughout history have moved themselves and their necessities. For the topic of Economics and Trade, they redesigned and rebuilt places to buy and sell goods and exchange services. To study Power Sources, my students designed power-saving utilities. To study Health, they built medical services for the citizens of their City, and to learn more about Government Process, they built places to house government services. They built places to store resources, industrial areas, religious facilities, and even places for burials.
When I gave them Pollution as the topic, the students designed ways to get rid of it and did research projects on different forms of pollution (air, land, water, noise, and visual blight). When they wanted a mountain in their City, I had them justify where the soil would come from in their flat community and do science experiments to learn about soil displacement. When they wanted to “demolish” places in present-day Oakwood, I insisted that they figure out where the debris would go. Pretending that a flashlight was the sun shining on their buildings, they learned about the Earth's rotation. When the topic was Efficiency, I taught them about division of labor.
PARALLEL WORLDS
My students spent approximately one month per topic, learning basic subject matter as they went. Regardless of the topic, I made Government and Civics intrinsic to how I taught my students to make connections between their model of a City of the Future and the classroom. To teach about governance and civic responsibility, I had turned the City and the classroom into five corresponding Council Districts and had the students in each District elect representatives. I then rearranged the classroom furniture, grouping tables together to represent each District in the revised City. My students role-played leadership positions in their Council Districts to learn about vested interests. They studied the organization of their community, of Los Angeles, and of the nation. They read the Bill of Rights and parts of the Constitution and wrote about the rights they wanted for their City and their classroom. They began learning the meaning of consequences and to know that laws are enacted for a reason, not simply that laws are enacted.
Having my students build and govern their City turned out to be indispensable for my research about Non-Specific Transfer of Learning. During the months-long process of revising their Starter City of the Future through experiences in critical and creative thinking, students role-played landowners, designers, government officials, and citizens—roles that corresponded to the governance of the classroom.
The students wrote detailed job descriptions and learned to debate such issues as how high the buildings should be in their City of the Future, how the desks should be organized in the classroom, and who got to decide and why. Ultimately, they voted unanimously to have their City remain in the center of the classroom with their desks around it so that they could easily compare their designs to facts they learned about each topic.
My yearlong curriculum became progressively more complex as I presented the sequenced, month-long activities that I would soon call Design Challenges. Based on what I came to call BIG TOPICS, these Design Challenges led to my teaching required subjects as Guided Lessons (small topics). Having students read, compute, and collect information about what others had done to solve a problem, taught them to make comparisons to their own solutions as they revised their initial designs. My research about the application of Non-Specific Transfer of Learning within the context of a city had come alive.
Experiencing higher-level Non-Specific Transfer of Learning, my students easily absorbed information and applied it to new situations. They were exactly where I wanted them to be. They became detectives, uncovering ways