Instead, we must come to grips with the fact that the classroom is an obstacle to making the shift to effective, forward-thinking instruction because it does not provide the necessary flexibility in the face of new online digital tools and experiences. For example, modern digital students are completely comfortable with what Ted calls spontaneous ad hocism. Texting on their phones, young people form several new social and work groupings in real time over the course of a day. If several students discover they are working on the same project at the same time, they can form an impromptu work group to get the project done. They are accustomed to and successful when working in this way. Classrooms are a barrier to this kind of approach.
Classrooms, and all the behaviors and expectations that accompany them, are acting like deadweights as education stakeholders try to create much more responsive school systems that are more effective in preparing students for the 21st century. We must look beyond 20th century ideas for how to organize schools and consider what learning could be without classrooms.
To do this, it is critical that we immediately engage all stakeholders in exploring these ideas. We cannot afford to leave this until tomorrow. Whether you are a teacher, a school administrator, a school board member, a superintendent, a Department of Education employee, a politician, or a parent, you must begin looking at how your schools can and should change to meet the challenges of preparing students for their futures. The pressing need for everyone to envision new schools without classrooms is summed up in this quote from Arthur Levine (2011):
Today’s schools are an anachronism. They resemble the assembly lines of the industrial era, when they were conceived. Groups of 25 to 30 children, beginning at age five, are moved through 13 years of schooling, attending 180 days each year, and taking five major subjects daily for lengths of time specified by the Carnegie Foundation in 1910. These schools are time-based—all children are expected to master the same studies at the same rate over the same period of time. They focus on teaching—how long students are exposed to instruction, not how much they have learned. They are rooted in the belief that one size fits all—all students can benefit equally from the same curriculum and methods of instruction.
With this in mind, the following chapters explore how educators can change secondary schools to make them more effective in preparing students for success when they graduate.
Essential Questions
As you reflect on this chapter, consider the following questions.
• Think about the physical facility of the middle school or high school that you attended. Was the school built with traditional classrooms designed for one teacher to teach twenty-five to thirty students? If so, how do you think that affects your ideas for what schools look like?
• How does the traditional classroom mindset affect people’s planning for new schools?
• How do your school’s existing learning environments inhibit student learning?
• Given that most districts organize traditional schools for mass instruction, what would schools be like if districts organized them for mass customization and serving individual student needs?
• Close your eyes and think about designing a new school that will prepare each student for life in the 21st century. How do you see the arrangement of physical space? What would you change relative to traditional classroom-based methods that would help customize learning experiences to better support students and help them succeed after they graduate?
Learning Without Classrooms © 2019 Solution Tree Press • SolutionTree.com Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to download this page.
Chapter 2
KEY PRINCIPLES FOR MODERN SCHOOLING
by Ted McCain
The problem with our schools is not that they are not what they used to be, but they are what they used to be.
—Education Commission of the States
When we think about modern education and what students will need from their learning to be prepared for their future, there are certain things that we know: We know that technological innovation drives the world, we know that we need a significant shift in focus to help students attain the skills they require for success in the modern world, and we know that effective school design is based on what effective instruction looks like. Given these things, the next important question is: What are the key attributes of effective 21st century instruction? By identifying those attributes, we come to a subsequent question: How do we reorganize schools to make them serve that kind of learning?
To answer these questions, we look at two reasons why technology makes school change necessary—(1) how it is changing our lives and (2) how it is changing how students learn—and then focus on four principles that must form the new foundation for how we provide effective instruction for students who require much different preparation than those of us raised on 20th century learning. Those four principles are:
1. Establishing a focus on individuals
2. Building flexibility into everything we do as educators
3. Rethinking how we use school time
4. Focusing on developing students’ higher-level-thinking skills
We start by examining how modern technology affects our lives.
Technology Transforms Lives
It’s easy for those of us raised in the 20th century to think of the myriad ways technology has changed the world. However, the long-term impacts of technological development on how we live are only just beginning to come into focus. Like the ripples from a stone tossed into a pond, the effects of technological change are growing as time goes on, and these changes will continue to have an astounding impact on our daily lives. No one will be exempt from the effect of these changes. To give you an idea of what we will see very soon, the following is a description of life in the future by Kevin Kelly (2016), a founding executive editor of Wired magazine:
It’s 2046. You don’t own a car, or much of anything else, paying instead to subscribe to items as you need them. Virtual reality is as commonplace as cell phones. You talk to your devices with a common set of hand gestures. Practically all surfaces have become a screen, and each screen watches you back. Every aspect of your daily life is tracked by you or someone else. Advertisers pay you to watch their ads. Robots and AI (artificial intelligence) took over your old job, but also created a new one for you, doing work you could not have imagined back in 2016. (Jacket cover)
Many of us who have been around for a while think we’ve already seen all the upheaval technology is going to throw at us, but the changes still to come will be very different than anything we have ever experienced. Indeed, changes like the ones Kelly (2016) describes stretch our ability to comprehend them.
Incredibly, despite these enormous changes that we know are coming, many educators don’t think they will significantly affect the way schools operate. In our observations, the modern school system’s amazing stability fosters a belief in educators that we will just continue to teach students the way we have always taught students. Many in education believe that although we will continue to deploy and use new technology, the basic approach to instruction, the basic organization of schools, and the basic arrangement of the physical spaces in school buildings will remain essentially as they were in the 21st century. We disagree. These waves of change will become so massive that education will no longer be immune to the technology-driven changes that will sweep over the rest of the