One of the most fun classes I ever taught was Environmental Geology 201. It was at a women’s college (Mount Holyoke) in Massachusetts and we had about 25 or 30 students in the class I think.
Throughout the semester, in addition to other classes, there was one ongoing project in the course, and it was to find a new landfill site for the city of Northampton, MA. It was a real task for the city - they would be using up the previous one within the next five years or so.
We took them to the landfill so they could see how it worked. How many trucks per hour, how much garbage, what kind of capacity was needed? We gave them population projections, geological maps, hydrology maps, transportation and topographic maps, and just plain old maps of buildings and critical resources, water supply, zoning, power stations and so on.
Each group of four or five students had to come up with three possible sites of the right dimensions and expected longevity for a new landfill. They had to balance ease of access with all the objections and needs of a community, safety, environmental considerations and so on.
It was really fun to see them working hard on iterating and refining their plans and writing up the justifications. I believe we actually got to send the proposals to the city for their consideration too.
This wasn’t just a geology course, it wasn’t city planning, nor hydrology, sustainability, urban geography, psychology, proposal-writing or any other subject - it was all of those things. The students learned real information about a real situation while testing their applied knowledge across a whole array of disciplines. They had to be creative. They had to collaborate.
For the most part, they also enjoyed it, and knew that it could actually be useful. As a teacher, I enjoyed it too. I wasn’t spewing a bunch of pre-determined ‘information’ and then testing their memory. I got to dip in and out of their groups and learn from their reasoning and thought processes. We got to take a step back every so often, when a problem came up, and examine it collectively. I got to really teach (which is to say, help them explore and learn). It made my teaching better the next semester too.
This to me is a great example of interdisciplinary learning. There is certainly a place for neatly-organized subjects, and especially when you know what you love and want to go deeper into a subject to really master it, that ought to be available. However, most problems, most lives, most jobs need a diversity of experience and expertise.
There are lots of examples, of course, where pre-college education also incorporates projects like this, but it’s getting harder for teachers to include these sort of options opportunistically. They have curriculum objectives to meet, ‘standards’ to teach to, and have to schedule tests and so on.
In a high school in Sebastopol California, the school had become typically focused on academic achievement and standardized scores and so on, until a local business asked for help from the students with exploring the options for 3D printers, and computer-aided design. The program was so popular that it reinvigorated the ‘shop’ room at the school, and with community support, donations, and cash, they acquired new equipment and attracted students from up and down the academic ‘achievement’ continuum to take technical and design courses. What was especially cool with this program is that they incorporated an entrepreneurship angle, so the students also got to learn how to cost out their projects, market them, sell them and so on.
If the school had insisted on remaining focused on being a highly ranked, ‘high performing’ school, this kind of opportunity wouldn’t have happened. A whole lot of kids would have missed out on learning something interesting, useful, and potentially career-defining. This community business and other future employers would have missed out on the enthusiasm, insight and set of skills these students developed.
In other words, this project created learning and engagement across the community, not just in the classroom. This to me, along with the flexibility to pull in projects and opportunities ‘of the moment’, seems like two key conditions of a vibrant, relevant, and engaging education.
So what are the ingredients that replicate this sort of experience for all our students? Well, again I am going to draw from Sir Ken Robinson to suggest a pathway for this, from his ‘summary’ book called ‘Imagine If….Creating a Future for Us All’, and I am adding my own interpretation of his thoughts too.
He lists a series possible conditions or ingredients that would define schools who sought this kind of educational experience for its students, and here I highlight just a few (lots more great thoughts in his book). This educational institution would:
Value its teachers. Truly, I think there is no substitute for great (or even just good) teachers. To give our teachers the professional credit, training, salary, and freedom they deserve to teach, is to create an inspired, engaged next generation. Above all else, we need to let our teachers, teach.
Be interdisciplinary. As I said above, almost all real situations are interdisciplinary and I certainly would have benefitted from more of that in my pre-college education. For example, instead of having to drag myself to an uninspiring and largely abstract math class, I would like to have had a ‘shop’ class where I had to calculate how much material to buy, with how much waste, and how much profit margin we needed, with how much owed in taxes and so on.
Personalize learning. I know - this seems like a very tall order for an education system where literally every child has to pass through it. And yet….we have recently gathered more experience about the use of technology in learning (for example). Perhaps not all classes have to be taught locally. And I think this is especially doable if we allow students to travel between schools with different specialties. If one afternoon a week, a few students from school A with a strong shop program can be brought to school B with a strong horticulture program and make a swap with some other students, surely this would help diversify and personalize education without making every school offer all the things.
Have a flexible schedule. This is a biggie for me. When I went to high school, we had eight classes a day. This meant that each class was 40 minutes long. And then we had five minutes to hop up, scurry to another part of the school and completely change topic, teacher, thought processes etc. This is nuts. And it also made for a long school day. They did eventually change it to six classes, but it still seems bizarre that I could only spend 50 minutes in each spot on each topic. Some projects need more time, some less, some benefit from a shorter lecture-style approach followed a couple of days later by a longer ‘lab’ perhaps, and then a series of personal study options so you can write up an essay, or do an exercise, or some background reading. I know that the administrative challenge of making a flexible schedule a reality in a school situation is rather daunting, but….it’s doable.
Keep assessment in perspective. Amen. There are three types of assessment: diagnostic (understanding a student’s development and aptitude), formative (ongoing assessment to alter a teaching style or otherwise help a student make progress along the way), and summative (an objective measure of how a student rates against some criteria, or peers, once a project or a class has finished). That’s it. There is no place for educational assessment to forever mark a child’s life, or lead to firing a teacher, or designating a school as ‘failing’. There are other measures and means for how a school or a teacher is doing. And not all assessments have to be exams or tests - it has to also involve informal and portfolio-based evaluation. Can you imagine if we subjected our own jobs to constant and invasive and largely irrelevant standardized tests every five minutes? Why are we doing that to our kids?! There is a place for objective standards and knowing where we all fall along that spectrum, but it’s not the only or even the most useful path for all assessment.
Value the voices of its participants. In other words, we include students in decisions about and the organization of their education. This is particularly true when we get to middle and high school I think. Not only will we get some insight into what’s important to young people (essential if we’re to design an engaging and relevant education that elevates their likely future contribution - the main point of education), but I suspect we will be humbled by how big they think, how naturally compassionate, and how eager they are to live lives of purpose and passion. We get to be inspired too.
There are, in reality, myriad ways we can organize education to invigorate society, optimize the well-being and contributions of future adults, and to solve our more pressing problems, including helping our very species avoid catastrophe. But I think we need to start very deliberately exploring what we can do differently.
It all seems very daunting to change an institution that has been operating more or less the same for well over 100 years, but we created it this way - it is a human system to achieve human objectives - and we can redesign it. In fact, we must, if we’re to write a next chapter that doesn’t keep adding to the problems we now recognize we must solve, let alone create new opportunities and innovative futures.
The next chapter we want can only be written if we can first imagine it. Creating an educational experience that not only fosters imagination, but turns it into creative, informed, compassionate endeavor, is surely one of our most important tasks as adults.
There are several brilliant ideas and points in this post; I am astonished that there aren’t any comments! Would love to hear from the teachers and higher ed folks among your readers. Perhaps just the thought of refining our system is overwhelming, and yet...