of School Administrators and Texas Association of School Boards have recognized projects for which he provided planning and programming services with Caudill Awards in 2007 and 2008. His work also received the 2008 Council of Educational Facility Planners International’s MacConnell Award. (This organization is now the Association for Learning Environments.)In 1984, he was elected to the American Institute of Architects’ College of Fellows (Design) and in 2009, the Association for Learning Environments (then Council of Educational Facility Planners International) Southern Region named him planner of the year. He coauthored with Ted McCain and Ian Jukes Teaching the Digital Generation: No More Cookie-Cutter High Schools. He authored the paper “Artifacts of Schooling” for the Journal of Applied Research on Children for the CHILDREN AT RISK organization.
A graduate of Rice University, Frank has taught design in the school of architecture at the University of Tennessee and worked with architectural classes at Rice University and Texas A&M University.
Ted McCain, first and foremost, is an educator who has taught high school students at Maple Ridge Secondary School, British Columbia, Canada, for over thirty years. Although he has had several opportunities to take other jobs, both inside education and in the private sector, he has felt his primary calling is to prepare teenagers for success as they move into adult life. He is the coordinator of Digital Arts Academy for the Maple Ridge School District in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has taught computer networking, graphic design, and desktop publishing for Okanagan University.
In 1997, Ted received the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Ted received this prestigious Canadian national award for his work in developing a real-world technology curriculum for grade 11 and grade 12 students that prepares them for post-graduation employment in website design and computer networking. The Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence recognized Ted’s work in creating his innovative problems-first teaching strategy, his “4D” approach to solving problems, his unique use of role playing in the classroom, and his idea of progressive withdrawal as a way to foster independence in his students. Ted wrote or cowrote eleven books on the future, effective teaching strategies, educational technology, and graphic design.
Prior to entering the teaching profession, Ted worked for several years in the computer industry as a programmer, salesperson, and consultant. In addition to his work as a teacher, Ted has also consulted with school districts and businesses since the 1980s on effective teaching for the digital generation and the implementation of instructional technology. His clients have included Apple, Microsoft, Aldus, and Toyota, as well as many school districts and educational associations.
To book Frank Kelly or Ted McCain for professional development, contact [email protected].
FOREWORD
by Jason Ohler
We will always want schools in some form. They may remind us of the patch of ground beneath the shade of the olive tree where Socrates and his students sat to debate truth and logic. They may consist of constellations of simple, satellite-connected rooms, distributed throughout the world, enhanced by augmented reality and robot mentors. They may consist of fabricated universes, shared by avatars or holographic projections, with multisensory capabilities that are so immersive and visceral that they are indistinguishable from real life. Depending upon how far into the future we want to look, they may well come to us in forms that we can’t yet dream of.
Regardless of the form or what we call them, we will always want schools to develop collaborative learning environments, serve as hubs of community activity, and allow new generations of students to pursue individual passions. We will always want schools that allow us to work together, so we can share resources, tell stories to each other, and pass on skills, ideas, and what is most enduring about our cultures. We will always want our places of learning to model what is best in us and best for our children.
What has changed is how all of this can happen.
Our technological trajectory promises unfathomable, roller-coaster innovation with no braking system. It’s a wild ride, full of panic and possibility, and it poses the following challenge to anyone interested in education: in an era of unbelievably powerful tools, embedded within the universal connectivity of the internet, we can have whatever we want. The question is: What do we want?
Until the late 20th century, that question had all the substance of asking how many angels dance on the head of a pin. But in an age when we can code, fabricate, and reinvent just about anything we can imagine, the question is not only real but also urgent. With a future that unfolds at the speed of thought, we need to be able to plan for change, rather than keep changing our plans.
That is why this book is so important. If we want to create schools that lead the way in a time of change, then we need to read this book seriously, with a mind focused on the big picture it presents, as well the practical details it provides. Learning Without Classrooms: Visionary Designs for Secondary Schools answers the question, What do we want? It also addresses not just what is going to happen, but what we could make happen. It goes on to ask, “How can we better design schools for maximum effectiveness in facilitating improved student and teacher interaction?” Above all, it puts the importance of student learning at the center of our efforts to reinvent schools, particularly in ways that are relevant to students and the times in which they live.
In the end, Frank and Ted provide a theoretically fascinating and practically based road map that connects education’s changing nature with new possibilities that await us. All that is necessary to take advantage of their vision is leadership that is willing to seize the challenge. They leave that up to you.
INTRODUCTION
by Ted McCain and Frank Kelly
Do you realize that we teach the same way today that Aristotle taught Alexander the Great 2,000 years ago? It hasn’t changed. That’s got to change.
—Michio Kaku
The purpose of any education system is to help students learn. The key to student learning is effective interaction between a student and a teacher. Schools are the places best equipped to facilitate that interaction. This raises the question: How can we better design schools for maximum effectiveness in facilitating improved student and teacher interaction?
We immediately face a significant challenge when we ponder the answer to this question—the general look and nature of schools haven’t changed much since the early 20th century. This is something that anyone who was raised in public schools, and then raised their own children or grandchildren in public schools, will recognize. Virtually everyone has a common picture in his or her mind for what a school is and how it operates, and that vision is consistent whether you are a teacher working directly with students in a classroom; a school administrator responsible for creating a timetable that determines when and where teachers and students meet; a facilities staff member for a school district responsible for determining the specifications for new or renovated school buildings; an architect tasked with designing a school facility; a parent of a school-age child; a schoolboard trustee charting the future course for the schools in your district; or a department of education official at the state (or province) or federal level involved in planning curriculum for secondary schools (grades 6–12). The list goes on, but the mindset persists that learning occurs in schools with classrooms. Communities have built schools this way for so long that it’s difficult to conceive of any other way for them to look.
However,
