place in the professional world. This means the technology we use to support teaching and learning must quickly make the transition from paper based to a variety of digital resources that expand students’ abilities to find any information they need at any time and from anywhere.
5. Spatial environment: Teaching and learning needs should shape the physical spaces in our schools rather than vice versa. Schools are not neutral containers. The configuration of a physical educational space enables and constrains the instruction that takes place within it. Consider the secondary school classroom that represents the centerpiece of school design; it is a space with walls and a door with about seven hundred to eight hundred square feet. It serves one teacher, a class of about twenty-five students, and one subject for one period, usually about one hour in duration. This classroom configuration severely limits the opportunity for teachers and students to explore learning that is individualized and self-paced. Instead, instruction is invariably teacher-centered and lockstep because teachers want every student doing the same thing at the same time. This classroom configuration also makes interdisciplinary studies very difficult. Furthermore, facilities staff want classroom construction to be durable and lasting, which constrains flexibility to respond to changes in teaching and learning. New and renovated school spaces, like those we propose in this book, can and must support and enhance innovative ways for effective teaching and learning.
6. Funding resources: The funding available for schooling and facilities clearly impacts the resources available for teaching and learning. The funds coming from public sources (federal, state or provincial, and local) too often draw schools into broader discourse over taxes and politics. Many funding decisions are limited in scope without considering the wider implications of the impact schooling has on society, and many of those responsible for funding decisions may not be open to paying for schools that operate differently from what they grew up with. But consider the huge costs when we don’t spend education dollars in ways that benefit teaching and learning. Students who are ill-prepared for the wider world limit a nation’s ability to compete globally. Students who are unemployable because they fail or drop out generally pay fewer taxes and place larger demands on governmental entities for welfare, medical services, incarceration, and so on (Latif, Choudhary, & Hammayun, 2015; Mallet, 2016; Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2014). Conversely, successful students are a net benefit to society.
All student learning is the product of the interplay of these six elements, which are all inextricably linked—make a change to one and it affects all the others. It is our belief that many insightful and valuable education initiatives fail to achieve maximum effectiveness because they focus on just one of these elements without taking into account that the relationship each component has to the others is more important than the component itself. For example, change the funding for schools and its effect ripples through all the other elements with a positive or negative impact on overall learning. When U.S. schools cut staff in response to the 2008 recession, school districts laid off hundreds of thousands of teachers and support staff (Center for Public Education, 2010). As class sizes grew, this change impacted how schools delivered instruction. In turn, that impacted facilities as classrooms were too small to accommodate the increase in class size. That limited the programs schools could offer and reduced their ability to respond to community needs. It became a vicious circle.
For another example, what if we change the technology we use in schools? The impact of such a change also ripples through the other elements in figure I.1 (page 3). With digital technology for instruction and individual devices for students, we have the potential to dramatically alter the relationship between students and teachers. Students can have direct access to content anywhere and anytime; not just from teachers, and not just in classrooms. Subjects and courses can come to students wherever and whenever they might be versus students going to teachers for course content that teachers deliver in fixed classrooms at fixed times. The opportunity for individualized, self-paced instruction is real and practical, and we explore this opportunity in Learning Without Classrooms. With digital technology, we could eliminate or dramatically reduce paper text and library books, saving considerable sums and reducing the area and staff libraries require. But, the technology is not cheap, and schools must prepare to consistently update or replace it. Effective technology use dramatically impacts instruction, time, facilities, and funding.
As a final example, consider how a school might change its use of time. Since the early 20th century, we have operated on an agrarian calendar in which schools are open approximately nine months of the year. This means that while school districts have billions of dollars invested in school facilities, equipment, and so on, those capital investments sit idle about 25 percent of the year. That is enormously costly.
Altering the school year for year-round use opens the door for students to work continuously and succeed at their own pace. We would not have to fail students because they don’t meet learning objectives on a fixed schedule. Instruction becomes more flexible and accommodates varied learning styles and paces, improving outcomes for students and thereby actually saving taxpayers from paying for students to repeat failed courses.
The point of all this is to convey that there are no neutral changes. Because each of these six elements has a ripple effect on the surrounding elements, improving student learning to make it effective in preparing students for life in the 21st century means we cannot focus on only one element. Instead, we must deal with them all concurrently. Failure to do this accounts for the extreme difficulty we’ve had for decades in truly improving and transforming education. Consider that, in most school districts, each element is an entirely separate administrative group with its own leadership, budgets, procedures, and so on. Consider that these groups are so different in their staffing and the nature of their work that they may not share a common vision for the future, may not communicate well, and may not always be fully cooperative.
We believe that it is vital that we put an end to this silo approach to education where there is little shared vision or meaningful discussion between those who represent the six elements in our diagram. In this book, we hope to engage people whose work comes from all the elements in our diagram. We want to spark conversations between all the stakeholders in education about what effective schooling should look like as we move further into the 21st century. That means examining real and substantive alternatives to traditional, classroom-centered schools.
About This Book
Learning Without Classrooms uses the elements of schooling to propose a new and highly flexible model, or concept, for schooling rooted in the advisory-school concept. This is a format that supports teachers and students in achieving individualized, self-paced, and successful technology-driven learning. To establish our vision for this concept, we organize this book to establish the scope of the challenges we face and then detail how we can design schools and curricula to meet them. This book is for grades 6–12 stakeholders across the educational world, whether you are teachers, administrators, school designers, elected or appointed officials, or parents. Although we specifically target this content toward educators working in the United States, we believe you can adapt and apply our ideas in communities throughout the world.
There are three parts to this book. Part 1 (chapters 1–4) outlines some powerful ideas about what we need to do to change our schools to better prepare our students for the world of the future. It is imperative that all educators wrestle with the issues confronting 21st century learning and the reasons why we need to consider dramatic changes to school design. Chapter 1 deals specifically with why traditional classrooms are ill-suited to support learning. Chapter 2 establishes key principles for modern learning, including the disruptive role technology plays in it.
