the foundation for why we organize schools this way is gone. The stable, predigital world for which we designed our school system no longer exists. A highly volatile, ever-changing, globally networked world of instantaneous information transmission is replacing it. The skills students need for success in this new environment are significantly different than those educators traditionally teach in the school system. This puts our schools in a precarious position because we are too often preparing our students for the wrong future. Instead, schools must serve and be a part of the world in which they exist. To do that, they must evolve with that world.
This is not to say that secondary educators, administrators, school architects, and district leaders are not giving their all to make schools work. There are many dedicated people working hard to make the education system the best it can be for students. The problem is that we educators can do an excellent job executing within existing systems, but we are often not doing the right job. The digital world does not need our modern school systems’ obsolete picture of excellence.
Modern school systems are obsolete because technological innovation has disrupted the traditional ways the world outside of school works. This disruption brings radical new ways of accomplishing tasks into our lives. For example, knowledge workers in diverse fields like accounting, engineering, medicine, and financial planning can now reside anywhere in the world and digitally send their work to clients via the internet. North American workers must compete with highly qualified workers from around the globe. Automation in the form of both robots and software continues to replace many jobs humans traditionally performed. This is the new workplace reality. In contrast, and as we will explain in this book, the world inside schools looks much like it did throughout the 20th century. For the most part, the skills schools teach, how they teach them, and the way they assess student achievement remain virtually the same as in the 20th century. This leaves schools out of sync with the world for which they are supposed to be preparing students.
Furthermore, the changes that will occur in the world by 2040 or even 2030 will dwarf the changes we have had to deal with so far. We describe many of these changes in detail in Learning Without Classrooms: Visionary Designs for Secondary Schools, but rest assured, they will challenge educators, leaders, and school architects to adapt quickly if they are to effectively prepare students for a much different world than previous generations experienced. This requires schools to implement new instructional approaches that properly equip students with the new skills necessary for their future success. Adopting these approaches means rethinking the entire concept of classroom learning.
Brilliant minds across all of education have explored the changes educators must make in their teaching methodology to align with 21st century learners’ needs (Robinson & Aronica, 2015; Thornburg, 2014; Wagner, 2012; Zhao, 2009); however, few question or explore alternatives to the 21st century schools’ central paradigm—the traditional classroom consisting of four walls with a grouping of twenty-five to thirty students sitting at desks, receiving stand-and-deliver-style instruction from one teacher covering one subject in one hour. Any new instructional approaches school systems introduce largely build on this traditional classroom model because teachers can implement them with very little new training. Since there has been little movement away from the traditional classroom arrangement, there has been little need to question how districts design schools. Consequently, districts continue to construct school buildings that look much like the schools 20th century learners grew up with.
For the sake of future learners, we must explore how secondary school facilities can differ if we implement in a significant way the sound, decades-long, and research-based instructional ideas of educational experts (Andrade & Valtcheva, 2009; Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956; Gardner, 2011; Vygotsky, 1978). Consider how we could design schools that facilitate individualized, learner-centered instruction that allows students to progress at their own pace. What would schools look like if we re-examine how schools use time and consider alternatives to the traditional one-hour periods? Is there a better way to configure the physical space in secondary schools to support problem-based instruction that mimics the challenges students will face when they leave the school system? What impact could truly authentic assessment have on the way we use space in schools? Could we better design schools to support the important, meaningful, long-term relationships students need with their educators?
These are all questions we answer in this book, but to really understand the significance of our ideas, we need to introduce a concept that underpins everything you will read in the coming chapters—the elements of schooling. From there we break down this book’s approach to these elements and how we’ve organized it to propose a vision for schooling that doesn’t depend on classrooms.
The Elements of Schooling
To ensure that the new schools we create are effective, every stakeholder in education needs to rethink all the factors involved in schooling. However, student learning must always be the focus of everything we do in schools. To that end, we identify six crucial and interconnected elements that factor into the learning equation (see figure I.1)
Figure I.1: The six crucial elements of schooling.
None of the components in this figure are ends in and of themselves. Instead, their effectiveness derives from how well they work together to create relevant learning environments for students. To emphasize this point, this figure specifically illustrates how each of the support areas interconnect. Note that because we reference these elements of schooling throughout the book, thoroughly understanding the purpose and role of each element, and how all elements impact each other, is critical to the vision we present.
The following list explains how we define the six elements of schooling.
1. Community context: Each school must reflect the characteristics and community needs of its location. When the community changes, schools must change to continue to be effective. We need to make different schools to serve different students in different communities. The cookie-cutter schools of the 20th century cannot work for all students in all communities.
2. Instructional approach: A school’s instructional approach should have a direct impact on the configuration of its physical space. The problem is that schools have used the lecture approach for so long it has become entrenched as the default way to teach. This leads to default expectations, procedures, and policies in the overlapping elements in figure I.1 (page 3). However, there are many ways to teach, and we know that students learn in different ways. No instructional method works equally well for all students. We must tailor the methods we use to teach the students we serve so that we can measure learning outcomes one student at a time and not by mass statistics. Changing the instructional approach in schools will have significant ripple effects in all the other circles in the diagram.
3. Use of time: The amount of time that schools allot and how they organize around the time available determine much of what teaching and learning look like. We know that different students learn and work at different paces (Levine, 2011; Medina, 2014; National Education Commission on Time and Learning, 2005). If time is fixed, then learning will be the variable. Most often, students receive failing grades for not meeting learning objectives in the time allotted (a semester, for example), not because they are incapable of learning the objectives. We can make school time serve students and learning rather than make students serve time in their schools.
4. Technology resources: The technology the world outside the school system uses has changed dramatically in the 21st century. Not so inside schools. For example, classroom teachers often do not have access to scanners, 3-D printers, digital still and video cameras, or the photo- and videoediting software and training necessary to effectively use these tools. The technology we use inside schools must remain in sync with
